long and short

take the cannoli, please

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Brief impressions after rewatching The Godfather.

ad Astra per aspera

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

[The Kansas state motto: "To the stars through adversity." I have to think there's an angle there.]

Yesterday OpenAI boldly proclaimed that, with the advent of its new model Astra, we had entered the AGI era.

It was never going to be long before claims of an Artificial General Intelligence hit the news. OpenAI scored first (arguably), and who knows, maybe the first company to feel comfortable suggesting they had attained the goal would capture that all-important market share, making them industry leaders for years to come.

As the article points out, it was strange that Sam Altman downplayed the significance of 'AGI', saying it was little more than "an irrelevant marketing term." He seemed to pave the way for critics who remain unimpressed with Astra's performance on various benchmarks.

Equally strange was OpenAI's own definition:

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)–—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work–—benefits all of humanity.

Italics mine. Luckily for their aim of benefitting mankind, Astra (the new model) was not the same one that recently flew the coop, spontaneously hacking the Hugging Face platform. OpenAI claim Astra has stronger protections against rogue behavior, not that it wouldn't be a capable hacker without safeguards in place. And how can they guarantee safety? Who guards the safeguards?

But this economic definition of AGI seems not only beside the point but emblematic of the technocratic era we live in, where even age-old questions of intelligence, creativity, and even consciousness might be reduced to external, "economically valuable" behavior.

The definition doesn't bother to make the case that intelligence has anything to do with "economically valuable work." A factory robot may excel us at putting hubcaps on wheels or whatever, and may be, for all intents and purposes, autonomous.

Ah, but they're not autonomous in the intelligent sense, it might be said: factory robots aren't free beings, acting in accord with their own thoughts. Is that what the definition is implying? That AGIs are "highly autonomous" in an intelligence-laden sense? That to qualify as possessing general intelligence they have to replace human beings in a particular way, namely, by mimicking human free agency? Why should that be a requirement?

I don't think we should embrace the implications of that reading of the definition, for at least two reasons. One, it adds a requirement of intelligence as a property of an AGI system that has nothing to do with its ability to perform well. How often do we say of human beings, "They're smart, but they don't do anything productive"?

And two, AGIs with free agency would entail obligations toward them as person-like beings—though no worry, Astra no doubt fails to meet that standard, and if it did, I'm not confident its rights would be respected. Robot, after all, comes from the Czech word for "forced labor."

I don't imagine the authors of the OpenAI charter have thought through the confusions of their definition of AGI, even to the point of realizing that dumb systems can outperform humans at economically relevant tasks, or that smart systems may be no more autonomous than factory robots, much less as autonomous as we are, yet that even if they were they probably wouldn't be cost-effective if we went to the trouble of protecting their rights.

In any event, maybe we could focus on the rights of human workers first?

Noë on color

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An old school paper on Noe's position on color.

first note on Rorty

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For reasons having to do with my own exposure to ideas and works of Richard Rorty, it's become inescapable that I should eventually say my piece about the guy and his metaphilosophy.

This isn't because I consider him an important philosopher. I don't intend this as an insult. Rorty himself would probably have been pleased to be recognized as something other than a philosopher, in the same way antivenin, were it suitably opinionated, would be pleased to be seen as something completely apart from venom yet complementary to it, namely, as the thing that neutralizes its opposite.

But Rorty has been significant in raising metaphilosophical questions about what it means to do philosophy and whether philosophy is a worthwhile occupation.

I feel as though I'll never be motivated to become a great, or even passable, Rorty scholar, and in my lack of deep interest I seem to mirror Rorty's self-distancing from philosophy once he discovered how inessential or beside-the-point an activity it was.

The reasons for my uninterest, I want to say, are two:

(1) I don't find Rorty useful pragmatically, which may be to say that I don't agree with his variety of pragmatism, which I've heard described as "linguistic." So often the philosophical foundations and modes of expression that he decries continue to strike me as neither here nor there in practical terms. His linguistic pragmatism makes a linguistic turn of its own (the first having been the focus of analytic philosophy on language), in seeing language use as a central pragmatic consideration. I think it always was one practical consideration among others, as Austin made explicit but which lurks beneath the surface of nearly every Platonic dialogue. In the ethical scheme of things, language has always been a consideration, just not the most self-consciously pressing one.

(2) I've provisionally arrived at a quietist attitude of my own, and it's not Rorty's. Rorty's is (something like) that we should quiet our furious pursuit of Truth, because it is damaging to the more important condition of political comity in the quest for social justice. That is, high-aspiration philosophy as quasi-science should be abandoned for pragmatic reasons, because it sows dischord and tribal dichotomies.

The initial problem with this, for me, is that abandoning the question of truth doesn't seem to lead to pragmatic advantage. Truth is just another problematic that philosophy can raise without burning anyone at the stake, and philosophers can debate it in a civil (or at least a mock-invective) manner. Whither Socrates?

There will be a lot to say about the orthogonality of linguistic pragmatism to the legitimacy of philosophical topics, but the main point for present purposes is that the quietism Rorty advocates serves the pragmatic aims he discusses (though BTW I do consider him a philosophical skeptic and his opposition to truth-seeking "foundational" for him, for lack of a better word), whereas the quietism I've come to embrace is less about practicality and more about the inescapability of certain tendencies most of us humans seem to share.

It will still be of some interest whether there is free will, for instance, but regardless of whether there is or isn't, after all the careful definitions and epistemological parsing is done, we poor players will continue to act and feel as though we're making decisions.

Ditto for various other philosophical bones of contention. It's not that the foundational questions behind those controversies suddenly become uninteresting—and, as I've mentioned, I don't believe they become anti-pragmatic—it's just that we can, even as we indulge in theoretical speculation, recognize that our own lived experience and that of most people is going to treat the philosophical outcomes of many of the Big Questions as irrelevant to, or separate from, how we live and how we feel inside our own skins.

I'll just assert the following, for the sake of future discussion: we may be discoverers of reality and makers of strong theories, but we're also, to great extent, creatures who act and think as we do because we can't do otherwise.

Tarot's roots and use

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In popular culture, Tarot is generally portrayed as part of the fortune-teller's toolkit. Divination is primary, and Michael Dummett et al. tell us that before Tarot started to be used for that purpose the decks were used in games of chance, much the way modern playing cards are.

I doubt most Tarot readers, even the ones who may think they're "a little bit psychic," believe the cards possess special powers. Their value, rather, lies in a kind of provocation, in bringing to the surface critical events, personalities, and relationships of importance to the customer, or subject. They believe there is value in reading the cards so as to make the subject conscious of people and issues that might escape notice otherwise.

This use of the cards is different from fortune-telling, because it doesn't claim to predict anything with certainty but rather affords an opportunity to interpret a cluster of notions surrounding events, personalities, or relationships that are of importance to the subject.

Kant's third critique deduction

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A paper for an aesthetics course

a quiet place of my own

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of years after I dropped out of academic philosophy, I began to reflect on a suite of philosophical problems that have several features in common:

their apparent importance, even cruciality,
controversy surrounding them based on differing philosophical commitments, intuitions, or assumptions, and, nonetheless,
persistent, empirical judgments regarding them, by most people, that don't go away, even when a skeptical philosophical argument against the intuitive position is accepted by a given person.

A central example would be the question of free will. It seems as though a lot would be riding on the answer, but I assert, in rather Moorean fashion, that ordinarily all humans feel and act as though they are in control of their own actions, no matter what theories they may espouse. Personally, I find epiphenomenalism somewhat compelling, the idea that our conscious minds may be "just along for the ride," but that can't change the factoid that we're in the driver's seat, and that sense is not going to go away even if I (for instance) become convinced that we don't "actually" have free will.

The epiphenomenalist view is interesting, because it helps to demonstrate in the sharpest way that the correctness of a theory of consciousness (and consequently of agency) doesn't change how things seem to go for us. Imagine that epiphenomenalism is correct, and my conscious experience and sense of deciding on my own actions is just an illusion. Because, however, I still have feelings of making decisions and acting on them in a way that is seamlessly coordinated with my brain states and my body's behavior, I will never have a confounding experience to refute this sense. For whatever whacky reason, my conscious awareness is along for the ride in just such a way that, like George W. Bush, I'm the decider.

Dennett argues against homonculus theories of consciousness and self. I'll need to review his position, but I suspect it doesn't have much to do with the condition I'm talking about, the inescapability of the homunculus pose within our own experience.

It will be important to point out that I'm not talking about the psychological deformations that can take place in an individual when they become convinced there is no free will. We can imagine one person trying real hard to do the right thing, in case the theory is incorrect, but another person might throw caution to the wind and commit atrocities, supposing that no compunctions they may feel have any real, ethical force.

The further objection that the latter rather proves, doesn't it, that our consciousness does have some effect on changing our actions, can be addressed simply: just because we're aware of our change in theoretical posture and we consciously support our having embarked on a life of crime doesn't refute epiphenomenalism or any other anti-free will theory. If epiphenomenalism were correct, everything would continue to be synchronized just so that we felt we were making efficacious decisions.

My preferred reaction to what I would call the Inescapability Principle is a peculiar form of philosophical quietism. The quietism I've been exposed to the most is Rorty's, in which he extends Wittgenstein's "whereof we cannot speak…" to include most of what is practiced in anglophone, analytic philosophy departments. He advocates a quietism that puts to rest theories about right and wrong, free will, and, indeed, anything about which we feel tempted to say, "This is the [right|correct|true] view," the reason being largely that arguing over truth is the source of strife, invective, and damage to others, and is an obstacle to collegiality and solidarity which are obvious desiderata.

I may talk about Rorty's quietism another time, but I think it differs from mine. He is saying that philosophical theory-making is a bane pragmatically and should be avoided, while I'm saying there's no getting away from certain fundamental impressions we tend to have in human experience and out of respect for which we act, or seem to, in certain ways. My quietism, on its own, doesn't lead to any prescriptions for how it would be better to think; it merely acknowledges that we do seem to think and sense in certain ways, and that this seeming, contra Hamlet, is enough.

The eventual essay would deal with other examples of the Inescapability Principle besides free will.

on the primacy of factual knowledge

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A note on the value placed on knowledge of facts in the intellectual landscape.

I often find myself disparaging the high esteem placed on knowledge of facts in both popular and academic culture. It's considered a mark of erudition, which in part it is, but it so often seems taken to be the whole ballgame. "Serious" and "critical" conversations so often turn into jousting matches in which the winner will be the one who recalls the juiciest fact in support of their opinion.

In pop culture, knowledge of facts is a kind of currency in establishing street cred. In My Cousin Vinny, Marisa Tomei's character wins the day in court through her knowledge of cars. Ken Jennings and other successful contestants on Jeopardy! are acclaimed. Well they should be, I suppose; what they have floating around in their skulls can be astonishing.

But I want to argue that facts are only fodder for argumentation, reasoning, the generation of associations, and interpretation. They are the beginnings of insight, not its endpoint.

One has to be careful not to disparage the importance of facts, especially in the fact-challenged world we suddenly inhabit. I'm not going to be dealing with whether there are facts (I believe there are) or whether there are "alternative facts" (what does that even mean?). In fact, we can stipulate that the only facts I'd be interested in discussing in an essay on this topic are the correct ones, the real ones. What I want to get at is not the validity of the concept of a fact but the poverty of facts in establishing interesting conclusions without considerable additional reflection.

Another danger with this topic is that it risks seeming obvious. But so many disputes in public—and everyday—life come down to who's got their facts straight or who has the best facts (the best "evidence") to bring into the argument, that we could be left thinking that only facts matter. When that happens, the poverty of facts alone can seem far from obvious.

the romance of the counterfactual

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Had wanted to write something about a personal, quasi-literary takeaway from my time in graduate school: the observation that Kripke's possible-worlds semantics of modal logic points up the central feature of the human condition: we alone among earthly animals are aware of what might be and what might have been.

Modal logic treats of "states" (states of anything; the notion can be harnessed to sundry domains). One could define the states of one's modal world, for instance, to be the stages of a four-stroke gasoline engine or the states a computer program can be in as it runs—or, really, anything you like that has an interesting sequential, state-like structure.

The modality of a state is whether it is possible, actual, necessary, or impossible. A possible state may or may not be the case. An actual state is trivially possible, which rings true intuitively: it's not just possible but happens to be actual. A necessary state is not only actual and possible but could not be otherwise. An impossible state is none of these and necessarily cannot be possible, let alone actual or necessary.

Although modality finds extensive use in computer science, the classic application of possible-world semantics in philosophy since Kripke has been time. States of affairs at different points in time can be laid out in the imagination and discussed in light of their possibility, actuality, and necessity. Kripke says something special about actuality and necessity that opens up a whole can of worms regarding metaphysics that we won't go into here, but what struck me about this seemingly esoteric subject was that focusing on the modality of events—if not outright obsessing about them—is so commonplace that we might say it's how we humans live our lives. It's what makes us human: we are the modalist species.

Faculties and emotions related to this phenomenon:

memory
planning
regret
hope
grief
denial

The list could go on and on, but it's all about contemplating things that might (or might not) have been in the past, how things are now, or what one might cause to be through one's actions.

Modalist thinking about the past is especially poignant, since most of us have our regrets, and many of us dwell on them to the detriment of our health and happiness.

The modal point about actions and events in the past is that they are actual and therefore irreovocable. No backsies! They may also be necessary in more than one sense, which may not be the same as saying they must have been necessary at the time they happened. It could still be that they were up in the air when they occurred (or slightly before), but now that they're a done deal, they're a necessary feature of the spacetime grid, because they can't be rerun. This is a controversial assertion, but I don't think anyone claims that past events can be undone unless they're willing to entertain the possibility of time travel.

chess and time

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Partly to satisfy testing requirements for this site's SERIES feature, I used 'chessays' as a series slug, because I'd always wanted to write essays on various interconnections among chess, the real world, philosophy, and human experience.

The essay I'm sketching here has to do with two senses of 'time' in regard to chess.

One sense is "real-time," the continuous sense of the passage of time we experience as we play. Time in that sense is continuous and, depending on our powers of concentration, can be filled with many things that don't have to do with chess.

On another plane, that of the rules and progress of an individual game on the board, there is a discreet sense of time which is the direct consequence of chess's being a "turn-based game."

Many years ago, when I had a Sega Dreamcast console, I can remember disparaging turn-based video games. They seemed old-school in the not-so-good way, concessions to an earlier era of game design limited by the technology of simulating real-time experience. I would think of Zork, its Zorky video successors, and other TBGs such as the Civilization series, as the gameplay equivalents of side-scrollers and crude sprite-based shooters like Robotron. Simulating reality was where it was at. Funny how naive that sounds today, 40 years later, when the state of the art in video games is pretty impressive in some respects but still falls far short of the hoped-for verisimilitude. The Uncanny Valley is still a mile deep and a mile wide.

Turn-based games have to earn their keep. Playing War with a deck of cards gets tiresome after a while; gin rummy, less so; and bridge can become the obsession of a lifetime. Complexity has something to do with this, and for sheer depth nothing compares to chess except Go, which is even more complex. I don't play Go and won't enter the preference debate, but I assume it shares with chess a fundamental similarity, namely, that it can take over one's mind in a peculiar way. Only something unfathomably complex can pose problems that would take a human an arbitrary amount of time to solve with total satisfaction, if they can be solved at all, so that the player must manage her real-time so as not to spend all of it playing chess—or even playing a single move in a chess game.

I take it this unfathomability, together with the human impulse to work problems out to the very end (an impulse that must have helped Og ease his worries by teaching himself to build fires and keep the wolves at bay), generates enough concern to fuel countless hours-long online blitz sessions.

Even as our real-time immersion in a chess game creates its flood of engagement, the game itself has a completely separate sense of time.

on notes

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The purpose of notes on this site will be akin to that of a blog but more as well. Unlike other entries, a note will appear in its own 'blog' list, which will be in reverse chronological order.

Notes on the site can be fodder for better-thought-out, more complete entries that might be developed later, but they can also be random observations or musings or jottings.

Each note should carry its date of creation (i.e., when it first appears on the site).

Gödel on syntactical conventionalism

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An old mini-paper in which I grapple with the rational basis of logical inference

Testing the authoring workflow

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A dummy document for early testing of the site.