-
-
How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older
“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.” We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow…
-
A Shelter in Time: John Berger on the Power of Music
“Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.” “A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music,” the poet Mark Strand wrote in his ode to the enchantment of music. Music is the most indescribable…
-
Coelho Mollo and Millière: The Vector Grounding Problem
Post on “The Vector Grounding Problem” for the Brains Blog Dimitri Coelho Mollo & Raphaël Millière We first preprinted “The Vector Grounding Problem” in April 2023, about four months after the release of ChatGPT. By that point, large language models (LLMs) had started to capture the attention of philosophers, but … Share this… Linkedin Facebook…
-
A Look Back at Campbell Brown, Silencing & Anonymity
As Stephen Colbert’s current show winds down after being terminated, seemingly at the command of the Trump regime, I thought I’d look back at an episode of the Colbert Report. Campbell Brown appeared on the July 31, 2014 episode of the Colbert Report to promote her Partnership for Educational Justice filing a legal complaint in…
-
Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is…
-
-
-
-