Links

Amazing story about the giant fungi library at Kew Gardens and research on the relationship between fungi and soil carbon sequestration.

Short summary of some central ideas in Rupert Sheldrake’s critical approach to the limitations of current science: the commitment to reductive materialism that characterizes its metaphysical and aesthetic foundations. Too short to give much depth but gets at the main points of his concern about consciousness and the loss of so much of the universe that doesn’t fit the mold.

Not cheerful but a helpful, dispassionate account of where we are: in a global socio-economic transition. The suggestion is that in such times shared conceptions of purpose, organization, identity, and trust break down — leaving us with only uncertainty about the future and unable to form collective objectives, and therefore, predictions about what might happen next.

I found this a useful analytic framing of present experience; the sense that the future has disappeared in uncertainty seems like a fair description of what I hear expressed by others and experience myself lately. Also many useful proposed connections relating to the rapid evolution of liberal vs conservative worldviews; the collapse of the relationship between them as points on a common spectrum; the growing reduction of ideological options into exremes of progressivism and authoritarianism…

Review of A Web of Our Own Making by Antón Barba-Kay, the book and the review stand among the many recent attempts to capture the disruptive strangeness of what the internet is doing to us. This one, as is becoming the norm with such investigations, mostly concerns the internet on the phone, or the effects of the convergence of the two. Very nicely written with rather captivating reflections on depth of psychological change (for those of us old enough to remember a time before all this…) the convergence has wrought.

Strange, dark reflections on the strange, dark state of modern culture. Nice, rambling essay connecting Vico, Kafka, AI, rationalists, and the rise of cheerful end-times techno-optimists and state-pessimists. Conclusion: the metaphors that drive the techno-culture of the moment have gone wrong; we need better metaphors.

Nicely written very personal engagement with several recent-ish works on the remarkable activities of and relationships between funghi, trees, and everything.

Article describing research done on mice that sees them consistently breaking trained patterns of behaviour in a way the researchers come to see as strategic. “Mice are surprisingly using higher-order approaches to learn even simple tasks” — as usual, the question is: why is this surprising? Why isn’t it the initial assumption to test in the hypotheses relating to animal cognition? Good read.

Another amazing essay by Maria Popova, this one on Johannes Kepler and his remarkable, tragic story. Great description of his contributions to modern cosmology but most interesting in organizing the story around his work of fiction, The Dream, intended to help show common readers the intuitions supporting Copernican cosmology, but which inadvertantly lead to his mother’s trial for witchcraft.

A reprint of an article first published in 1995 in which Denby describes a university literature class engage with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Denby’s worry the forces of moral correction may remove it from memory. The article is mainly hopeful but a reflection published almost 30 years after observes the progress of forgetting has advanced. In any case, a lovely essay.

Helpful review of attitudes and studies on Autism Spectrum Disorder that shows how poorly understood it is, how persistent and pervasive discrimination against NDs is and on what poor grounds, how diverse and intetesting NDs typically are, and how complex the issue is despite casual reduction to a mere disorder. Makes you wonder what is so great about NTs.

More stories from the edges of biology demonstrating something clearly like cognition in ‘primitive’ organisms, plants, even just cells; memory and decision making without brains or evolution. Excellent review of work and ideas across a range of fields and experiments.

Excellent and highly readable review of the rise of remarkable and controversial challenges to the standard model of evolution.

Short, slightly reductive, but useful summary of basic positions in philosophy of science on what science is doing.

The essay is actually, kind of claiming this. More charitably, it argues that historians, specifically, are prone to letting the emotional and moral tension of a story corrupt their commitment to reason and evidence. This is a story (I know, right?) well told, and the cautionary tale is apt, but it kind of skips over the challenge we find in making a distinction between the kind of story that ‘makes us stupid’ and the kind of story that connects the metaphysical foundations of the commitment to rational process of scientific discipline — see Bruno Latour, eg.

Meditation on the making, sharpening, and using of kitchen knives. The most pleasing element is its fine distinction between sharpness as a property of an object vs sharpness as a relation of the knife edge to the practice of cutting — “the aesthetics of the object against the aesthetics of processes”. This wouldn’t have made proper sense to me before I started using a really good Japanese knife…

Long historico-biographical article on the career and habits of Tom Waits at the time of the release of the Frank’s Wild Years trilogy for its 40th anniversary reissue. Good summary of Waits’ work and influence and a timely reminder of these startlingly original and compelling recordings.

The article gets at something in Waits’ sound that reminds me of an interview with Keith Jarrett published by Ted Gioia where Jarrett talks about the essence of music he is grasping after, something unstructured and organic… Something intimated in the Waits article, in passages like this:

Ribot remembers how Waits would often be writing the lyrics moments before he sang them. “The groove was the main thing, which he would keep trying to communicate with the way he was moving his body and guitar.” As Richards recently said in an interview with Uncut: “[Tom] had a lot of rhythms going on in his head and in his body… the groove is another word for the grail. People search for it everywhere, and when you find it you hang on to it.”

A re-publication of a 1986 interview from Keyboard Magazine. A rambling philosophical engagement with the role of music and the responsibility of the musician, the essence of music and its relation to the essence of experience. Beyond my capacity to summarize but there are several passages that are strikingly similar to things said in a recent article about Tom Waits — worth reading these together.

Entertaining and informative lecture on math and geometry using paper to demonstrate ideas.

A dense tour through Hugh Kenner’s ideas on action and intention as revealed primarily in his work on T.S. Eliot. Featuring comparative remarks by Stanley Cavell, G.E.M. Anscombe, and others. A winding literary path into practical reason and moral theory.

Reflections on the idea of nature as something other than human; something in which humans intervene. The thesis is that we can’t make sense of nature by removing ourselves from it, nor make sense of ourselves by removing nature from us. Pleasing anecdotes and a refreshing engagement with the problem of our moral interpretations of animal behaviour beside instances of animal behaviour that seem to make no sense without a moral interpretation.