Category: Philosophy

“The Powers of a Man’s Mind Are Directly Proportioned to the Quantity of Coffee He Drinks”

(p. C9) . . . certain aspects of 18th-century Parisian life diluted the importance of sight. This was, after all, a time before widespread street lighting, and, as such, activities in markets (notably Les Halles) were guided as much by sound and touch as by eyes that struggled in the near dark conditions. Natural light governed the lives of working people, principally because candles were expensive. Night workers–such as baker boys known as “bats,” who worked in cheerless basements–learned to rely on their other senses, most notably touch.
. . .
“For Enlightenment consumers, a delicious food or beverage had more than just the power of giving a person pleasure,” writes Ms. Purnell; taste, it was held, could influence personality, emotions and intelligence. Take coffee, “the triumphant beverage of the Age of Enlightenm ent.” Considered a “sober liquor,” it stimulated creativity without courting the prospect of drunkenness. Sir James Mackintosh, the Scottish philosopher, believed that “the powers of a man’s mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks.” Voltaire agreed and supposedly quaffed 40 cups of it every day. Taste was also gendered: Coffee was deemed too strong for women; drinking chocolate was thought more suitable.

For the full review, see:
MARK SMITH. “The Stench of Progress.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MARCH 11, 2017): C9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 10, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Purnell, Carolyn. The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Panopticon: “Bentham’s Most Infamous Idea”

(p. C6) Perhaps the most fascinating chapter of the book, highlighting Mr. Crawford’s ability to mix philosophy and reporting, is the one about the panopticon. The idea of an annular building with a central observation tower was conceived by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). The utilitarian is known most superficially by students of and visitors to University College, London, as the eccentric who willed that, after his death, his body be preserved seated on a chair in a glass case.
Mr. Crawford fleshes out the story, noting that, in fact, the smartly dressed Bentham figure that sits inside a glass display case today is actually a skeleton of the man, his head a wax replica of the real one that did not survive the preservation process. When I was a regular at University College one summer, I was told that the cabinet holding the “Auto-Icon” (Bentham’s term) was rolled over to the lecture hall on occasion, something that I don’t recall witnessing.
The author’s real purpose in discussing Bentham’s most infamous idea is to describe the utopian–or dystopian, depending upon one’s point of view–concept. In one embodiment, it took the form of a rimless wagon wheel, in which someone situated at the hub could oversee activities in all directions, making the layout ideal for insuring that workers in a factory did not take more breaks than allowed, inmates did not misbehave in a prison or students did not cheat on an exam.
Bentham’s insight was that the mere fact that those being observed knew that they were being watched would cause them to alter their behavior for the better. Could Bentham have imagined that his idea would form the foundation of our surveillance society? Looking at our culture today–with its CCTV, smartphones and so on–to some it surely seems that we live in a permanent panopticon. “All this,” Mr. Crawford writes, “from a ‘simple idea in architecture.’ “

For the full review, see:
HENRY PETROSKI. “What Goes Up.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MARCH 11, 2017): C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 10, 2017, and has the title “The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings.”)

The book under review, is:
Crawford, James. Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings. New York: Picador, 2017.

For $9,000, No Chicken Need Die, When You Eat a Pound of Chicken

(p. B3) A Bay Area food-technology startup says it has created the world’s first chicken strips grown from self-reproducing cells without so much as ruffling a feather.
And the product pretty much tastes like chicken, according to people who were offered samples Tuesday [March 14, 2017] in San Francisco, before Memphis Meats Inc.’s formal unveiling on Wednesday.
Scientists, startups and animal-welfare activists believe the new product could help to revolutionize the roughly $200 billion U.S. meat industry. Their goal: Replace billions of cattle, hogs and chickens with animal meat they say can be grown more efficiently and humanely in stainless-steel bioreactor tanks.
. . .
On Tuesday [March 14, 2017], Memphis Meats invited a handful of taste-testers to a San Francisco kitchen and cooked and served their chicken strip, along with a piece of duck prepared à l’orange style.
Some who sampled the strip–breaded, deep-fried and spongier than a whole chicken breast–said it nearly nailed the flavor of the traditional variety. Their verdict: They would eat it again.
. . .
The cell-cultured meat startups are a long way from replacing the meat industry’s global network of hatcheries, chicken barns, feed mills and processing plants. But they say they’re making progress. Memphis Meats estimates its current technology can yield one pound of chicken meat for less than $9,000. That is half of what it cost the company to produce its beef meatball about a year ago. The startups, however, aspire to produce meat that can be cost-competitive with the conventionally raised kind.

For the full story, see:
JACOB BUNGE. “Startup Serves Chicken From the Lab.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., March 16, 2017): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 15, 2017, and has the title “Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab.”)

People Root for Billionaires If They Believe They Also Could Become Billionaires

(p. 22) “Billions” manages the feat of making you want the guy who has everything to have even more.
“People still root for billionaires because it reinforces the idea that they can do it too,” Mr. Kirshenbaum said recently. “People don’t want to be in a place where there’s not a lot of magic left in the equation.” Political analysts have long given this explanation for why poor or working-class people vote against tax increases for the wealthy: They want to believe that some day they, too, will have assets to guard.
. . .
Like the TV series, the film “The Big Short” puts you in the position of wanting the investors — or at least the investors depicted on the screen — to win. The movie channels your anger at the banks that came up with the perilous financial instruments that devastated the economy, but it leaves you no room to despise the charmingly eccentric rogue geniuses who made hundreds of millions of dollars shorting the housing market. All that hard work, the culling of documents and the fact-gathering trips to endangered Sun Belt real estate markets — it would be so wrong if they didn’t triumph in the end. Institutions are greedy; people are merely obsessed.

For the full commentary, see:
GINIA BELLAFANTE. “Big City; Rooting for the Robber Barons, at Least Those Onscreen.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., MARCH 20, 2016): 22.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MARCH 18, 2016, and has the title “Big City; Rooting for the Robber Barons, at Least on the Screen.”)

“Fear Moved Aside to Make Room for Hope”

(p. B11) Joyce Appleby, a distinguished historian and author who argued that ideas about capitalism and liberty were fundamental in shaping the identity of early Americans, died on Dec. 23 [2016] at her home in Taos, N.M.
. . .
Dr. Appleby, a former journalist who began her Ph.D. training at 32 while caring for three children, rose to the top ranks of the discipline, serving as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
. . .
In books like “Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s” (1984) and “Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination” (1992). Dr. Appleby argued that the revolutionaries were more individualistic and optimistic than they had been given credit for.
John Locke and Adam Smith had as much influence on founders like Jefferson as the radical Whigs — if not more, she said. In her view, the revolutionaries believed that the public good would arise out of the harmonious pursuit of private interests in a market economy.
“For me, liberalism had entered American consciousness as a potent brew blended from 17th-century entrepreneurial attitudes and the Enlightenment’s endorsement of liberty and reason,” Dr. Appleby said in the 2012 lecture. “Because nature had endowed human beings with the capacity to think for themselves and act on their own behalf, representative government seemed the perfect fit for them.
“Rather than classical republicanism’s fixation on social traumas, liberalism was optimistic, moving forward with the rational, self-improving individual who was endowed with natural rights to be exercised in a widened ambit of freedom.”
Or, as she put it in a 2007 essay on the intellectual underpinnings of American democracy, “Fear moved aside to make room for hope.”

For the full obituary, see:
SEWELL CHAN. “Joyce Appleby, Scholar of Capitalism and American Identity.” The New York Times (Fri., January 6, 2017): B11.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JAN. 2 [sic], 2017, and has the title “Joyce Appleby, Historian of Capitalism and American Identity, Is Dead at 87.”)

The Appleby books mentioned above, are:
Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, Anson G. Phelps Lectureship on Early American History. New York: NYU Press, 1984.
Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

“We Shall Increasingly Have the Power to Make Life Good”

(p. B13) Derek Parfit, a British philosopher whose writing on personal identity, the nature of reasons and the objectivity of morality re-established ethics as a central concern for contemporary thinkers and set the terms for philosophic inquiry, died on Monday at his home in London.
. . .
The two volumes of “On What Matters,” published in 2011, dealt with the theory of reasons and morality, arguing for the existence of objective truth in ethics.
. . .
“With no other philosopher have I had such a clear sense of someone who had already thought of every objection I could make, of the best replies to them, of further objections that I might then make, and of replies to them too,” the philosopher Peter Singer wrote recently on the philosophy website Daily Nous.
. . .
In February [2017], Oxford University Press plans to publish a third volume of “On What Matters.” It consists in part of responses to criticism of his work by leading philosophers, which will appear in a companion volume, edited by Mr. Singer, titled “Does Anything Really Matter?”
. . .
On Daily Nous, Mr. Singer offered a snippet from Mr. Parfit’s new work:
“Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine.
“In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.”

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “Derek Parfit, 74, Philosopher Who Explored Identity.” The New York Times (Thurs., JAN. 5, 2017): B13.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JAN. 4, 2017, and has the title “Derek Parfit, Philosopher Who Explored Identity and Moral Choice, Dies at 74.”)

The book by Parfit quoted above, is:
Parfit, Derek. On What Matters: Volume Three. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2017.

Empathy Is “a Poor Moral Guide”

(p. C4) “Against Empathy” is an invigorating, relevant and often very funny re-evaluation of empathy, one of our culture’s most ubiquitous sacred cows, which in Mr. Bloom’s view should be gently led to the abattoir. He notes that there are no less than 1,500 books listed on Amazon with “empathy” in the title or subtitle. In politics, practically no higher value exists than being empathetic: Think of the words “I feel your pain” coming from Bill Clinton through a strategically gnawed lip.
. . .
Mr. Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale, is having none of it. Empathy, he argues, is “a poor moral guide” in almost all realms of life, whether it’s public policy, private charity or interpersonal relationships. “Empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism,” he writes.
. . .
His point, . . . , is that empathy is untempered by reason, emanating from the murky bayou of the gut. He prefers a kind of rational compassion — a mixture of caring and detached cost-benefit analysis. His book is a systematic attempt to show why this is so.
To those who say empathy is essential to morality, he’d reply that morality has many sources. “Many wrongs” — like littering or cheating on your taxes — “have no distinct victims to empathize with.” Nor does it appear that the most empathetic people behave the most ethically. “There have been hundreds of studies, with children and adults,” he writes, “and overall the results are: meh.”

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR . “Books of The Times; Have a Heart, but Be Careful Not to Lose Your Head.” The New York Times (Weds., December 7, 2016): C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 6, 2016, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: ‘Against Empathy,’ or the Right Way to Feel Someone’s Pain.”)

The book under review, is:
Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York: Ecco, 2016.

The Octopus, Though Intelligent, Only Lives for Two Years

(p. C5) Around 600 million years ago there lived in the sea a small unprepossessing worm, virtually eyeless and brainless. For some reason this species split into two, thus seeding the vast zoological groupings of the vertebrates and the invertebrates. On one branch sit the mammals; on the other sit the molluscs (and many others). Among these two groups, two notable creatures eye each other warily: the human and the octopus. They have no common ancestor apart from that lowly worm, yet there is a strange affinity, a bond almost. For they are both evolutionary experiments in intelligence–pockets of genius in a vast ocean (sorry!) of biological mediocrity.
In “Other Minds,” Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher at CUNY and an avid scuba diver, has given us a smoothly written and captivating account of the octopus and its brethren, as observed by humans. He celebrates the cephalopods: the octopus, the squid and the cuttlefish. He stresses their dissimilarity to us and other mammals, but he also wants us to appreciate what we have in common. Just as eyes have evolved independently in many lineages, so have intelligent minds. From those mindless worms, via two separate evolutionary paths, to the glories of consciousness and curiosity–we are brothers in big brains.
. . .
(p. C6) Mr. Godfrey-Smith mixes the scientific with the personal, giving us lively descriptions of his dives to “Octopolis,” a site off the east coast of Australia at which octopuses gather. There they make their dens in piles of scallop shells. He also reproduces some excellent photographs of the octopuses and other cephalopods he has observed in his submerged city. It is with a jolt, then, that he announces the average life span of the cephalopod: one to two years. That’s it: That marvelous complex body, the large brain, lively mind and amazing Technicolor skin–all over so quickly. There are boring little fish that live for 200 years, and the closely related nautilus can live for 20 years, but the octopus has only a year or two to enjoy its uniqueness. Mr. Godfrey-Smith speculates that the brevity results from a lifestyle that forces the animal to reach reproductive age as soon as possible, given the problem of predators such as whales or large fish.
Whatever the biological reason for such a brief life, it is a melancholy fact.
. . .
What is it like to be an octopus? It’s not easy to say, but I speculate soft, malleable, brimming with sensation, vivid, expressive, exciting, complicated, tragic and determined. They make good, if brief, use of their portion of consciousness. They must live by the evolutionary laws that have created them, but there is an inner being that makes the best of its lot. Though it’s easy to think of octopuses as alien, a better view is that they are our cousins in biological destiny–spirits in a material world.

For the full review, see:
COLIN MCGINN. “Experiments in Intelligence.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 3, 2016): C5-C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 4 [sic], 2016, and has the title “Our Noble Cousin: The Octopus.”)

The book under review, is:
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Rat Ticklers Find Ticklishness Has Deep Evolutionary Roots

(p. A12) As Michael Brecht and Shimpei Ishiyama of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin point out in their report, tickling raises many questions. We don’t know why it evolved, what purpose it might serve and why only certain body parts are ticklish. And what about that disappointing and confounding truth that all children and scientists must grapple with: You can’t tickle yourself.
The researchers were also inspired by earlier studies. ” ‘Laughing’ Rats and the Evolutionary Antecedents of Human Joy?” published in 2003 in Physiology & Behavior, reported that rats would emit ultrasonic calls when tickled. Ultrasound is too high for humans to pick up.
. . .
The scientists found that tickling and play, which involved chasing a researcher’s hand, both caused the same ultrasonic calls and the same brain cells to be active. The scientists also stimulated those cells electrically, without any tickling or play, and got the same calls.
And they found that you can’t tickle rats when they are not in a good mood, something that is also true of people.
. . .
And the similarity of tickling in rats and humans is, Dr. Brecht said, “amazing.” They even have similar areas that are susceptible for unknown reasons, including the soles of their hind feet, but not of their forepaws.
That similarity suggests that tickling is evolutionarily very ancient, going back to the roots of touch as a way to form social bonds in the ancestors of rats and humans.
“Maybe,” Dr. Brecht speculated, “ticklishness is a trick of the brain to make animals or humans play or interact in a fun way.”

For the full story, see:

JAMES GORMAN. “When Tickled, Rats Giggle and Leap, Researchers Find.” The New York Times (Fri., NOV. 11, 2016): A12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 10, 2016, and has the title “Oh, for the Joy of a Tickled Rat.”)

Ishiyama and Becht’s recent report, discussed above, is:
Ishiyama, S., and M. Brecht. “Neural Correlates of Ticklishness in the Rat Somatosensory Cortex.” Science 354, no. 6313 (Nov. 11, 2016): 757-60.

The earlier paper mentioned above, is:
Panksepp, Jaak, and Jeff Burgdorf. “”Laughing” Rats and the Evolutionary Antecedents of Human Joy?” Physiology & Behavior 79, no. 3 (Aug. 2003): 533-47.

Another paper in this line of research, is:
Rygula, Rafal, Helena Pluta, and Piotr Popik. “Laughing Rats Are Optimistic.” PLoS ONE 7, no. 12 (Dec. 2012): 1-6.

Never Say Die

(p. A7) LONDON — During the last months of her life, a terminally ill 14-year-old British girl made a final wish. Instead of being buried, she asked to be frozen so that she could be “woken up” in the future when a cure was found — even if that was hundreds of years later.
“I want to have this chance,” the teenager wrote in a letter to a judge asking that she be cryogenically preserved. She died on Oct. 17 from a rare form of cancer. “I don’t want to be buried underground,” she wrote.
The girl’s parents, who are divorced, disagreed about the procedure. The teenager had asked the court to designate that her mother, who supported her daughter’s wishes, should decide how to handle her remains.
The judge, Peter Jackson, ruled in her favor. Local news reports said he was impressed by the “valiant way in which she was facing her predicament.” He said she had chosen the most basic preservation option, which costs about £37,000, or nearly $46,000, an amount reportedly raised by her grandparents.
“I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up,” the teenager wrote in her letter to the judge. Local reports said she had told a relative: “I’m dying, but I’m going to come back again in 200 years.”
. . .
“The scientific theory underlying cryonics is speculative and controversial, and there is considerable debate about its ethical implications,” the judge said in a statement.
“On the other hand, cryopreservation, the preservation of cells and tissues by freezing, is now a well-known process in certain branches of medicine, for example the preservation of sperm and embryos as part of fertility treatment,” the statement said. “Cryonics is cryopreservation taken to its extreme.”
Zoe Fleetwood, the girl’s lawyer, said her client had called Judge Jackson a “hero” after being told of the court’s decision shortly before her death. “By Oct. 6, the girl knew that her wishes were going to be followed,” Ms. Fleetwood told BBC Radio 4. “That gave her great comfort.”

For the full story, see:
KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA. “Wish of Girl, 14, to Be Frozen, Is Granted by British Judge.” The New York Times (Sat., NOV. 19, 2016): A7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 18, 2016, and has the title “Last Wish of Dying Girl, 14, to Be Frozen, Is Granted by Judge.”)