Philip Sugg | Blog

Three pictures that I wanted to post this fall, that I never got around to:

I don’t know why–I knew I liked them, and wanted to see them archived. Maybe I would find them the following season. But I also know that I liked these photos because they reminded me of an act of seeing, that the artifact stood in for how I related to something with my own eyes. The photos exist to point: to a moment of observational capacity, openness and fulfillment that is far less communicable.

I’ve been thinking again about what it means to be a naturalist; one answer I’ve arrived at is that a naturalist is someone who observes uncontrolled situations for their own sake. The qualifier uncontrolled does the work, for me, of a more traditional definition of nature: nature is not just that which is opposed to the human. I believe so strongly in this observational component, I am willing to bend quite a bit on my definition of nature. Streets are a fine place, as long as you look. The point is to look with such unrelenting commitment that your vision starts to get strange, to be OK with taking away (only, only!) the impression and go no further. To rest in what cannot be communicated.

This news in astronomy got a bit of attention in a few newspapers last week. The discovery was that a distant star system has six planets orbiting at different resonances, or rates of orbit, that are related to one another in precise ratios.

Imagine one planet orbits its star at twice the rate of another planet in the same system, a third planet that orbits four times as fast (these ratios are made up), and so on.

This arrangement is both beautiful to behold and mathematically harmonious. Current thinking suggests that these neat arrangments probably arose during the formation of the star system, while fusion gets underway, and dust and gas accumulate into planets. If these initial relationships still hold, it means we are looking at a system whose planetary bodies have not been disturbed over billions of years. The perfection of the system can be seen as a mechanical time capsule, a glimpse at the original creative force that first pushes stars into motion.

On a related note, I’ve been returning to Spinoza’s work recently because I’m going through this book. I thought of him when I read about this concordance of ideal motion and intellectual beauty. In it, I see a phenomenon that Spinoza would find particularly pleasing. In his Short Treatise, Spinoza writes about the two types of Natura naturata, or “those modes or creatures which immediately depend on, or have been created by God:” “motion in matter, and “intellect in the thinking thing.” On matter:

With regard particularly to motion, it belongs more properly to a treatise on natural science than here, [to show] that it has been from all eternity, and will remain to all eternity immutable, that it is infinite in its kind…

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Given that I am not someone who specializes in this stuff, I am especially tired of thinking and writing about AI chatbots. But there are at least two thoughts in this area I’d like to see get more attention:

• How the OpenAI’s nonprofit status contributed to the breakthroughs it made. Over the last few weeks, since the shake-up on the board, the company’s unusual legal structure– a nonprofit controlling a for-profit corporation–has mostly been the subject of ridicule. This is a reflection of how badly the current moment has been captured by a certain type of profit-motive narrative about creative breakthroughs–at least the capture of those who are in a position to do most of the reporting on OpenAI. The consensus I read is that OpenAI’s non-profit structure has been holding it back for a while, that it was an accidental property of its naive founders. I hope, with time, that the stories move past this prejudice, and some journalist or ethnographer gets enough access to study if and how the company’s unusual corporate structure contributed to what it did. Innovation–especially profitable innovation–will always be unpredictable, but shouldn’t a non-profit environment for technical innovation be taken more seriously? Was there a relaxed field here–maybe a different relationship to work, goals, and play–that nurtured the achievements that the for-profit partisans now want to take credit for?

• All the ways in which ChatGPT reflects a a larger civilizational readiness, a cultural priming, to accept automated text generation. If bots like this really do maintain their status as breakthroughs once the hype has settled down, one of the more curious aspects of its origin story will be how long the basic technology was out in the open without any real mainstream reaction. This is true since at least 2020 from OpenAI, and Google reportedly had in-house chatbots with significant capabilities before that. Why did it take it so long to land, and why did it explode when it did? Is there a story here about post-pandemic mental exhaustion? Certainly there’s a story here about large numbers of people wanting to do–doing more of–the things that chatbots do well: sit for long periods of time in front of screens, sending chat bubbles back and forth, and write the things (e.g., code) that chatbots are trained to do well. I wonder, without the conditions that lead large numbers of educated people to sit inside in front of computers all day, if chatbots would seem so impressive. There’s also a backstory here about an algorithmic way of life, of which chatbots are just the latest, strangest chapter. Chatbots may be philosophical zombies that usurp human qualities in the body of a computer, but computers had to draw humans a little closer before that became possible.

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Over the past year, as OpenAI’s ChatGPT has gone from a specialist tool to a worldwide cultural phenomenon, there has been one anxious question controlling the discussion: is this time different–are computers now really intelligent–and what does this change about the human self-understanding? If human beings are exceptional, then it is in large part because of intelligence.

It didn’t help that a computer was now considerably more likely to pass one of the most clearly defined, functional tests for artificial intelligence, the so-called “Turing test:” give a human being the chance to pass messages back and forth with a partner behind a veil; if the human cannot tell that he or she is conversing with a machine, it passes the test. It is intelligent, practically speaking.

There are a lot of problems with this test. Still, the bar was raised. Furthermore, if the standard for “real” artificial intelligence is a moving target, always a few steps ahead of whatever computers are currently capable doing, then maybe the questions about artificial intelligence are hopelessly philosophical, likely to generate new pathways for analysis but impossible to answer with any closure.

When I wrote above that human intelligence is an essential quality of the human–of human exceptionalism–I meant it in two senses of that word: that intelligence is (1) a distinguishing quality of the human, and that (2) as a quality, it has the special status of an essence. The essential quality and its object are hard to separate. What is intelligence? Look to human beings, see it in action. What are human beings? Homo sapiens, thinking things, subjects with intelligence.

The computer was originally conceived for military problems.

• Joseph Weizenbaum, Interview with Der Spiegel, 1987

The means of computing was industry, and the end of computing was control.

Geoffrey Bowker, “The Ends of Computing,” in The Ends of Knowledge, (2023)

This new machine-based mind would lend to human thought permanent existence, not just in Heaven, as Kepler imagined, but on earth as well.

• David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology (1997), 148

The most suggestive clue that the computer contains a divine aspiration might be the unresolved disagreement over its purpose. Computing inserts itself into every describable aspect of life, and the result is that existence itself becomes a computer-tractable unit , the “it from a bit” as the physicist Joseph Wheeler said.

But what about the relativist claim, that computers structure and condition–blind–our reality? Regardless of one’s position on what computing is, what cannot be doubted is that the computer is a tool–a means to doing things. It is obvious that some tools have an effect on the how their users know the world (e,g., trains, plastics, firearms), but the tools that condition reality most comprehensively work through people who are not even trying to use them; maybe they don’t even know that the tool exists, or are compelled to use it against their will.

The existence of any real and definite computer is neither miraculous nor obscure. Only the cooperation between immense numbers of people–friends, unknown collaborators, even enemies–makes the computer possible, and each realized design can be traced back through corporate, professional, and research associations whose human participants are–at least in historical terms–well-documented. The computer is a device with utterly mundane (as in mundus, of this world) origins. As inventions go, the history of the computer contains what is arguably the most comprehensive proof that it was not divinely inspired.

I imagine a specialist job someday with the title resembling “techno-archaeologist,” or “digital paleontology.” Right now paleontology might be the study of ancient beings, but would it be surprising if information gained the status of a living being one day? And if someone worked painstakingly to recover ancient technology, like they do today for dinosaur bones?

Digital technology makes it possible to create and store immense amounts of information. And to destroy it. Most of the new information created today is likely to live a short lifespan, at most until it stops being useful to someone. But a small number of informational units are likely to persist–“live”–much longer, indefinitely. Today the planet is overrun by space junk above and oceanic plastic above, but someday the material remnants of broken information may become as common as dirty air. The thing about technology, as a distinctive category of human endeavor, is that it first distinguishes itself by being new. Today old technology first ceases to exist when it becomes obsolete: “not-new” is its own kind of non-being.

If information achieves a transition to a kind of being, a personhood, maybe it will be worthy of being dug up, preserved, archived–because age itself will make it worthy of an archive. It becomes valuable not for what it can do, but because of what it is, what it suggests about the line between past, present and future.

I was in western Wisconsin over the weekend, in a rural area, and was struck by the grandeur of the the power transmission lines. Something about the emptiness of the countryside makes the infrastructure seem larger–against naturalistic settings more obviously unnatural. In this part of the country, there are no mountains. No other object is this tall, this long (you can’t follow its beginning or end), this exact in its proportions. And it can’t blend in with other traces of civilization. Here, there is nowhere for these lines to go but against the trees and the sky.

Western Wisconsin has an embattled recent history with electricity generation and transmission; the objections are, at least in part, aesthetic. I can sympathize: I don’t know how I would feel if I had to look at this feature everday. But for me this object fell closer to the sublime, as if these devices were some sort of unintentional monument whose true purpose was still waiting to be discovered.

I know when I have visited a beautiful place because I convince myself, almost without reasoning it out, that this place has made itself essential to my life.

A beautiful place exists in time. One among many magic tricks that it performs is to break out of the constructed specifics of its appearance. Even beautiful cityscapes, with a view that changes every day, become monumental, geologic, in stature. Disasters in the city derive some of their visual power from buildings that take on the qualities of mountains, crumbling.

The beautiful place is essential because it reconfigures life, points it in a different direction. This does not mean I know where I’m now headed (usually not). Still I feel that, no matter how accidental my arrival, I couldn’t have done otherwise than be here. I will do it every chance I have.

But firm hindsight crumbles. It’s all too easy to turn away from the next opportunity: I’m too busy, I’ve seen that before, I know what it’s like. When I arrive again, I have the thought: beautiful places are as necessary as eating or drinking. This necessity has a different pace. Like water for a plant, it can seem indifferent to being ignored from one day to the next. But to go without is to let something die, to be newly vulnerable. Other dangers rise up, the real cause will never be traced back because the language and concepts for the loss have themselves been lost.

But that the present order of things was not to be taken for granted, that it presupposed a certain harmony between the world and the guardians of culture, that this harmony could always be disrupted, and that world history taken as a whole by no means furthered what was desirable, rational, and beautiful in the life of man, but at best only occasionally tolerated it as an exception—all this they did not realize.

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Yascha Mounk had the political philospher Michael Walzer on his Good Fight podcast a few days ago, and they had an exchange about the rise of the so-called “post-liberal” political thinkers. The full version is too long to quote here, but a few highlights:

Walzer:

According to people like Patrick Deneen, liberalism is responsible for everything that has gone on in the modern world. And what is most amazing about his work is all the factors that he omits in his description of the rise of modernity, like the Protestant Reformation, which is perhaps the truest source of the individual and individualism—the individual and his God. The Protestants invented that singular pronoun. The gathered congregation, the critique of hierarchy—all that comes from the religious side, not from secular liberal ideology. And Deneen just doesn’t talk about it. One crucial aspect of individualism (which already also begins in primitive forms among the Protestant radicals) is the equality of women. Genuine equality of women, the end of the patriarchal regime, is going to change the way families live and the way familial life is organized. And they continually invoke the traditional family which has been destroyed by liberalism, and they are not prepared to say that women are not equals, they’re not prepared to say that.

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Alexander Etkind, historian of Russia and an expert on the trade in natural resources, discusses the privatization of agriculture after the 1991 breakup the Soviet Union:

Members of the Soviet collective farms had used (but did not own) micro-slots of land, mostly vegetable gardens. After 1991, millions of peasants and dacha owners privatized their small households and gardens. In 1999, a quarter of the Russian population owned a subsidiary plot and was cultivating it. They worked 7 percent of the country’s arable land but produced more than 40 percent of its agricultural output. Amazingly, they provided 92 percent of Russia’s potato harvest, three quarters of its vegetables, almost all of its fruit, and half of its milk and meat. In 2009, the numbers were similar. This was an intensive but premodern agribusiness: whole families worked with shovels on miniscule plots, while elderly women sat on the side of the road, selling herbs by the gram or potatoes by the kilo. But these people were free: the only levy they paid was property tax; they chose their seeds, tools and methods; they owned their land and could sell it whenever they so desired. Russian agriculture had the same two-tier structure as other sectors: one part of the system, populous but mostly poor, fed the ordinary folk with perishable produce that could not be exported; another part, small but wealthy, produced the staples at volume, selling them abroad for convertible cash.

–Russia Against Modernity (2023), “Parasitic Governance”

This is amazing. Post-Soviet privatization of the economy in Russia usually meant privatization in the hands of a few, so that the resources could be sold on an international market for international cash, which went to the international bank accounts of those same few owners. As a result, the fruit, vegetable and meat consumption of around 150 million people was treated as an afterthought by the domestic authorities. And so a nation’s grocery store worth of fruits, vegetables and meat was effectively provided by a bunch of subsistence and hobby farmers.