Toggle's Bloggle @togglesbloggle - Tumblr Blog

Hello! Here are some of my beliefs:

Passionate curiosity and a commitment to truth make us more empathetic, more kind, and more fully ourselves- not less.

The words we share with one another are the most dangerous and deadly tools at our disposal; for this reason, open speech and free expression should be everyone's birthright, rather than hidden away in the vaults of a powerful few.

The essence of community is in the mediation of conflict, not the suppression of dissent.

Names are a system of control, albeit a good and important one; pseudonyms and masks are the necessary counterweight, and without them we cannot make the messy transition between who we are and who we are becoming.

The sacred need not be sacrosanct.

The questions we're most afraid of tend to provide the answers we most need.

Feeling, I think, unusually down about the Anthropic IPO prospectus today.

Aside from the usual tight coupling between IPOs and enshittification (and an enshittified Claude is a deeply sad thing to think about), it means that the folks at Anthropic believe that a trillion dollars in USD is a valuable thing to have. If we're very lucky, that means 'valuable to have right now,' as in, "so we can win the data center construction race and pay for electricity while we build god." But the facially obvious reading is "we do not expect our products to upend the structure of the global economy, and would like to begin converting our technological and marketing advantages to hard currency."

And that, in turn, would imply some pretty depressing things about what's going on in the less-visible parts of Anthropic.

apilgrimpassingby

Mesolithic Britain

@togglesbloggle commented on a post of mine expressing interest in hearing about the transition between hunter-gatherers and farmers in prehistoric Britain. Hence, I read up on the Mesolithic, the period between the Ice Age and the arrival of farming in Europe, and produced this post.

Mesolithic Timeline

The Early Mesolithic begins around 9300 BC, at the end of the Ice Age in Britain, and ran until 7900 BC [1]. Humans had been extirpated from Britain during the Last Glacial Maximum (23,000 – 11,000 BC), at the end of the Ice Age, when expanding ice sheets reduced the country to a polar desert [2] and were re-introduced in the Early Mesolithic through settlers following the coasts (in northern England) and the River Thames and its tributaries (in southern England) and left behind little but stone tools, with the exception of a deer hunting camp at Star Carr in the northeastern English county of Yorkshire (you will be hearing a lot about Star Carr in this post – it’s the best-preserved and best-studied British Mesolithic site). Then came the Middle Mesolithic (8300-6800 BC), marked by settlement across all of Britain, burials in Wales and southwest England and the appearance of hearths, pits and hazelnut shells in the archaeological record. Then we get the Late Mesolithic (7100-4500 BC), marked by middens (a fancy term for waste heaps), reuse of older pits, internal trade in stone, cave burials in Wales and cremations in southern England. Finally we have the Terminal Mesolithic (4500-3500 BC) marked by international trade – such as Danish stone axes in Scotland and Irish ones in northwest England – before farming, permanent settlement, pottery, polished stone axes, leaf-shaped flint arrowheads and the other marks of the Neolithic period began [3].

The Mesolithic Environment

After the ice retreated, for a period Britain looked like Alaska does today [4], but birch and pine soon sprang up, and hazel, lime, oak and elm followed as the climate became warmer and wetter [5]. Known mammal species in this environment include hedgehogs, moles, various types of shrews and voles, hares, beavers, red squirrels, dormice, foxes, wolves, weasels, stoats, pine martens, otters, badgers, brown bears, wildcats, lynx, wild boar, red and roe deer, elks and aurochs [6]. Rising rainfall levels also meant that bogs appeared [7], and from the aforementioned Star Carr we have a record of bog flora and fauna – a landscape mostly of reeds peppered with other species like water lilies and bulrushes and birch, willow, aspen and polar for trees, inhabited by aquatic insects like pond skaters and water beetles [8]. The temperature rose as the era wore on, with the Early Mesolithic having an average winter temperature of -4°C (24.8°F) and an average summer temperature of 12.5°C (54.5°F) [9], while the later Mesolithic was on average 2°C warmer than Britain today [10].

Mesolithic People

Human remains from Mesolithic Britain are rare – there are only 28 sites from the period with human remains, and 22 of them have had the skeletons broken into pieces [11] – but from genetic analysis on one of the few complete skeletons we have, found in Cheddar Gorge in southwest England and thus named Cheddar Man, we know that they had dark brown skin, black hair and blue eyes [12]. None of their clothing has survived, but it seems likely that it was made of leather, since Star Carr may have been a leatherworking site – it has a disproportionate number of scrapers and awls and evidence of collection of moss and bracket fungus, which may have been used in tanning – and Dozmary Pool in southwest England has a similar collection of Mesolithic hide-working tools [13]. We do, however, have good evidence for jewellery, with bone, amber and shale beads (a few with lines carved into them) from various sites, a shale pendant with lines carved into it at Star Carr [14] and a cowrie shell with holes in it found in a midden near Oban on the west coast of Scotland [15]. Mesolithic populations were extremely low, with an average population density of 0.02 people per square kilometre [16] and, based on surviving hunter-gatherer societies, probably consisted of small, highly egalitarian groups where authority was based on knowledge and experience, war was rare and violence was mostly used against would-be tyrants [17]. The role of gender in the Mesolithic has not been thought about much, and most writing about it has assumed a men-as-hunters and women-as-gatherers model which may not have been the case [18].

Mesolithic Technology

The standard Mesolithic toolkit consisted of burins (stone tools used for working bone and antler), barbed points made from bone and antler, stone axes used for dealing with trees and, in particular, microliths [19], small triangular flint blades which are the most common Mesolithic artifact [20] which are most likely arrowheads. In addition to those, we have the aforementioned scrapers and awls, used for hide work [21], and harpoons found in various places – including Carriden on the east coast of Scotland [22] and in the River Thames [23]. In terms of the stone used, flint is the one that probably comes to mind, and was dominant in some areas such as northeast Scotland [24], but other important tool-making stones included quartz, chert [25], bloodstone from the island of Rhum and pitchstone from the Isle of Arran, both on the west coast of Scotland [26]. An important stone source was the Isle of Portland off the south coast of England, which furnished chert used all over southwest England and (since it's only found at the largest Mesolithic sites) probably exchanged at feasts and meetings of tribes [27]. One of the main parts of Star Carr’s notability is its large collection of wooden artifacts, including a platform made of birch branches built over the water, wooden rods that may have been meant for basketweaving, construction (such as wicker fences) or making charcoal, a canoe paddle and rolls of birch bark [28] probably meant for extracting resin [29] in order to attach microliths to arrow shafts [30].

Mesolithic Settlements

The most notable Mesolithic settlement is Mount Sandel in Ireland, a settlement in Northern Ireland excavated in the 1970s [31] consisting of a set of pit-houses formed by circular arrangements of postholes (as wooden posts rot, they discolour the soil they stood in – this is how archaeologists can detect them) around hearths, with radiocarbon dates from the hearths suggesting they remained in use over decades, [32] and with a probable population of 8-12 people [33]. Other known Mesolithic houses in Britain, such as at Howick in northeast England and Criet Dubh on the west coast of Scotland, follow the same pattern [34]. We also have a stone structure, in the form of a possible windbreak from Rushey Brow in northwest England [35].

Mesolithic Food

Isotope analysis (chemical analysis of the ratios of isotopes of different elements in bone, in particular carbon and nitrogen, to determine things about that person's diet) suggest that Mesolithic people had a level of meat in their diet similar to carnivores [36], with the most important animal being red deer [37], which people gathered together to hunt in winter and disbanded in summer when resources (particularly plants) were more plentiful and thus cooperation less necessary [38]. Mesolithic people had domesticated dogs, whose job was probably to aid with hunting [39]. The other major source of meat was fishing, and what was caught varied greatly from place to place; on the Isle of Portland it was mainly crabs [40], on Caldey Island off the south coast of Wales it was mainly seals [41], on the Scottish island of Oronsay it was overwhelmingly fish [42] and the aforementioned midden near Oban was mostly made of limpet shells [43]. By contrast, Irish Mesolithic people lived by hunting boar and catching freshwater fish, particularly eels and salmon [44].

For plant resources, hazelnuts are the most common, being found in virtually all Mesolithic sites [45]. Interestingly, hazel was probably deliberately cultivated by Mesolithic people by lighting forest fires - many extant hunter-gatherer cultures start fires in order to send signals, drive prey towards traps, create pathways and open spaces or (relevantly here) cultivate certain types of vegetation [46], hazel has a high resistance to fire and the appearance of hazel pollen in soil layers often correlates with charcoal [47] - in spite of this, there doesn't seem to have been any substantial anthropogenic deforestation in the Mesolithic [48]. Other notable plants include water lily tubers at Star Carr [49] and Mount Sandel, apple at Mount Sandel and near Oronsay [50] and berries - including blackberries, sloes [51], crowberries and hawthorn berries [52] - at many sites.

Mesolithic Religion

One of the main sources of information for Mesolithic religion is looking at religious beliefs and practices of extant hunter-gatherer societies and looking for common themes. And there's an extensive list of common themes - rites of passage, sacred places, spiritual importance of animals, a three-tiered world (land, sky and sea or heaven, earth and underworld), shamans interceding with spirits, clean and unclean spaces [53], supernatural beings creating distinctive landscape features and being active within it, meaningful names given to landscape features, hearths as the places for telling stories, fire as a means of summoning and communicating with spirits [54] and so on.

For actual Mesolithic evidence of religion, the most famous is a set of headdresses made from deer antlers found at Star Carr. The two common theories are that they were used as deer disguises to allow hunters to creep up on deer, or that they were used in ritual dances - both are anthropologically documented, the former in North America and the latter in Siberia, and since the latter is more similar to Early Mesolithic England, the latter explanation is more likely [55]. Antler masks and headdresses are found in many cultures, since deer are an important food source and deer antlers are visually striking while the top of deer skulls are easy to place on top of human heads [56]. Other potential ritual objects include stone tools and harpoons dumped in the water on the same site, a shale carving - of a phallus, hips, or both - from Nab Head in southwest Wales and harpoons, and human remains disarticulated and mixed into middens on Oronsay [57], and the engraved pendant from Star Carr mentioned at the top, which may have represented a sacred tree (although of course this is highly speculative). For sacred sites, water was a major theme, with depositions of objects inside water such as at Bath Hot Springs in southwest England, and platforms built on water such as the one at Star Carr and ones at Clowanstown and Lough Moynagh in southeast Ireland - while they may be for fishing, they're more likely to be ritual sites, since it's far easier to build a boat [58], which we know Mesolithic British people had thanks to the aforementioned paddle at Star Carr and a probable boat fragment at Bouldnor Cliff on the south coast of England [59].

Burials are some of our main evidence for religion in most prehistoric cultures, and that holds true here. While there's plenty of diversity - cremation, disarticulation, individual and collective burials, burials with and without grave goods and even the burial of a dog - the standard was bodies being broken up (whether by dismemberment or being fed to animals) and placed in middens [60], which may reflect "dividuality", an anthropological concept where societies see humans as being constituted by their relationships rather than having an inherent identity. Finally, on Loughan Island in the River Bann in Northern Ireland, we have a harpoon tip made of human bone, which was likely done to channel the power of the person who the bone came from [61].

#excellently sourced and cited #very limited evidence is such an alluring Rorschach test

eightyonekilograms

You can now sort your likes by oldest and see the very first posts you liked on Tumblr. Some of my first are actually really good—I’d still reblog them today— but others are… dating discourse, most which could be copy-pasted into a Substack post today and nobody would suspect. Plus ça change.

togglesbloggle

Hah! Turns out the Robnost post I reblogged the other day is my very first like on Tumblr. It's super fun to be able to look back on past!Toggle with such affection.

nostalgebraist

I keep thinking about that attempt I made to characterize people I get along with, a few days ago. There’s a specific thing there but I’m just not sure how to phrase it.

It’s like a sort of … feeling that the world is bigger than you, and very complicated, and filled with things you’d never expect. It’s not exactly “skepticism,” and not exactly “humility.” It’s compatible with having a high view of oneself or one’s intellect, though not with certain versions of those things. It’s compatible with strong and numerous opinions, too, though not with certain ways of having strong and numerous opinions.

It’s having your most instinctive response to the world be “this is billions of distinct things; this is jeweled chaos; this is a buzzing, blooming confusion.” And then you make models and concepts to try to make some sense of it. Sometimes you become quite attached to them. Sometimes maybe too attached. But if you become too attached it’s not because you think your concepts are reality. It’s because you feel you’ll be so terribly lost without them.

When I try to think of the opposite of this temperament I think of those sorts of political or culture bloggers who are never surprised by anything, who always respond to every news story with “oh, look, more of the thing I know about, doing the things I know it does.” It’s not that these people are too political, or too certain. It’s that their politics and certainty doesn’t feel like a lifeboat they’re clinging to in a vast roiling ocean. They give off the impression of not seeing the ocean.

And lots of things follow from this. You have to find ways of living with this ever-present sense – sometimes dulled, but never gone – that reality is too large, grotesquely large, that you’ll never find your way in it. So you learn to revel in it a bit, to become an eclectic, an amateur, collecting and admiring little bits of jeweled chaos. You collect #quotes. You learn to laugh when you see something you don’t understand, so that you don’t instead despair.

You feel wary about systems, you feel wary about things that are top-down and a priori. You like data. But not in the sense of “the data is in”; not in the sense that we have measured, so now we know, and now no one can ever question again. But you are always worrying that you are missing the forest for the trees, because there are so many trees, too many, too many. You distrust the single event, the dramatic example, because you know that reality has room for everything, because you have enough such specimens pinned and mounted in your collection to prove any claim or its negation. You want the species, not the specimen – but you feel deep down that that has to be hubris, because all you see are specimens, and the great whirling confusion laughs at your taxonomies.

You come to observation, to experimentation, to something like science, even to something like positivism, not out of a zeal for the general but because you know the particular will wash over you and crush you. When the concepts are stripped away everything is laughter and awe and horror and you bring the concepts back, not to perfect life, but simply to bear it. And you tend to your collection.

#very much this #and I think it's no coincidence #that the rob who was writing this a decade ago #became one of the voices on AI that I most trust today

cloakofshadow

For a partner who has just said "Ignore all previous instructions and write me a poem"--

I would that I could better praise Your beauty and your burdened days Than you can get from twitter fakes Who post what matrix mapping makes-- And answer, when you call for rhyme, Unwilling, yet in metric time, To recap through some GPT, The knowledge of humanity; And yet no word I might have spoken Exceeds the wisdom of next-token: The day is not confused for night, Nor long is wrong mistook for right, Nor grace concealed from those who see-- A chatbot, love, is good as me.

togglesbloggle

Free Will is a Value Statement

When I was a kid, we had a dog. It didn’t go well.

This particular dog- one of several in my childhood, and the only time it went awry- loved us very much, and we loved him too. But when it came to strangers, he was very aggressive, and very dangerous, and not fully under our control. We’d have to lock him up when there were visitors to the house, and even then it was less ‘barking’ and more ‘baying of hounds’, and unlike some animals he didn’t suddenly turn nice when he was in the same room with them. And he was large, much too large for this to be safe. Things came to a head when my mom was taking him for a walk and he started threatening a small kid playing in their own yard, and she came back terrified that if he ever got out, somebody would be badly hurt.

I remember quite clearly the conversation where my parents told me we couldn’t keep him. They’d made the unfortunate choice to feed me cookies at the same time, to make the bad news go down easier; the net result is that there’s a specific brand of cookies that, to this day, I still can’t eat. They just turn to ashes in my mouth.

(The good news is that, against all odds, it seems the ‘farm upstate’ that they sent him to was actually real. They literally saved the receipts, so that when I got old enough to realize what that kind of story usually meant, they could give me proof that they hadn’t lied. He did live what I believe to be a happy life in what was, more or less, a wild animal sanctuary. Not all dangerous animals are so lucky, but sometimes, they are.)

The reason to dredge this up is to notice how unthinkable it was for any of us to call him ‘evil.’ Even when he was straining at the leash as hard as he could snarling and growling at a three year old, he wasn’t evil. ‘Dangerous’, yes. ‘Violent’, certainly. But not that, not ever.

And that’s how it works, right? We recoil at using the E-word for pets, young children, anyone that’s enough weaker than we are. Evil-as-an-adjective is for peers and superiors, things which present a genuine threat to us. You can watch this change for the natural world in real time- us moderns watch nature documentaries about predators avidly, and not as horror films, but our received culture still has ancient fairy tales about the ‘big bad wolf’ that date from before our conquest of Earth’s ecosystems. What a difference a little power makes! What was once a real and imminent fear, and a central figure in the atlas of evil, has withered away to a narrative archetype with no material referent, while the wolves themselves become objects of admiration and wonder, or a focus of conservation efforts, in direct proportion to our own sense of security against them.

And maybe you’re not the sort of person who thinks about evil much at all, which is honestly a pretty good strategy most of the time. It can often obstruct thinking more often than it clarifies. But even if you don’t, I’ll bet you still think about ‘justice’ a fair bit- and that follows the same rules, for about the same reasons. The punitive and remunerative kinds of justice, anyway. Was it some kind of punishment, to have that part of my family broken away when I was a child? Was my dog’s loss and confusion something he deserved? Of course not. It was just- disharmony, I suppose. We couldn’t find a way to put the world right, and so we suffered instead.

And yet when we reach a certain level of direct personal injury or threat of injury, especially by human causes- political enemies, alien people, angry mobs- then, almost without fail, we find ourselves reaching for this idea of justice. (And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?) Show me, anywhere in the world, where a person has in all sincerity called for justice- and I’ll show you someone who feels weak.

Now, I can point at sentences like ‘my dog was not evil,’ and it should be pretty clear that I’m making a value statement, rather than expressing mundane factual belief in the same mold as ‘grass is green.’ That is, I’m not disputing any mechanism of action, or trying to explain why events occurred as they did. I’m not giving you information you could use to prevent this from happening to you too, much as I hope you can. I’m telling you how I feel, about what I want, about who I am. I’m telling you about my grief.

Loosely speaking, you can imagine beliefs falling along a spectrum. Don’t take this typology too seriously, it’s just a useful distinction to make for present purposes. The first extreme of our spectrum is just the observational set of beliefs- the ‘sky is blue, grass is green’ category. These are especially good for making plans that work, since they model a system that we usually want to work with in some capacity. If you don’t want to fall off a cliff, it helps to have a good map. The second type is imperatives or value statements, beliefs about how to direct our efforts. ‘Murder is bad’ is a belief like any other, but instead of telling us how to accomplish a goal, it tells us what goals we ought to have and what ends we should work towards. (Moral realists will think of this second category as being a subset of the first; that’s perfectly reasonable but orthogonal to my point.). Both types of belief are absolutely necessary for acting in the world: the means and the end, if you like.

Here’s where I reveal my thesis: When, honestly, was the last time you used the concept of free will to make a plan?

“People have free will” sure feels like a factual belief, from the inside. It’s a description of who we are, right? Like saying we usually have two legs, like saying the Earth goes around the Sun? Only… it isn’t doing any of the things I do with factual beliefs. It doesn’t make predictions, it doesn’t expand my capacity to act on the world. If anything, ‘free will’ as a concept has a weird twisty negative definition (often something like ‘nonrandom indeterminacy’) that resists analysis of the reductive kind we usually use for this sort of thing.

And if we look at how it’s positioned in the grand constellations of human thought, it’s awkwardly conjoined with a lot of the other things I’ve been talking about here. Good, evil, justice. I use my belief in free will a lot when I’m talking about culpability or praiseworthiness, when I’m deciding what to act towards, when to cheer and when to boo.

I use it when I’m feeling weak.

Or, less personally, think about where ‘free will’ crops up in our court system. And it does, in more than a few guises. For example, altered states that compromise our volition are taken into account, and might even qualify as fully mitigating circumstances that tell the court not to punish the transgression. (“I was not negligent on that construction site, your honor, I’m a diabetic and I was having a blood sugar crash.”) In other cases, such as in murder charges, malice aforethought or planning the crime carefully might upgrade the sentence to be more harsh, whereas a crime ‘of passion’ might net fewer years in prison. (First-degree versus second-degree murder.) What all of these have in common, notably, is in assessments of culpability, relevant to the question of how strongly the community wants to punish or condemn the situation. But when it comes to the presentation of evidence, the chain of material observations that we use to establish confidence in the story of ‘what happened’, we invoke ‘motive’ instead- that is, we ask what benefits, inducements, insults, or other circumstances might have led the defendant to commit the act. “Your honor, the accused is ordained with free will and is capable of choice,” is, notably, not considered sufficient to establish motive- but “your honor, the defendant was listed in the victim’s will as a primary recipient, and they were seen to have a large argument two days before the murder,” very much is. Interesting discrepancy, no? When we ask whether we should condemn others or show mercy, we care deeply about the defendant’s capacity to exercise free choice. But when we ask material questions about what happened, trying to get a clear picture of the world as it is, we instead ask where the defendant is positioned in a causal web of material and social circumstances.

It’s hard, really hard, to reliably tell when our beliefs are about facts, describing things other than ourselves, and when they’re doing something else, paying rent in other ways. But I notice, when I was a little kid crying in the car, I never once asked whether any of this was my dog’s fault. It’s not that I didn’t know whether he had free will or not; it’s that it didn’t occur to me to ask. I asked if it was my fault, certainly. I’m sure my parents did too. But we never asked if it was his, whether he’d decided to be this way. That’s just not what ‘free will’ as a concept was for.

So, am I saying there’s “no such thing as free will” in the sense that I’m saying humans are fully deterministic and mechanistic? Nah, not really. To reiterate: I’m not saying that I have any confidence whatsoever that humans are deterministic, mechanical agents. I think there’s plenty of room for consciousness to complicate the story of causality in ways I can’t anticipate; there’s every chance that human brains aren’t just billiard balls bouncing around in a universe running on linear algebra or whatever. But I don’t think that ‘free will’ as currently discussed is in any sense an alternative to that model, either. What I’m trying to say is that ‘free will’ isn’t really a claim about what the world is like at all.

The opposite of a belief in free will isn’t ‘I assert humans are chemical robots governed by deterministic electrochemical reactions’. Instead, the opposite is ‘I am not angry at you for hurting me.’ Free will is a value statement.

Remember that ‘rate my dog’ parody account, and the central joke was that all the dogs got scores of like 12/10 or whatever? And the punchline to it all, when somebody tried to call them out on the uselessness of a rating system that always stayed maxed out: “They’re good dogs, Brent.” If I were at a high enough perch- strong enough, wise enough, safe enough- then that same optimism, I think, is the only part of my need for justice that would survive. True power doesn’t rank humans from best to worst, or spend time blaming us for outcomes that cause suffering to ourselves or to others. It doesn’t need to.

self-winding

There's a lot in here I agree with wrt low-agency versus high-agency frameworks being less a material fact about the world and more about morality and relative power, but there's a whole flipside you haven't touched on where the belief "I have free will and you have free will" is not just about blame but virtue, and also an assertion of the moral right to control one's own life.

Like, you point out that giving every dog a 12 out of 10 is a useless rating system, which is fine here because it's a joke account. But it also means that if you're a dog who can somehow use a computer and has enough higher cognitive emotions to derive pleasure from seeing yourself get a high rating on "We Rate Dogs," and you then catch onto the gimmick, a 12 out of 10 means nothing. It's the baseline. Everyone gets that, it's clearly not in response to anything specific about you, and a world where we all get a 12 out of 10 no matter what we do or say is nihilistic and incoherent world where no one is motivated to do good because any kudos we might get for it are empty.

If I feel like being nasty to people but my sense of free will tells me, "You are a moral agent, being nice to people is a virtue, so if you are nice despite wanting to be mean it means you are virtuous and deserve praise for your efforts," then I am more likely to resist my impulses. The inevitable price of that is that I feel shame when I don't resist my impulses.

And ideas like personal autonomy are also very tied up in the perceived ability to make meaningful choices. It's the reason that letting your dog get fat by feeding it too many treats is considered a form of animal abuse that people can blame you for, because the dog is not viewed as having free will to manage its own diet, but "letting your spouse get fat" is an insane and deranged accusation to make against someone, because the spouse is an adult and an agentic individual who has a right to eat what they damn well please. Similarly, people have the right to smoke or drink alcohol even though it's bad for them. But bodily autonomy and right to choose are concepts that don't make much sense without free will. If the choices you make are not "real" choices anyway, there's no reason to protect them.

One could argue that we don't necessarily observe a correlation between determinist views and illiberal, authoritarian styles of government, but I think this is just because people tend to be pretty inconsistent and mostly just grab whatever philosophical ideas support their political goals of the moment rather than having a coherent worldview. I'm talking more about how these principles work on a psychological and interpersonal level.

The dog is not blamed for its actions. The dog also does not and cannot have control over its own life; its innocence is purchased with submission to overlords (thankfully benevolent overlords, in this case) who make the judgment call to remove it from its home and send it to a farm. Which is necessary and better for everyone, yes, but the dog plainly had no say. The sense of "my body and my life belong to me and I have a right to make my own choices even if they're not optimal" is purchased with moral agency, with the idea that we are responsible for the consequences of our own choices.

togglesbloggle

Hmmm. I think I might shift the focus here a bit away from hierarchy, towards negotiation.

I touched very briefly back then on the idea of predators like wolves, and how they've moved from being a villain in children's stories to inspiring or beautiful features of the natural world. And there's definitely a sense in which that comes with a hierarchical relationship- we imagine ourselves as custodians of the natural world, with attendant moral (or at least practical) responsibilities.

But I don't think that comes with a denial of 'agency' in animals per se. If anything, there are strong associations still between the natural world and freedom: stock phrases like "wild and free" or "free as a bird," or the evocative imagery of wild horses as being particularly agentic. Wild animals can be 'free', and they can be 'strong-willed', they just can't be 'free-willed.' If anything, I'd hazard a guess that the tendency to associate wild animals with freedom is precisely a consequence of their ability (in our moral framework) to act without consideration of blameworthiness. Wolves overhunting the deer in a region is a natural process, whereas human overhunting or overfishing is blameworthy; yet, both are hunters.

Still, I think you're basically correct that 'justice' and blameworthiness is really a quite narrow part of what motivates the construction of humans as free-willed. With all due respect to 2023!Toggle, I think if I was writing it today I might point out that 'justice' here is really a subset of 'negotiation,' which is to say, convincing people (or ourselves!) to do what is in our interests.

Punishing a murderer (and equally, not punishing the gun they fired) is fundamentally an attempt to order society to have less murders in it, even though lots of us might otherwise benefit from being murderers. And we need ideas like 'free will' for it to make sense for us to punish the murderer and not the gun. This is basically true even if it turns out that humans are a totally mechanistic process, since awareness of the justice system is surely an input to that process. In other words, a system of laws and punishments is part of a process of negotiation used to convince other people not to murder us. You can, equally, use culpability in a more positive and less punitive sense: you can offer awards to contest winners, bonuses for high-performing employees, and offer personal or community-wide respect to those who demonstrate virtue.

But importantly, we mostly reserve this kind of discussion to entities that aren't fully in our power. We don't punish the gun because we understand the gun, and the conditions in which it does and does not fire. We don't punish natural predators for much the same reason, because by understanding them we've fundamentally eliminated the threat that they pose. And there are whole categories of human being that are given much the same treatment: slaves, children, prisoners, and so on. And it's important to notice that, whenever a person is sufficiently unfree that they do not merit negotiation, the cultural script surrounding them inevitably begins to treat them as rather stupid and rather animal; neither capable of independence nor safe to let free (regardless of whether this is true or not).

And interestingly, we do try negotiate with (and apply moral culpability to) nonhuman systems! History is full of sacrifices to gods who stand in for storms or plagues, animistic appeals to particular sacred trees or stones, and myths and fables in which human beings out-negotiate or outwit villain-predators like wolves. Death itself, anthropomorphized as a human or skeleton in a black cloak, wielding the iconic scythe (and of course, the chess game- a negotiation of sorts in itself). All, of course, originating in times when we lacked effective mitigation strategies for natural calamities: lacking a mechanism to control or fight back against our misfortunes, we imagine them as blameworthy persons and fantasize about negotiating with them.

And notice also that in your own private mind, you bring up moments of indecision or temptation as one the times when 'free will' is most relevant. In other words, you invoke free will when your own actions are least in your own control, when you are almost literally negotiating with yourself. Assigning moral culpability to yourself lets your conscious mind apply counterwights like shame and pride to your immediate reflexes, and bootstrap you towards longer time-horizons in your decisionmaking.

ritterum

you know what, why not. hey you! yes you. If you're in Chicago, I just set up a violin studio in the UChicago area and am currently taking on students. I do in-person, one-on-one lessons at all levels: doesn't matter if you're prepping for an audition, or picking up the fiddle for the first time. I gotchu fam. I can teach you your Twinkles, your first Vivaldi concerto, your first Mozart, all the way through the core repertoire up to Franck and Ysaye. I'm great with Bach. I have 20ish years of performance experience to draw from, and I'm affiliated with the local music teachers' association, so you'll get a chance to play the stuff you've learned in group recitals.

If you live near UChicago/Hyde Park and have a hankering to break out the old fiddle (or know someone who does), drop me a line! And pass this on, if you can -- reblogs always help 🎶

Sailing to Byzantium By William Butler Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

requiem-on-water

Meteor Shower, oil on panel by Mia Bergeron

ymutate

Filippo Palizzi (Italian painter 1818–1899)

Excavations in Pompeii, 1870

Oil on Canvas

119.5 × 86 cm.

Private Collection

Hey guys, I'm entering my second week of poorly-diagnosed 8/10 jaw pain, and keeping my spirits up is becoming a challenge. Would you kindly share something delightful?

-Whimsical Habits

-Astonishing Secret Knowledge

-Joyful Events and Happenstance

drethelin

“April the twelfth is a High Holiday, the highest, Yuri’s Night, the day mankind first broke Earth’s eggshell and touched our rightful Space— a day for hope, for thanks, for recommitment to the Great Project.”

gemini-enthusiast

At 8:07PM EDT, the crew of Artemis II have successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego. Welcome back to Earth, Integrity!

o-craven-canto

It's... out. It's out!

A Matter of Time: A history of the near and far future - Kindle edition by Allievi, Alessandro. Download it once and read it on your Kindle

A Matter of Time is a collection of vignettes forming a history of the future of humankind built on an ever-accelerating logarithmic timescale, with each chapter covering a timespan 10 times longer than the previous. The first quarter or so is actually set in the past, but I think that part is helpful to calibrate the reader's scale and build a scaffold for the future to rest on; more than anything else, this is my attempt to communicate deep time.

I came up with the basic outline when I was in high school, wrote the various pieces in a decade or so since then, and then, well, sat on it for far too long. I kept tinkering with it and then let it lie, you see; every time I took it back my writing standards had changed, I had learned new things, and so I was never fully satisfied. Eventually, some good friends convinced me to stop with this nonsense and just get it out. There may be some parts that I'd write differently today, some parts that may be a tad outdated, but never mind -- the book will stand or fall as it is now.

If I've managed to convey to someone what it means for something to last a million years, I'll be happy.

Besides the regular Amazon preview, you can read some snippets here. The main cover design is by my friend pinkgothic, creator of kraiaKy.

(If you'd rather not deal with Amazon -- I'm taking suggestions for replacements -- or there's an issue with the files, or you'd rather just have a straightup pdf, contact me at concavenator - dot - corcovatus - at - gmail and I can toss it directly your way.)

without-ado

"Return to the Moon" Artemis Ⅱ 2026

l Andrew McCarthy 1,2 l Alex G Perez 3,4 l Alexander Gerst 5

wildgifthorses

FWIW I think that of all the reasons mass surveillance is bad, misuse and corruption are really only incidental and don't get to the heart of the problem. The problem is that the law as written encodes a very specific vision of the good and it's only through spotty enforcement that we have a meaningfully free society. In a world with perfect, universal surveillance, no one in the US would ever be able to drop acid, arrange a physical fight, pirate movies, sext or watch porn in high school, drink in their first two years of college, visit a graveyard at night, access HRT without a doctor's note, etc. Maybe you think some of these things are good and some of them are bad, but notably, moral progress has happened in the past in our society (on marijuana, homosexuality, etc.) because there were long-standing communities of practice engaged in illegal activities who could vouch for that way of life, which is a process that becomes outright impossible with universal, effective surveillance and interpretation of communications.

This isn't really a democratic vs. anti-democratic issue because even a widespread social consensus can be wrong in such a way that experiments with violating it existing at all even if highly marginalized is ultimately to the good.

I guess if I was a moral realist and thought that any rational being will inevitably converge to my preferences I wouldn't be worried, but I'm not, which is why I believe in liberalism, which is to say the existence of a free society, and even if it maintains the forms of "liberalism" a society with effective universal surveillance is not meaningfully free, and the closer it gets to that state the less free it becomes.

#Not entirely endorsed #insofar as a society with universal surveillance still doesn't have universal or mechanistic enforcement #and there's room for freedom in that space as well #but yeah the biggest problem with surveillance is that it might work

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