- Daniel Dennett attributing to Anatol Rapoport (via here)
The Russian terrorist Vera Figner, a leader of the group that assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, recalled how she lost respect for her father when he replied to a serious question: “I do not know.” This answer filled the child with “burning shame.” All important questions, Figner knew, have clear answers, and all reasonable people accept them.
Figner didn’t weigh pros and cons. No sooner did she hear some indubitably correct answer than she adopted it. Regardless of counterevidence, she never questioned a belief, just as one never doubts a mathematical proof. Figner was by no means unusual. This way of thinking—this certainty about being absolutely certain—characterized both the prerevolutionary Russian radical intelligentsia and, after the Bolshevik coup, official Soviet thought.
Born and raised in Petersburg, Alisa Rosenbaum—better known as Ayn Rand—shared this mentality. Though Jewish, her thought was Russian to the core. Rand’s fiction closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism. In the most perceptive article on Rand I have encountered, Anthony Daniels claimed, without much exaggeration, that “her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature.”
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When I became a scholar of Russian literature, I immediately recognized Rand’s debt to the Russian radical intelligentsia. One can divide prerevolutionary Russian thought into two strongly opposed traditions: that of the radicals and that of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and other great writers. The radical tradition featured ideologues and revolutionaries, including devoted terrorists like Figner and Sergey Nechaev; anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin; populists Pyotr Lavrov, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, and the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party; Marxists like Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin; and a host of tendentious literary critics.
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Rand’s reasoning was, in fact, remarkably sloppy. She regarded Aristotle as the greatest philosopher because he formulated the law of identity “A is A,” from which she claimed to derive a proof of radical individualism and the morality of selfishness. If A is A, then Man is Man and I am I, which (for Ran d) means that I owe nothing to anyone else. If Man is Man, then man must choose to survive, which means that it is irrational to let oneself be “looted” by unproductive people. If one is to survive, she reasoned, one’s ultimate value must be one’s own life. “The fact that a living entity is determines what it ought to do. So much for Hume’s question of how to derive ‘is’ from ‘ought.’” It is hard to say which is worse, Rand’s failure to understand the positions she dismissed or the shoddy logic she deployed in the name of infallible “reason.”
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Rand utterly rejected the idea that some issues are ambiguous or call for compromise. “One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture,” she declared, “is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: ‘There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays.’ . . . Just as, in epistemology, the cult of uncertainty is a revolt against reason—so, in ethics, the cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. Both are a revolt against the absolutism of reality.”
Middle-of-the-road thinking is for Rand “the typical product of philosophical default—of the intellectual bankruptcy that has produced irrationalism in epistemology, a moral vacuum in ethics, and a mixed economy in politics. . . . Extremism has become a synonym of ‘evil.’”
Is it any surprise that Rand strongly appealed to bright teenage boys? As comic book writer John Rogers remarked, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
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I could not help recalling this famous phrase, which Rand must have known, when encountering her defense of essentially the same position. “Why must fiction represent things ‘as they might be and ought to be’?” she asked. Quoting from Atlas Shrugged—Rand had an annoying habit of quoting herself or her fictional heroes as authorities—she answered: “As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.” In other words, she concluded, “Art is the technology of the soul.”
Both Rand and the Soviets believed that, without the aid of supernatural power, humanity will accomplish what had always been regarded as miraculous. There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm, declared Stalin, while Rand attributed the same power to unfettered capitalism. Enlightened by the right philosophy, human will can accomplish anything.
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Children require sacrifice: this obvious fact indicates that people are not, and can never be, fully independent. Rand’s heroes and heroines apparently arrive at adulthood without having gone through childhood, let alone infancy. It is as if she believed that, like Athena springing fully grown from Zeus’s head, people are created by sudden flashes of insight. My point is not just that infants are utterly dependent on another person and that children only gradually learn to take care of themselves. It is also that no one chooses when, where, and to whom to be born. Unlike Howard Roark, people always inherit something they did not choose.
Rand wrote as if poverty always resulted from failure of willpower, as if no one is born into it. She was right to reject the deterministic view that people are wholly the product of heredity and environment; choices that cannot be wholly explained by such factors help make us who we are. But it is no less mistaken to treat people as entirely self-made and utterly responsible for their condition.
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I was one of those "teenage boys"; although I was like 22 or so when I read Rand for the first time and hooked.
Then as time passed, I grew up and I understood how deluded I was. There are some very good self-reliance messages in her book a.k.a “pep” talk - I took those few hundred words and flushed out everything else from my life.
Ayn Rand gives a "certain" view of the world which is completely against reality. Reality is uncertain and to top it off - our biology doesn't even allow us to see much of reality in the world.
The answer is to be humble, keep learning and change your mind as our understanding of reality changes.
Buddha once said, "If you see the Buddha, kill him".
That was a wise warning about organized religion plus idol worship.
We all know monolithic religions and eastern religions are riddled with "God Men" who promote self interest. Buddhism is no different.
In my life, I learnt a ton from Buddha and that reflects in this blog.
Organized religion is a bane, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth:
A reading of Tibet’s history suggests a somewhat different picture. “Religious conflict was commonplace in old Tibet,” writes one western Buddhist practitioner. “History belies the Shangri-La image of Tibetan lamas and their followers living together in mutual tolerance and nonviolent goodwill. Indeed, the situation was quite different. Old Tibet was much more like Europe during the religious wars of the Counterreformation.” [6] In the thirteenth century, Emperor Kublai Khan created the first Grand Lama, who was to preside over all the other lamas as might a pope over his bishops. Several centuries later, the Emperor of China sent an army into Tibet to support the Grand Lama, an ambitious 25-year-old man, who then gave himself the title of Dalai (Ocean) Lama, ruler of all Tibet.
His two previous lama “incarnations” were then retroactively recognized as his predecessors, thereby transforming the 1st Dalai Lama into the 3rd Dalai Lama. This 1st (or 3rd) Dalai Lama seized monasteries that did not belong to his sect, and is believed to have destroyed Buddhist writings that conflicted with his claim to divinity. The Dalai Lama who succeeded him pursued a sybaritic life, enjoying many mistresses, partying with friends, and acting in other ways deemed unfitting for an incarnate deity. For these transgressions he was murdered by his priests. Within 170 years, despite their recognized divine status, five Dalai Lamas were killed by their high priests or other courtiers.
For hundreds of years competing Tibetan Buddhist sects engaged in bitterly violent clashes and summary executions. In 1660, the 5th Dalai Lama was faced with a rebellion in Tsang province, the stronghold of the rival Kagyu sect with its high lama known as the Karmapa. The 5th Dalai Lama called for harsh retribution against the rebels, directing the Mongol army to obliterate the male and female lines, and the offspring too “like eggs smashed against rocks… In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.”
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Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.
In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care. They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land — or the monastery’s land — without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location.
As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.
One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.” Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed.
The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery.
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The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation — including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation — were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs.
Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.” Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet.
Let's ignore "ism" and organized religions. I cannot promise you the world will be a better world but I can promise that we got rid of some of the major badness in the world.
Why should I feel this way about travel? What has it ever done to me? Travel is one of those things one generally doesn’t attack in polite company, the world of letters excepted. Its wholesomeness is assumed. It broadens the mind. It makes us empathetic and, by rewarding our curiosity, encourages it to develop further. It teaches people the just-right amount of relativism —the amount that makes them easygoing in company, perhaps usefully pliable in exigencies, but not nihilistic. Only a fool or a misanthrope would criticize travel.
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Given travel’s salutary reputation, it is no wonder that I am biased against the whole topic. A writer is someone who resents being told that something is good for him, and that this is therefore why he must do it. It’s no wonder, either, if such people repeatedly fling themselves against this broad, smiling enemy, hoping to smite it.
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Similarly, the well-worn complaint that travel banalizes places—that, if too many people start to go somewhere, the place reconfigures itself in order to please the almighty tourist’s gaze—doesn’t take the absolute otherness of human beings seriously enough. For example, in “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace writes that tourism is good for the soul, not because it broadens tourists, but precisely because it constricts them, in a painful yet educational way:
To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
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In fact, you can treat this performance as information in its own right. Before every place was spoiled, assuming that there was such a time, we could go observe what we took to be the unselfconscious manners and ancient customs of the people there. Today, we can observe self-conscious manners and generic customs—each with its own little flutters of imperfection and telling gaps in performance. And these, again, are information. You can learn as much about people from thinking about the way they act themselves out for you as you can from analyzing their less artful, less premeditated moments. So I agree with Wallace that there is no “unspoiledness” to experience, but the curious and attentive mind can do just fine with spoiledness. Wallace certainly did, in several of his classic essays.
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We love, as well, to mock the privileged Westerners who go somewhere far away and realize one or two momentous, banal things about themselves, especially if these same people then have the temerity to make art about their epiphanies. Consider, to name two much-discussed examples, Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love, and Alanis Morrissette in “Thank U,” that song in which she thanks India. It happens that I, too, dislike that book, and that song. But to have an epiphany in Italy or India is no sillier than to have one in the woods or at work or on a walk around one’s neighborhood. Abroad, one is surrounded by billions of strangers who presumably have better things to do than serve as one’s backdrop, but that is also true at home, or even in the woods. (Look at all those trees! Do you, solipsistic walker, even know their species names?) Yet we dare to have interior lives anyway.
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Agnes Callard criticizes tourism as pointless “locomotion.” (She does so, tellingly, only after distinguishing tourism from several more benign forms of faraway-place-going.3)“The single most important fact about tourism is this: We already know what we will be like when we return,” she writes. This is a hell of an assumption. I don’t really know what I will be like next week, at least not in every important detail. To judge by her other writing, Callard is also, and not infrequently, a surprise to herself; her ability to describe these moments in fine, perhaps unintentionally comic detail provides her work with much of the insight and entertainment value it possesses.
In disconnecting us from the ongoing and sometimes nightmarish dailiness of our lives, travel allows us to “do nothing and be nobody.” For Callard, this makes it a preview of death, the nothingness that will put an end to our quotidian boredom forever. “Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death,” she concludes. “For everyone else, there’s travel.” This is funny because, like many of Nietzsche’s witticisms, it is a melodramatic overstatement of something that is, perhaps, five percent true. When we disrupt our routines, we do not do nothing, or become no one; we do different things, we try on other selves. This is why we frequently come back from even rather silly jaunts, pace Callard, a bit different.
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So the antitravel position, broadly conceived, doesn’t seem to work. Yet I feel a sour satisfaction, as I have said, whenever someone decides to take travel down a peg. Partly, this is because the cases for travel are often sillier than the cases against, and I think it’s important to question them. If, for example, travel broadens the mind, why are at least some of the best-traveled people the worst blockheads one has ever met? If travel increases tolerance, why did it not have exactly that effect on so many of history’s conquerors—monomaniacs who could not let stand any place that failed to give back their own image?
- More Here
Animals used in laboratories are often treated as mere objects, enduring painful procedures like burns, poisoning, food deprivation, and skin, eye, and ear lacerations—all in the name of human safety. While many argue that these tests are necessary for ensuring product safety, ethical alternatives exist, and they should be explored. That’s where the Spanish university’s virtual rabbit initiative comes in.
The primary goal of the VICT3R project is to significantly reduce the number of animals used in safety testing for drugs and other chemicals by replacing them with computer-generated virtual models. This represents a crucial milestone in the quest for ethical and sustainable scientific research. If successful, the project could prove that virtual models can yield reliable scientific results without harming living creatures.
Scientific advancements have provided more humane -and incredibly scientific- alternatives to animal testing, such as computer simulations and human tissue models. These methods can offer effective results without harming living creatures like rabbits. The VICT3R project introduces additional key objectives:
- Reducing Animal Use: The European VICT3R project aims to reduce the total number of animals used in experiments by up to 25%. This could lead to fewer animals being subjected to tests for medicine and chemical safety.
- Data Reuse and Sharing: The project promotes reusing and sharing data and applying new data science techniques to further implement the 3Rs—reduce, refine, and replace—in preclinical animal experimentation.
- Generative AI for Synthetic Animals: In cases where historical data on certain species or conditions is unavailable, generative AI could create fully synthetic virtual animals to fill the gaps.
- Expansion to Other Studies: The aspiration of the VICT3R project is to extend this concept of virtual control groups to other toxicological and pharmacological studies, both in academic and industrial settings, further reducing reliance on animal testing.
- More Here
I like to make a distinction between imagination and creativity that you may or may not agree with. Imagination is the ability to see known possibilities as being reachable from a situation. Creativity is the ability to manufacture new possibilities out of a situation. The two form a continuous spectrum of regimes in simple cases, but are disconnected in complex cases.
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Imagination is an aptitude based on analysis, and is a variety of reasoning forwards from a current state marked by freedom from habituated patterns of seeing. Creativity is an aptitude is based on synthesis, and is a variety of reasoning backwards from desired outcomes marked by closing of realizability gaps. To some extent, the two behaviors exist on the same continuous spectrum, and in most situations we alternate between forwards and backwards reasoning modes. But in complex situations, there is also a discontinuity between the two modes, which is the same as the general discontinuity and qualitative difference that separates analysis from synthesis.
Forward and backward are not symmetric. Synthesis, since it works backwards from a desired state, is strictly more expressive, since it can start from desired states that are not realizable or reachable from the current state using known techniques and patterns of behavior. It can also fail in more ways, since it might attempt impossibilities.
A leap — a creative leap — may be required to connect the forward and backward regimes. Sometimes this might just manifest as a textbook technical problem that is easy to solve once you pose it correctly. You could even outsource that to an appropriate sort of technician to actually execute. Craftsmanship and skill are useful for creativity up to the point where you can see the leap that is needed, but once seen, others can often do it. The most creative people in a medium are rarely the master technicians.
I like the definition of genius as “talent hits the target others can’t hit, genius hits the target others can’t see.” Creative genius likes in seeing what others don’t see. But once you’ve actually seen it, you might be able to simply point it out to others to hit. They might even be better at hitting it than you, once you point it out.
At other times creativity might manifest as an “invention gap,” as I’ve taken to calling it, or even a “discovery” gap — uncovering a new principle or phenomenon to harness in nature. A problem that nobody knows how to solve, or a behavior of nature that nobody has noticed, modeled, or figured out how to harness.
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Imagination to some extent is relative to training data. What for you is a leap of imagination may be a straightforward inference for someone who has seen or experienced more cases. A sufficiently trained AI model may produce behaviors indistinguishable from highly imaginative human behaviors.
Creative behaviors require imagination, but also require more something more. Imagination is necessary but not sufficient for creativity.
Creative behaviors, I think, call for the equivalent of mutation or noise-injection into an evolutionary process. There is a non sequitur quality to creative leaps that strikes me as fundamentally non-analytical and serendipitous.
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