Sunday, March 17, 2024

To be sure, Edna, the less one knows, the more one thinks one knows

Courtesy of DragonsDogma2

Meanwhile

In a Class of Her Own

“Humans shouldn’t worry about Artificial Intelligence, but rather cooperate with it”.


Four-time Women’s World Chess Champion and PKU Professor 侯逸凡 (Hóu Yìfán) is one of the most influential voices of Peking University’s public elective course “冠军讲堂” (“Champion Classroom”). Photo: 人民日报 (People’s Daily).

In your place, Edna, I would crown myself with laurels before they were withered

卡珊德拉 (Cassandra)

Friday, March 15, 2024

You see, Edna, one word is enough to turn black hair into blonde hair

The Fischer King

Fischerandom chess takes centre stage as five-time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen and German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner announced in a joint statement on Friday that the first of five legs of a worldwide Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour will be actually held in India in November 2024 for a money prize of $500,000. The format is the same of that of Freestyle Chess G.O.A.T. Challenge: rapid prelims followed by a knockout with classical time control. “In 2025 the next stop will be Germany (Weissenhaus) from February 7–14. Further Grand Slams are currently planned for summer, fall and winter 2025 in New York, Cartagena/Colombia, and Cape Town/South Africa, as well as for Australia in 2026”, Buettner said, adding he was inspired by mainstream sports like Formula One and tennis.

The While Ever After

While

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 14, 2024

To free our thinking from the enticement which prevent it from taking flight, it is best first of all to accustom it to no longer think in nouns (which, as the name itself unequivocally betrays, imprison it in that “substance”, with which a thousand-year-old tradition believed it could grasp being), but rather (as William James once suggested) in prepositions and maybe in adverbs. That thinking and the mind itself have, so to say, a non-substantive character, but an adverbial one, is what the singular fact reminds us that in our language to form an adverb it is enough to add the suffix “ly” to an adjective: lovingly, cruelly, wonderfully. The noun — the substantive one — is quantitative and imposing, the adverb qualitative and light; and, if you find yourself in difficulty, it certainly will not be a “what” that pulls you out of your embarrassment, but a “how”, an adverb and not a noun. “What to do?” paralyses you and nails you down; it is only “how to do?” that opens up to you a way out.
Thus to think of time, which has always put a strain on philosophers’ mind, nothing is more useful than to rely — as poets do — upon adverbs: “always”, “never”, “already”, “now”, “still” — and, perhaps — the most mysterious of all — “while”. “While” (from Latin dum interim) does not designate a time, but a “meantime”, that is, a curious simultaneity between two actions or two times. Its equivalent in verbal modes is the gerund, which is neither strictly a verb nor a noun, but supposes an accompanying noun or verb: “So still go onward, and in going listen”, says Virgil to Dante, and everyone remembers Romagna by Pascoli, “the towm where, as we go on, we follow / the blue vision of San Marino”. Let one reflect on this special time, which we can only think of through an adverb and a gerund: it is not a measurable interval between two times, indeed it is not even a time in itself, but almost an immaterial place where we somehow dwell, in a sort of simple and interlocutory perpetuity. True thinking is not that which deduces and infers according to a before and after: “I think, and therefore I am”, but, more soberly: “while I’m thinking, I am”. And the time we live in is not the abstract and frantic rush away of ungraspable instants: it is this simple, still “while”, where, without realising it, we always already are — our counted eternity, which no worn out clock will ever be able to measure.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Alfred Freddy Krupa, While Fixing Hair, 2015. Courtesy of WikiArt.

Basically, Edna, no one knows what is worthwhile while one is in the meanwhile

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Castle to Fortress

A drone view shows Mont Saint-Michel, in the western region of Normandy, France, surrounded by sea. Photo: Stéphane Mahé/Reuters.

Well, Edna, if happiness is a whole tiramisu cake, then you better not eat it all in one bite

Exit Laughing

Ethics, politics and comedy

Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 11, 2024

We need to reflect on the singular circumstance that the two maxims which tried to define with greater acuteness the ethical and political status of humanity in modernity come from comedy. Homo homini lupus — cornerstone of Western politics — is in Plautus (Asinaria, v.495, where he jokingly warns against the one who does not know who the other man is), and homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, perhaps the happiest formulation of the foundation of all ethics, we read in Terence (Heautontim., v.77). No less surprising is that the definition of the principle of law “to give to each his own” (suum cuique tribuere) was perceived by the ancients as the most appropriate definition of what is in question in the comedy: a gloss on Terence enunciates it unreservedly: comic is par excellence to assignare unicuique personae quod proprium est. If one assigns to each man the character that defines him, he becomes ridiculous. Or, more generally, any attempt to define what is human necessarily results in a comedy. This is what the caricature shows, in which the gesture to catch at all costs the humanity of each individual turns, according to all evidence, into a joke, it really makes one laugh.
Plato must have had something like this in mind, when he modeled the characters of his dialogues on the mimes of Sophron and Epicharmus — decidedly comic. “Know thyself” is the antithesis principle to any tragic arrogance and can only give rise to a game and a joke, even if these can be and are perfectly serious. The human, indeed, is not a substance whose boundaries can be traced once and for all — it is, rather, an always ongoing process, in which man does not cease to be inhuman and animal and, altogether, to become human and talking. For this reason, while tragedy brings to expression what is not human and, at the point in which the hero abruptly and bitterly gets awareness of his inhumanity, results in silence, the person, i.e. the comic mask, entrusts the smile with the only possible enunciation of what is no longer and yet is still human. And against the West’s incessant, obnoxious attempt to assign the definition of ethics and politics to tragedy, it must be remembered every time that man’s dwelling on earth is a comedy — perhaps not divine, but which anyway betrays into the laugh its secret, quiet solidarity with the idea of happiness.

(English translation by I, Robot)

Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko, Mayakovsky smiles, laughs, mocks, 1923. Courtesy of WikiArt.