News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I'm in the midst of the end-of-semester grading deluge. It's not my favorite time of year, but despite the challenges, it's always encouraging to see what students have learned over the course of the semester and to see the fruits of our conversations and work.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about reading, chatbots, and home.
- David Bannon considers the sorrows that often surface on Mother's Day: "Our mothers and our children will always be part of our lives, in life and death. Surprisingly, grief does not dominate our existence, it informs it."
- Eric Scheske unpacks Iain McGilchrist's cultural analysis and looks for ways to strengthen our right hemispheres: "In our daily lives, we need activities that aren’t driven by our left hemispheres. We need leisure (as understood by Josef Pieper). We need to waste time. We need to do nothing . . . a thing that rankles the left hemisphere’s productive disposition."
- Elizabeth Stice offers smart advice for marketing the liberal arts: "Let’s point to the wiser and the well off and ask people if they want what those people have–often they do. Many times, those people have a love for the liberal arts."
- Michael Strand describes the importance of human-centered architecture: "Arched doorways, private courtyards, personal craftsmanship, a sense of place, and almost everything else we love about buildings has been taken away by the modernist ethos intent on depriving the public of a choice, as architects are left unchecked to focus more on how their buildings look in magazines than on how the people using them feel."
- Matthew Boedy peruses his father's CV and reflects on how we weigh a life's significance: "Reading for the shape of a life can be medicinal, especially when we allow that life to diagnose and heal ourselves. And maybe then that understanding can encourage doctors of all kinds–but especially scholars of the humanities–to think differently about their life."
- John Murdock interviews Nancy French on the latest episode of the Brass Spittoon podcast: "Longtime ghostwriter Nancy French tells her own tale in Ghosted: An American Life. French was raised in rural Tennessee and would later provide the words behind famous talking heads but found her own enchanting voice amid political and personal tumult."
I recently read Thomas Nagel's slim and incisive Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. As advances in AI fuel new conversations about whether consciousness can be reduced to the brain (and hence replicated in silicon), Nagel's philosophical argument for the irreducible mysteries of human consciousness, and of the material world as a whole, becomes newly essential:
The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day. That it has produced you, and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it. If contemporary research in molecular biology leaves open the possibility of legitimate doubts about a fully mechanistic account of the origin and evolution of life, dependent only on the laws of chemistry and physics, this can combine with the failure of psychophysical reductionism to suggest that principles of a different kind are also at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro