Daniel Dennett with the Institute of Art and Ideas

Modern History, Philosophy, Science, Secular Humanism

From the philosophy section of Institute of Art and Ideas, we have a new 30-minute interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett. It’s basically about “the arc of his life”, and has some interesting revelations. I’ll just touch on a few key ideas, but you should listen to it yourself:

• Dan’s father was a spy who worked for the OSS, but Dan didn’t learn that until his dad died.

• Dan says that most of his good ideas came from his Ph.D. thesis and postdoc, and since then he’s been largely “turning the crank” on (i.e., working out the consequences of) his early ideas.

• Those good ideas involved “the intentional stance”, how learning takes place, and views about consciousness and the evolution of the brain. He doesn’t talk much about consciousness, though, and doesn’t mention free will once during the interview, much to my relief.

• In new work, Dan says he and a colleague are extending the intentional-stance view down to the level of the cell, visualizing development as the consequences of “what the cell wants.” This isn’t like panpsychism, for Dan isn’t dumb enough to think that cells really have desires, but he’s looking at it as Dawkins looked at the metaphor of the “selfish gene”, gaining insight by imagining how genes would behave if they were selfish even though he realizes (and has repeatedly emphasized in the light of misinterpreters) that genes don’t have desires.

• Dan doesn’t admit that he ever had a wrong idea. But he does say he’s worked to prevent misuses of his ideas.

• Dan decries the truth-denial aspect of postmodernism as “intellectual vandalism,” but also ponders the question of whether some ideas or truths are too dangerous to impart to the world. I’ll leave you listen to that bit yourselves.

• There’s a lot about religion at the end, with Dan arguing that it’s time for the world to “grow up and leave religion behind”. And he thinks many faiths are in fact doing this, stripping out the false claims and injurious morality and leaving the ceremonial bits—bits that he has no quarrel with.

https://iai.tv/video/arc-of-life-daniel-dennett5

Ken Burns NYT Interview

Film & TV, History, Modern History

The NYT has an interesting interview with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, Would he make his classic series, “The Civil War” (still one of my favorite t.v. documentary of all time) differently in light of the present Zeitgeist? Was Shelby Foote a Confederate sympathizer? And why was Burns so changed by the early death of his mother?

#Documentaries #KenBurns

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/15/magazine/ken-burns-interview.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

Anne Frank’s Last Diary Entry

History, The Holocaust

On August 1st 1944, Anne Frank penned her last entry into her diary.

“… Believe me, I’d like to listen, but it doesn’t work, because if I’m quiet and serious, everyone thinks I’m putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke, and then I’m not even talking about my own family, who assume I must be ill, stuff me with aspirins and sedatives, feel my neck and forehead to see if I have a temperature, ask about my bowel movements and berate me for being in a bad mood, until I just can’t keep it up any more, because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if … if only there were no other people in the world.”

Three days later, Anne was arrested with her family in the “secret annex” of a house in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where they had hidden for two years. She later died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp when she was 15.

(Anne Frank at the Sixth Montessori School, Amsterdam, 1941)

Kristallnacht 101

Modern History, The Holocaust

Kristallnacht 101

On November 9 to November 10, 1938, in an incident known as “Kristallnacht”, Nazis in Germany torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed close to 100 Jews. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, also called the “Night of Broken Glass,” some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. German Jews had been subjected to repressive policies since 1933, when Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) became chancellor of Germany. However, prior to Kristallnacht, these Nazi policies had been primarily nonviolent. After Kristallnacht, conditions for German Jews grew increasingly worse. During World War II (1939-45), Hitler and the Nazis implemented their so-called “Final Solution” to the what they referred to as the “Jewish problem,” and carried out the systematic murder of some 6 million European Jews in what came to be known as the Holocaust.

Children of Lidice

Modern History, The Holocaust

Takes away your breath:

On July 2, 1942, most of the children of lidice, a small village in what was then czechoslovakia, were handed over to the office of the gestapo of łódź. These 82 children were then transported to the extermination camp of chelmno, 70 kilometers from there. Once they arrived on site, they were gassed to death. This remarkable sculpture by Marie Uchytilová commemorates this massacre.

#ChildrenOfLidice #MarieUchytilova #HolocaustRemembrance