Meghan O'Gieblyn, God Human Animal Machine ****

A collection of essays about the metaphors we use to understand our relationship to technology (specifically AI), and how they are largely the same metaphors we use to understand our relationships to God and to the "disenchanted" scientific world.

Many "new" ideas are merely attempts to answer questions that we have inherited from earlier periods of history, questions that have lost their specific context in medieval Christianity as they've made the leap from one century to the next, traveling from theology to philosophy to science and technology.

The unanswerable questions we keep returning to are about subjectivity and understanding. What is consciousness? What counts as an explanation for natural phenomena? 

Despite the technical subject matter, O'Gieblyn writes in the classic style of personal essays, including first-person stories about her own struggles with the issues. Her style makes the abstruse topics feel relevant, although I sometimes lost the thread of her argument.

She makes thought-provoking connections; for example, thinking of consciousness as software running on the hardware of the brain is a modern variant of the mind-body problem, which in turn is a recurrence of the religious idea of a soul. ("The metaphor has not solved our most pressing existential problems; it has merely transferred them to a new substrate.") I was particularly intrigued by the idea that science struggles to understand subjectivity because the enterprise was designed precisely to eliminate subjectivity from our understanding.

 

Daniyal Mueenuddin, This Is Where the Serpent Lives **** 1/2

This Is Where the Serpent Lives is ostensibly a novel by the author of the excellent story collection In Other Rooms. Other Wonders. Like the earlier book, it provides a convincing portrait of characters from various castes attempting to get ahead as the old feudal society of Pakistan gives way under modern and Western pressures. Every detail contributes to a realistic milieu, from the choice of which language to speak to whether you accept your host's offer to sit down.

The book seems like a Russian story that takes place in Pakistan. The subject matter is similar, peasants and landowners, social stagnation and transition, corrupt officials and disappointed dreamers, characters with multiple nicknames and forms of address. Mueenuddin's writing style is extremely Chekhovian. 

While it purports to be a novel, This Is Where the Serpent Lives is actually a collection of linked stories that includes the title novella. The four sections share characters, but they don't enrich each other as they would in a proper novel. For example, the main character in "The Golden Boy" is the orphan Bayazid who eventually becomes the driver for the Atar family. Yazid is also an important character in the title section, but none of his adventures from the first section affect his responses in the last.

Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood ** 1/2

This history of the Peasant's War in Germany (1524-26) is extremely well researched and provides an abundance of detail about the massive public uprising that occurred just as the Reformation was taking hold. I got a clear sense of the peasant's grievances, the complex interplay of authority among the lords and clergymen, the social forces that led to the rebellion, even the attire of the armies. It's an impressive feat of research given that the events happened 500 years ago and the participants were either illiterate or self-interested.

Unfortunately, though, Roper writes like a sociologist rather than a narrative historian. The book is organized into chronological sections for autumn 1524 through summer 1525, but the individual chapters explore the conflict thematically, exploring concepts like freedom, lordship, and brotherhood. 

One cause for this collapse of authority was the empire's confusing patchwork of different rights and claims. What prevailed was not what we today understand by 'rule.' Rather, it was a kind of negotiated governing that depended on cooperation and, ultimately, comparative strength. Rights and jurisdictions could be bought and sold or even swapped. The buyer of a castle might gain judicial rights associated with it; the tithe of a village could be bought as an investment. ... Because sovereignty was frequently fragmented and not unitary, subjects could sometimes pick their fights and play one authority against another.

The result feels curiously static for a bloody and tragic war story, a description of the "rich detail of [the peasants'] daily lives" not a chronicle of battles. I would be hard pressed to describe the chronology of the conflict or its flashpoints.

The last 10 pages reveal the reason for this academic approach: "Some of the most profound political debates in historical writing of the last two hundred years, and especially over Marxism and its legacies, were fought out on the terrain of the German Peasants' War." Marx and Engels both wrote about it, East and West Germany highlighted different aspects of it, and historians of the Reformation blame it on one or another of the major religious figures. Roper is engaging with the meaning of the conflict more than the tale.

Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection ***

Rejection is a collection of linked stories in which characters fail to understand why their attempts to connect with others lead instead to rejection. For example, the first (and best) story "The Feminist" features a young man who has internalized the tenets of modern feminism but discovers that his less enlightened peers are the ones getting laid.

Tulathimutte describes his characters' thinking in ways both subtle and darkly hilarious, especially in the first couple of stories. He's got the style of online conversations down cold. Unfortunately, though, he doesn't provide any actual story in the sense of narrative or character development. The later stories ramp up the level of postmodernist reflexivity to no great effect.

Rejection reminded me of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Both books feature unpleasant people tying themselves into rhetorical knots; they both experiment with writing styles; and they both concern themselves with the failure of self-conscious pluralism to improve our connections with other people. The story "Ahegao" builds to an elaborate, explicit, over-the-top sexual fantasy that wouldn't be out of place in a mid-career Chuck Palahniuk book.

Agnes Callard, Open Socrates ****

Socrates is more renowned for his method than for the content of his philosophy. The Socratic method involves questioning the premises underlying commonly held beliefs in the form of an inquisitive dialogue. Callard argues that the method is the philosophy: Socrates believed that we rarely achieve true knowledge, and that the key to a good life is continuous conversation moving us ever closer to truth.

Open Socrates is an oddly structured book. Collard wants to produce what she calls "an inquisitive text" that simulates Socratic inquiry, which is a difficult, if not impossible, task because Socratic inquiry requires two cooperative interlocutors, one seeking the truth and the other looking to avoid error.

I feel as if I got the flavor of the Socratic dialogues and clarification on common misunderstandings about them. Collard shows how to apply Socrates' techniques to contemporary questions. She successfully creates an inquisitive text if we take that to mean a work that invites the reader into a conversation. I feel like she is on the right track with many of her ideas, but I would need to talk with her to clarify the conclusions she draws from the ideas. For example, the chapter about equality is very insightful about conversational status-seeking but I remain unconvinced about how these insights relate to equality.

The book's subtitle is "The Case for a Philosophical Life," but Collard neglects to argue that a life lived philosophically is better than an incurious one.

Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz ***

Like Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Cahokia Jazz is a murder mystery that takes place in an alternative version of the United States. Cahokia was a real-life Native American city, located across the river from present-day St Louis. In the story, Native Americans were not decimated by smallpox and retain power in Cahokia in 1922.

The book starts strong with an atmospheric crime scene and all the noir elements in place: night, fog, a violent murder, detectives in fedoras, untrustworthy witnesses, hints of powerful subterranean social forces at work. It's not long before the murder becomes secondary to the public reaction and inflamed racial tensions. Which is fine, except that the portrait of city politics is rather too superficial. For example, overt conflict breaks out between the Klan and the native population, with the city's third ethnic group receiving barely a mention. I also felt that the characters were underdeveloped. 

The murder plot was fine. But I didn't get a sense of Cahokia as a living, breathing city, nor an idea of how the United States would be different if we had a substantial native population during westward expansion.

Ruth Garrett Millikan, Varieties of Meaning ** 1/2

Varieties of Meaning is a work of academic philosophy. The title and the back-cover abstract led me to believe it would explore the common thread that connects all the different things we say have meaning: "people mean to do various things, tools and other artifacts are meant for various things; people mean various things by using words and sentences; natural signs mean things ... What does meaning in the sense of purpose have to do with meaning in the sense of representing or signifying?" I've been pondering the meaning of "meaning" since my undergraduate days, and hoped for new insights.

But Millikan's topic is different. She uses evolutionary psychology to explore the nature of our internal representations (aka concepts), how they differ from those of non-human animals, and how we might have developed them. She concludes that concepts are more directly goal-oriented than is generally assumed, and that they are not constructed from intermediate sense impressions.

This topic is interesting even if it's not what I was looking for. However, Millikan falls into the common academic trap of focusing too much on esoteric terminological disputes at the expense of clear exposition, not to mention the evolutionary psychology vice of "just so stories."

There were a few asides that intrigued me. One was a (probably false) anecdote about how venomous snakes hunt and eat mice without the benefit of a concept of "mouse":

The story is that certain venomous snakes perceive mice for purposes of striking by sight, trace the path of the dying mouse by small, and find its head so as to swallow that part first by feel, and that none of those jobs can be accomplished using any other sensory modality. A snake that was wired up this way would merely perceive first a "strike me," then a "chase me," and finally a "swallow me," having no grasp at all that what it struck, followed, and swallowed was the same thing.

Another was the distinction, attributed to Gilbert Ryle, between "task verbs" that describe an attempt to do something (hunt, look, listen) and "achievement verbs" that indicate success (find, see, hear).