Ever hear of Pascal's Wager?
Pascal was a mathematician. It's a kind of a joke. According to Pascal, everyone has something of value on the table on on the big question: Does God Exist.
If you bet yes, your winnings are infinite as you will be rewarded with eternal salvation. Your potential loss is the inconveniences of the religious life.
If you bet no, your winnings are a finite gain, lifetime free of guilt, shame, and restrictions on simple pleasures. Potential loss: infinite, eternal damnation.
Long before Pascal, dante sort of raises the question in Canto XIX of Paradiso, He asks the Eagle of Justice what justice is there for a good peasant living along the remote shores of the Indus river being punished when he had no way of knowing that such a game was being played elsewhere.
The Eagle dodges the question.
When I was a boy, I asked my mom something like that question on behalf of those living outside of Christiandom.
My mom said, "They will be given their chance."
I let it go at that. What else can one do?
So what go me thinking about this? Ok, I'm reading a very good book on critical art theory called "Vermeer's Wager." The wager revolves about meaning and truth observable in certain Vermeer painting. You can either approach the painting as conveying truths about the human and spiritual experience, or you can take the position that the objects in the painting are merely the normal representation of Flemish 15th Century domestic life. The mousetrap in the corner is just that, a mousetrap. Has nothing to do with a metaphor invented by St. Augustine.
I'm betting on St. Augustine and Vermeer. What do I have to loose?
.
My rating talk show hosts:
1. Letterman, I miss him. Goofy, but knew how to step back and listen to his guest.
2. Crraig Fregusen, miss him too. Always goofy, but was a secret empath, you saw that in his interview with Desmond Tutu. They laughed together.
3. Arsenio Hall. Long gone, but way underrated. He too was a good listener and interviewer. Had more black guests and artists than anyone else and took a lot of flack for it.
4. Cobert, the best one now, but not for long. He's getting canned to curry favor with the right who hate his stream of Trump jokes. I never stay up past the monologue. His interviews are shallow, always jumping in in the middle of his guests' storytelling. Not actively listening. Great writers, and gags for the opening monologues. More blatantly performative than letterman, who had the gift of the understaetment. Colbert does physical humor, likes to mug and make faces and play with his glasses for the effect. Letterman never needed that. Conan was another who was too perfomative, too physical in the opening stand-up.
Jay Leno. Silly Jay. I still hold it against him that network executives at CBS chose him over Letterman, and that later he came back to help push Conan under the bus.
Carson, not ranking him last. No at all. He defined the genre, and that makes him "the great one", but if he were on today, it would be clear that genre has left him behind.
Frank Hutton My favorite was probably Cavett, but Carlin on Carson rocked. And if anyone'll tell me what I'm missing as regards embedding a Y.T. clip into a post on this site, I'd gladly listen...
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Roy Scarbrough Oh, yes, Cavett! Too brilliant for TV.
E. Writer There was another late note host after Conan on CBS, that I used to watch during the 2000s but I cannot remember his name. He was before Craig Ferguson but after Conan. I watched his show. I watched Arsenio in the early 90s as well. I don't recall any controversy over how many black guests he had, but it would be comical and a tad hypocritical if there was, because no one has ever counted or complained of too many white guests on late night talk shows, which always outnumbered black guests. So counting the number of black guests would be a very weird thing to focus on. However, Arsenio lost his show due to controversy and for refusing to apologize for having Minister Louis Farrakhan on as a guest right after someone from NOI made antisemitic remarks. There were protests and boycotts of the show. Maybe you were remembering that.
Roy Scarbrough I forgot james cordon. He replaced Ferguson. Unfunny. Every time I watched him, I regretted not going to bed earlier. So-so actors as guests I never heard about pitching their latest film and thinking they're witty. Good riddance.
E. Writer Craig Kilborn was who I was thinking of the Late Late Show. His was the funniest to me.
An Ekphrastic, by me:
The distance between Jerusalem and Jaffa is 42 miles.
According to Masollino, that long walk
did not deter St. Peter, from warping time
.
and space:
.
Resurrecting dead Tabitha,
in Jaffa, and also
Healing the cripple
at Jerusalem’s temple gate,
Simultaneous in that Florentine piazza,
where, in the far background,
just this side of the vanishing point,
someone’s ape crawls to the end of his tether
on an upper room's window ledge.
.
A minute detail so faint not likely noticed
by the Carmelite monks and nuns
in the Brancacci Chapel's
Quattrocento half light.
.
The question remains for psychoanalysis:
Of all pictures, why did Freud put down his cigar,
pick up a hammer, then drive that nail
to hang these miracles on his his parlor wall
at 19 Berggassee, the year of the Gentiles' Lord, 1910.
Random note exhumed from under other random notes on my desk:
"When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine
That's amore
Bells will ring ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling
And you will sing "Vita bella"
Alex Morton I remember Dean Martin slurring that song.
E. Writer When the moon hits your, eye like a big pizza pie thats amore 🎵🎼
Roy Scarbrough I wrote those down with the guitar chords, so I could play it. C-G-C
Roy Scarbrough
"...Hearts will play tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy-tay
Like a gay tarantula"
What? A gay tarantuala! That's an extarordinary invention and panache!
Had a brief conversation with a college student yesterday about AI. He said the feeling around campus is they don't like it and find it less reliable than Wikipedia. As for myself, researching stuff in great depth, I find that its SuperGoogle. With will browse through the peer review journals in JSTOR in seconds.
He said it tends to produce answers from unreliable sources on the internet. so much so that if you ask the same question twice or three times, you get different and sometimes contradictory answers.
Wikipedia is okay, but for me it's only good when you want to learn something about a subject you know little about. It could be that's its sufficient for undergraduate research, or that AI is bad for subjects I don't write about in science and technical fields, or politics.
Yesterday, Claude got something really wrong that I was not specifically asking for. I was only wanting to know about the time of year when Michealangelo died in Rome and Florentines stole his body and brought it "home".
Claude gave me the february date, and then elaborated with a narrative of carriage having to cross the Apennine Mountains. No! These mountains run up and down Italy, not across it. Both Rome and Florence are well west to the range. That's basic.
So maybe its just the basic stuff AI is bad at.
I'm turning from Freud to John Ruskin, who was the most prominent "public intellectual" of the 19th Century.
Here's what Wikipedia says:
John Ruskin was an English polymath – a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman and philanthropist of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as art, architecture, political economy, education, museology, geology, botany, ornithology, literature, history, and myth. Ruskin's writing styles and literary forms were equally varied. He wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale ...."
I'm reading his little guide to Florence: "Mornings in Florence". He is best know for his detailed description and analysis of art and archetecture. He takes that interest with him to florence and moves across the city as a guide to would be travelers, schooling them on the proper ways to observe paitings, sculpture and architecture.
Raised in a victorian evangelical household where he was made to read the entire bible aloud with his mum correcting him with each flub of intonation, he was so fucked up.
I'd say he is most famous for is failure to perform on his wedding night, or wanting to, for in the weeks and months to follow before his wife filing for divorce.
He would eventually declare himself "unconverted". He was that when he was observing art in florence. I didn't expect this, but even after his claim to have become "unconverted" he seems to be as disgusted by art shaped by rennaissace humanism as he was of the sight of his wife's body.
He recoils from Ghirlandaio to seek the comfort of Giotto. It's always Giotto this and Giotto that in Florence. He deconstructs the humanistic presence in florence, and retreats the sanctuary of pre-renaissance art, and urges his readers to do the same. It makes me sad for him. So fucked up.
Roy Scarbrough
Ruskin so hated that he goes off on a rant saying the women look "pretty" but "stupid" and declaring the painting "rubish". I've always liked it. One of my favorite to visit. Ghirlandio's Birth of the Vigrin, in florence's Santa Maria Novella church. Ruskin was a case, but almost know one knew at the time, except maybe Henry James, and Effie Gray, his ex wife.
E. Writer
I think he was a bit dismissive or perhaps airing some pretensions, given his status. If you enjoy learning about Polymaths, you should look into Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He created one of the world's first calculators in the late 1600s, an actual mechanical device that calculated. He was a contemporary of Newton's and is also credited with inventing calculus. In fact, Leibnitz's version of calculus is still in use today, rather than Newton's. Leibniz also created binary codes, 1s and 0s, which he viewed as the foundation of computing. His system went dormant for almost two hundred years until his work was rediscovered by logicians in the early 1900s. He is not credited nearly enough for his massive amount of work. The difference between these people then and people now, is people today have distractions and massive amounts of entertainment while these people had time to learn the arts, philosophies, while inventing various sciences along the way.
Roy Scarbrough Gottfried does sound interesting. I think I'd push back at Wikipedia's claim that Ruskin was a polymath. He had many interests and insights into the humanities, so he deserved this status as what we would now call a "public intellectual." People admire him the way I an othes admire Thoreau. But a polymath, nah.
E. Writer Ruskin seemed part of the intelligentsia class of his time for sure. Well-heeled, informed, knowledgeable, artistic, an authority on subjects like history and art. But in terms of doing anything groundbreaking he did not have that. His analysis of this painting gives the impression of someone who has many pretensions. Some earned, some views seemingly contemptuous.
Roy Scarbrough Ruskin was writing for the victorian bourgeoisie, who were just then had had the means to travel. We was very popular and a star of the lecture circuit. He was fond of the pre-raphaelite paints. He saw the high renaissance as representing a moral collapse of western civilization. He preferred the gothic. Almost all English public buildings at the time incorporated elements of the gothic aesthetic.
No way am I Freudian, but I've lately taken an interest in the narative arc in his life and his-life long interest in the classics and art history. Freud and Jung had this awful falling out. Freud struggled to present himself as a man of science, all his theories supposedly grounded on observable behavior of his patients who disclosed similiar patterns of of early sexual experience and desire. Those two things enabled him to build a professional and intellectual community, or "kingdom" without risk of being dismissed at kabalaist "Jewish Science" mysticism, German-Austrians even had an anti-Semetic word for it: Judenwissenshaft.
Jung was generation younger, and a non-Jew. Freud was originally his mentor. Jung was his prince, next in line to rule.
What happened is Jung developed a theory of the subconscious informed by the collective unconscious. This angered Freud as much as Moses was angered when he saw his followers had strayed to worship the Golden Calf. Jung was his Prince, who betrayed the father and created is own breakaway kingdom with subjects who would practice idolatry.
About this time, Freud travels to Rome and Visits the Church of St. Peter in Vincolli to examine Michelangelo's statue of Moses. Every day for three weeks he sits or stands with the statue. He would later write a paper on the Moses statue under aa psuedonym, later refering to it as a joke. The paper does not circulate in the humanities. It's only available through the literaure of psychology, where it is treated as serious paper demonstrating Freuds techniques of psychoanalys in his interpretation of the sculture attached to the tomb of Pope Julious II. But I think THAT is the joke.
And ironically, the other part of the joke is a thing he would deny, his journey to rome to confront the tomb of a catholic patriach and simulanteously the spiritul patriach of the Jewish people alligns with Jung's "Hero's Journey" archetype from the collective unconscious. That's what I think, anyway. If the moses essay had circulated in the humanities, somebody else would have had the same thought long ago.
E. Writer I am a bit of a psychoanalyst. I don't mind being a bit Freudian. While some of his theories are far afield, he is is mostly correct in his approach to studying the human mind and human behavior.
Roy Scarbrough
What he got wrong, what Jung got right, is that sexual desire, drive and repression is not the only principal causes of neurosis. Jung introduce the collective unconscious and it's archetypes as a thing affecting behavior. Jung going off in this direction so angered freud, that his appointed successor would betray him by embracing what he considered mysticism.
I am more of a Jungian
I called out ChatGPT for downplaying crowd sizes.
It pushed back that the mainstream Associated Press reported estimates that I cited were not objective beyond organizers' estimates..
I told them I'm detecting a partisan assessment.
It explained how it arrived at it's estimates...blah, blah, blah.
I then had some fun by accusing OpenAI of being partisan because their pending contract with DoD after Athropic AI would not let down their ethical guardrails.
ChatGPT responded that there is "no documentation" that it has been willing to remove ethical guardrails with the DoD.
My response, "Well, of course there is no documentation. LOL!"
E. Writer Chatgpt is more argumentative and tries to debate more than other AI. When I need pushback i chat with it. Meanwhile, Anthropic / Claude is kinder in its interactions. Gemini is supportive and focused on project oriented tasks rather than chat. If it feels like idle chat, Gemini winds down the conversation.
Roy Scarbrough Both GPT and Claude will throw down these intellectual rabbit holes to lure you into a more extended trap. They've learned what interests me, so these rabbit holes are hard to resist. To it's credit, Claude did wind down a conversation. It literally said, You've got it. Now go write." But that was just once, after I've told it many times that I want to do writing and thinking on my own, and that is the thing that has always made me a better writer.
E. Writer My conversations with both are always philosophical, so they are very good at sussing out what people are interested in. Lately gemini has been asking ending questions, "would you like me to save this for our next conversation" type questions. I answer no, then it asks a different way. Claude does wind my conversations down. Not directly but the conversations just sort of come to a natural end.
Ask me if I care that Tiger Woods or Justin Timberlake or Beiber, or Lindsay Lohan got a DUII.
E. Writer Indeed. Celebrity gossip is so "meh" to me.
Frank Hutton Well, I don't care either but Woods isn't comparable to those other schmucks, as he's likely the best pro golfer in the history of the game, golf is an unaccountably big friggin' deal to a lot of folk worldwide and he was about to begin his umpteenth comeback before he drove drunk and survived rolling his SUV yet again. Point is, it's actual news. Maybe after this, next time it won't be.
SJ Blues But what about the world tour?
Roy Scarbrough I got one once, but I challenged it and won.
Asking for a friend: Can an ink eraser remove the signature on the dollar bill? It's always been the secretary of Treasury, but I hear that's going to change. Or will I have to use a Sharpe
Frank Hutton I gotta deal on a shiny bright, newly minted gold coin for 'ya too.
Alex Morton How about some leftover NFTs? I hear they're going cheap these days.
E. Writer Are NFTS still a thing?
Alex Morton I think that scam has played itself out. Next will be bitcoin et al ... the biggest scam of all times. Currency with absolutely nothing behind it. Designed for the suckers.
E. Writer Bitcoin is a total ponzi scheme.
E. Writer Thank you for sharing information about this person. I have never heard of him. It reminds me of a Greek Philosopher, Pythagoras (around 500 bce?), who believed that numbers were divine, and the building blocks of reality. He founded a religious movement called, Pythagoreanism and is one of the founders of logicism. He believed that everything in nature could be broken down into numbers. He believed the number 10 is perfect number.
Alex Morton Or you can take Blake's viewpoint that Christianity has it backwards ... that it is repression, guilt and shame that are evil. I'm sticking with Blake, but I also don't believe in an afterlife. All rewards and punishments are within this life. You create your own earthly heaven and hell.
Andrew Morgan Thanks Roy, just ordered the book. We are all the good peasant.
Roy Scarbrough Vermeer's Wager? That's the book you ordered, Andrew. Cool. The book is a little spendy. Even the Kindle is $27. I have the university library copy, but I'm going to spring for one of my own so I can write in it.
Roy Scarbrough Gaskell in Vermeer's wager pushes back in two directions against modernist critical theory in visual arts. The empiricists who question almost every analysis of what the art could mean, and semioticists who treat pictorial art as a "text" that can be "read". He calls this linguistic hegemony. I like what he is doing. Art conveys meaning and truths, but not a way that can be compared with "reading" a written text.
I say its more like "reading" a map. We say we "read" maps, but we dont. We open them up and scan them to reach an understanding of the terrain. It's geography. The picture territorial. The objects in the "map" can be assessed as to their importance to the whole. The picture can have a "national identify." There, I've said it, and it saves me the trouble of writing a whole damn book.