Week 10 of the humanities crash course had me reading (and listening to) classic Greek plays. I also listened to the blues and watched a movie starring a venerable recently departed actor. How do they connect? Perhaps they don’t. Let’s find out. Readings The plan for this week included six classic Greek tragedies and one comedy: Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Euripides’s The Bacchae, and Aristophanes’s Lysistrata. The tragedies by Sophocles form a trilogy. Oedipus Rex is by far the most famous: the titular character discovers he’s not just responsible for his father’s death, but inadvertently married his widowed mother in its wake. Much sadness ensues. The other two plays continue the story. Oedipus at Colonus has him and his daughters seeking protection in a foreign land as his sons duke it out over his throne. In Antigone, Oedipus’s daughter faces the consequences of burying her brother after his demise in that struggle. In both plays, sadness ensues. Agamemnon dramatizes a story we’ve already encountered in the Odyssey: the titular king returns home only to be betrayed and murdered by his wife and her lover. The motive? The usual: revenge, lust, power. Sadness ensues. The Bacchae centers on the cult of the demigod Dionysus. He comes to Thebes to avenge a slanderous rumor and spread his own cult. Not recognizing him, King Pentheus arrests him and persecutes his followers, a group of women that includes Pentheus’s mother, Agave. In ecstatic frenzy, Agave and the women tear him apart. Again, not light fare. Lysistrata, a comedy, was a respite. Looking to end to the Peloponnesian War, a group of women led by the titular character convince Greek women to go on a sex strike until the men stop the fighting. For such an old play, it’s surprisingly funny. (More on this below.) These plays are very famous, but I’d never read them. This time, I heard dramatizations of Sophocles’s plays and an audiobook of The Bacchae, and read ebooks of the remaining two. The dramatizations were the most powerful and understandable, but reading Lysistrata helped me appreciate the puns. Audiovisual Music: Gioia recommended classic blues tunes. I listened to Apple Music collections for Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson. I also revisited an album of blues music compiled for Martin Scorcese’s film series, The Blues. My favorite track here is Lead Belly’s C.C. Rider, a song that’s lived rent free in my brain the last several days: Art: Gioia recommended looking at Greek pottery. I studied some of this in college and didn’t spend much time looking again. Cinema: rather than something related to the readings, I sought out a movie starring Gene Hackman, who died a couple of weeks ago. I opted for Francis Ford Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION, which is about the ethics of privacy-invading technologies. Even though the movie is fifty-one years old, that description should make it clear that it’s highly relevant today. Reflections I was surprised by the freshness of the plays. Yes, most namechecks are meaningless without notes. (That’s an advantage books have over audiobooks.) But the stories deal with timeless themes: truth-seeking, repression, free will vs. predestination, the influence of religious belief on our actions, relations between the sexes, etc. Unsurprisingly, some of these themes are also central to THE CONVERSATION. I sensed parallels between Oedipus and the film’s protagonist, Harry Caul. ChatGPT provided useful insights. (Spoilers here for both the play and movie – but c’mon, these are old works!) Both characters investigate the truth only to find painful revelations about themselves. Both believe that gaining knowledge will help them control events – but their efforts only lead to self-destruction. Both misunderstand key pieces of evidence. Both end up “isolated, ruined by their own knowledge, and stripped of their former identity.” (I liked how ChatGPT phrased this!) Both stories explore the limits of perception: it’s possible to see (and record) and remain ignorant of the truth. Heavy stuff – as is wont in drama. Bur for me, the bigger surprise in exploring these works was Lysistrata. Humor is highly contextual: even contemporary stuff doesn’t play well across cultures. But this ancient Greek play is filled with randy situations and double entendres that are still funny. Much rides on the translation. The edition I read was translated by Jack Lindsay, and I marveled at his skills. It must’ve been challenging to get the rhymes and puns in and still make the story work. A note in the text mentioned that the Spartans in the story were translated to sound like Scots to make them relatable to the intended English audience. (!) Obviously, none of these ancient texts I’ve been reading were written in English. That will change in the latter stages of the course. I’m wondering if I should read texts originally written in Spanish and Italian in those languages, since I can. (But what would that do to my notes and running interactions with the LLMs? It’s an opportunity to explore…) Notes on Note-taking Part of why I’m undertaking this course is to experiment with note-taking and LLMs. This week, I tried a few new things. First, before reading each play, I read through its synopsis in Wikipedia. This helped me understand the narrative thread and themes and generally get oriented in unfamiliar terrain. Second, I tried a new cadence for capturing notes. These are short plays; I read one per day. (Except The Bacchae, which I read over two days.) During my early morning journaling sessions, I wrote down a synopsis of the play I’d read the previous day. Then, I asked GPT-4o for comments on the synopsis. The LLM invariably pointed out important things I’d missed. The point wasn’t making more complete notes, but helping me understand and remember better by writing down my fresh memories and reviewing them through a “third party.” I was forced to be clear and complete, since I knew I’d be asking for feedback. Third, I added new sections to my notes for each work. After the synopsis, I asked GPT-4o for an outline explaining why the work is considered important. I read these outlines and reflected on them. Then, I asked for criticisms, both modern and contemporary, that could be leveled against these works. Frankly, this is risky. One of my guidelines has been to stick to prompts where I can verify the LLM’s output. If I ask for a summary of a work I’ve just read, I’ll have a better shot at knowing whether the LLM is hallucinating. But in this case, I’m asking for stuff that I won’t be able to validate. Still, I’m not using these prompts to generate authoritative texts. Instead, the answers help me consider the work from different perspectives. The LLM helps me step outside my experience – and that’s one of the reasons for studying the humanities. Up Next Gioia scheduled Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus for week 11. I’ve read Meditations twice and loved it, and will revisit it now more systemically. But since I’m already familiar with this work, I’ll also spend more time with the Bible – the Book of Job, in particular. In addition to Job itself, I plan to read Mark Larrimore’s The Book of Job: A Biography, which explores its background. It’ll be the first time in the course that I read a work about a work. (As you may surmise, I’m keen on Job.) This will also be the first physical book I read in the course. Otherwise, I’m sticking with Gioia’s recommendations. Check out his post for the full syllabus. Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!

For week 9 of the humanities crash course, I revisited the most important text in Western culture: the Bible. Of course, I didn’t read the whole book – only a small subset. Still, it was a lot. As I’ve done in previous weeks, I followed Gioia’s suggestions for the texts. Readings Gioia’s plan aims for around 250 pages per week. This week’s readings exceeded that. I tackled seven books: Genesis, Ecclesiastes, the four Gospels, and Romans. I said ‘revisited’ because in 2009, I read the whole Bible. But it’s been fifteen years, and these texts are important enough that they merited a second reading. (In the case of Genesis, a third.) I used the English Standard Version. Yes, King James is more influential, but it’s also harder to grok – and I’m reading for understanding. I considered reading in Spanish this time, since my earlier reading was in English, but I couldn’t find a decent freely downloadable ePub. (What’s up with that?) That was the plan, anyway. I soon realized that reading these books would require more time than I’ve allotted to the project. So I devised an alternative: listening to the work as an audiobook. I already did this for the Odyssey, which I justified because that work was originally oral. No such justification for the Bible. Oh well. Audible has several versions of the ESV Bible read by different narrators. I picked the one read by Robert Smith, who has a wonderfully warm voice. Smith’s narration accompanied me during two long drives and several morning walks. What can one say about the Bible? I kept thinking of something Bill Moyer said about Joseph Campbell when introducing one of their interviews: Campbell told the story of the young Hindu who called on him in New York and said, “When I visit a foreign country, I like to acquaint myself with its religion. So I bought myself a Bible and for some months now have been reading it from the beginning. But, you know, I can’t find any religion in it.” Genesis, in particular, reads more like tribal mythology than a work of spiritual guidance, such as the Dhammapada. Of course, for those of us raised in a Western culture, the stories in this book are very familiar: the creation of the world, expulsion from the Garden, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, Noah and the Ark, Joseph and his brothers, etc. Ecclesiastes feels closer to what Cambpell’s friend might have been looking for. Rather than chronological narratives, it offers advice for living – some of it surprising. The main gist: much in life is vanity; death is inevitable; you should fear God and enjoy life even amidst uncertainty. The Gospels narrate Jesus’s life, each with a slightly different emphasis. Mark is the earliest and shortest. It, along with Matthew and Luke, focuses on the life of Jesus. John is more theological, exploring Jesus’s message and meaning. The Epistle to the Romans, written by Saint Paul, is part of the theological framework developed by the early Christian community. It connects Jesus’s life and teachings with the earlier Jewish scriptures, but contextualizing it and making it relevant to a broader audience. Audiovisual Gioia recommended music and art inspired by these readings. I was already familiar with Handel’s Messiah, Thomas Tallis’s work, and The Byrd’s Turn! Turn! Turn!, a Pete Seeger tune that sets part of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes to music. I saw Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and sculptures in person when I lived in Rome in the early 1990s, so I opted to not dive in this week. But obviously, this week’s texts served as inspiration for the most important works of art and architecture in the Western world. For this week’s movie, I opted for Martin Scorcese’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. I’d seen it shortly after it came out. I was familiar with the Gospel stories then, but hadn’t read the original sources. I revisited it now, primarily for its textures. The movie features powerful imagery. The scenes of crucifixions effectively convey the horror, suffering, and shame entailed by this brutal method of execution. Willem Dafoe is magnificent as a conflicted and uncertain Jesus. Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack and its companion Sources album have long been among my favorites; the music is even more powerful in context. Reflections I can see why THE LAST TEMPTATION was (and still is, in some countries) controversial. Although it features a prominent disclaimer, the movie diverges significantly from the Gospels. It also shows Jesus having sex. But the movie also addresses serious spiritual questions. What does it mean for somebody to be both human and divine? Did Jesus act freely? Was he predetermined to suffer? What is the role of suffering in salvation? I was surprised to realize that two of the stars of previous movies in the crash course also have important roles in this movie: Andre Gregory (of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE) plays John the Baptist and Harry Dean Stanton (of PARIS, TEXAS) plays Saul/Paul. Both characters bookend Jesus’s arc. Back to the texts: of this week’s readings, I was most pleased to revisit Ecclesiastes. I was struck by its parallels with the Buddhist scriptures. Both caution against becoming attached to transitory things – and in this sensuous world, all is transitory. Understanding that suffering comes with life is the first step in overcoming suffering. All else is vanity. Notes on Note-taking This week, I implemented a new note-taking habit: early each morning, after my daily journaling, I wrote down a few notes on the text I finished the day before. I’m still using Obsidian with the Text Generator plugin. The Judeo-Christian scriptures are part of the LLM’s training corpus, as is much of the commentary around them. I took advantage of this fact by asking GPT-4o for summaries in each text’s Obsidian note. This week, I also started a new section in these notes. In addition to my reflections and GPT summaries, I’ve started reflecting on the influence and criticisms of each work. For the influence, I used variations of the following prompt: Why is the Gospel of Matthew considered important? Focus on its overall influence but also relative to the other three Gospels: For criticisms, I used variations of this prompt: What are the main criticisms levied against the Gospel of Matthew? GPT’s answers to these prompts were invariably insightful. It was especially helpful for understanding the differences and similarities between the four Gospels. I started a separate note in to examine the Gospels at this higher level, linking them together. An obvious next step is creating more granular notes to capture individual ideas from the scriptures and linking those too. I’ll eventually get to that; this won’t be my last explorations of these scriptures. But now, we must move on to other works. Up Next We’re heading back to Ancient Greece: Sophocles’s Oedipus trilogy plus plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Standard Ebooks has beautiful versions of Sophocles’s works, but I’m also listening to audiobooks. These plays come to life when dramatized, and Audible has excellent versions as part of their subscription package. Check out Gioia’s post for the full syllabus. Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for all the videos I’m sharing here. And as a reminder, I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment.

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence By Jeff Hawkins Basic Books, 2021 If you’re interested in artificial intelligence (and you should be,) it behooves you to learn about intelligence in general. While there’s still lots to learn, neuroscience has made lots of progress in the last few decades. This book offers a compelling new theory of how we think. Hawkins is a tech entrepreneur (i.e., he founded Palm Computing.) But his passion is neuroscience. He’s on a quest to understand how intelligence works, and this book explains what he and his team have found. It’s divided into three parts, with the first focused on their “Thousand Brains” theory. It starts by explaining what we know about the brain’s architecture. The brain is a complex organ composed of subsystems. Its older parts are responsible for baseline features such as breathing and walking. The neocortex is a newer part that is responsible for more complex tasks, such as reading and talking. Hawkins recaps two general tenets underlying all of this: Thoughts, ideas, and perceptions are the activity of neurons Everything we know is stored in the connections between neurons Physically, the neocortex is composed of around 150,000 cortical columns, modular units responsible for somewhat independent tasks in the brain. For a long time, people didn’t fully grok the role of these columns in thinking and perceiving. Hawkins and his team made three discoveries: The neocortex learns a predictive model of the world Predictions occur inside neurons The secret of the cortical column is reference frames Specifically, each column learns models of objects and concepts based on sensory inputs. The brain learns models by observing change in inputs over time. For example, moving around a space lets you perceive its boundaries from different perspectives. As you do, you create a sort of mental map of the space. The brain uses these models to make predictions about the world. Each cortical column develops models independently of other columns. It’s a decentralized model of understanding that contrasts with the more traditional hierarchical model. Reference frames are like maps that set objects in context so the brain can understand how things relate to each other. When you grab a cup, your brain uses reference frames for both the cup and your hand. Your senses provide input on where either is in relation to the other. Reference frames let you track both the cup’s and hand’s locations and features as they (and you) move in space. Each cortical column builds a spatial and conceptual reference frame for things you encounter in the world. The brain integrates these disparate models into a cohesive understanding of objects, environments, and abstract concepts – including information coming in through the senses. Having learned the attributes and expected capabilities of things (e.g., hands and cups) over time, your brain can predict what will happen when you act on them (or with them) in various ways. Which is to say, reference frames are essential to learning, understanding, and acting. They’re how the brain models the world so you can act skillfully. Part two of the book explores the theory’s implications for building artificially intelligent systems. A key takeaway: current approaches AI won’t get us to “true” intelligence (my term, not Hawkins’s) since they lack embodied reference frames. Hawkins believes that artificial systems that aim to function like our brains would need to provide analogs to this distributed structure, even if their sensory and actuating mechanisms were wildly different from ours. AIs can’t achieve human-level general intelligent absent reference frame-based models. Part three explores the theory’s social implications. Hawkins is concerned with the preserving intelligence in a world that is 1) on track to develop artificial intelligent systems while 2) destroying the environment. Intelligence is a fragile phenomenon that could disappear, so Hawkins argues for “estate planning for humanity” – i.e., finding resilient ways to perpetuate intelligence and its accomplishments. As you may surmise from these notes, the book gets progressively more speculative as it goes. Part one, which is grounded on solid evidence, is the most informative. By part three, the book has shifted to speculative/philosophical advocacy. The “Thousand Brains” theory has important implications for both AI and design. For one thing, it grounds the concept of mental models on neuroscience. We do indeed carry around “maps” in our brains that help us act and decide in the world – something that designers have known empirically all along. For another, these models emerge from our experiences as embodied beings. Our models of hands and coffee cups are only relevant to beings that share our physical, sensory, and neural characteristics. An ant would have a very different model of a cup, for example. This second point raises questions about the ability of current AIs to supplant humans in many (most?) activities. LLMs in particular work by detecting patterns in language that may create something like models, but they’re unlike the models in embodied beings with reference frame-driven architectures. Which is to say, the “Thousand Brains” theory suggests current AI architectures might not lead to what most of us imagine as AGI. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, but they’re definitely different. We have lots to learn about how to work effectively with these things. The theory is still relatively new and not yet widely accepted. But it represents an intriguing shift in how we think about how we think. The idea that intelligence emerges from independent yet cooperative modular units has intriguing implications for AI and beyond. As a non-specialist, I found the book compelling and insightful. At a minimum, it offers fascinating thoughts about the preciousness and fragility of attention and intelligence in a world bent on commoditizing both. A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

In episode 4 of the Traction Heroes podcast, Harry and I discussed mental models. It’s a tricky phrase: we brought up two different, yet common, uses: Mental models as individuals’ internal understandings of a particular things and situations – i.e., the “Indi Young” sense. Mental models as universally-applicable mental shortcuts or tools for thinking about situations – i.e., the “Shane Parrish/Charlie Munger” sense. Knowing how your mind understands things will help you act more skillfully. But models are often based on incomplete information or in tension with other latent ideas. We landed on a practical note, with Harry explaining a framework for making these points of tension visible. We’re still trying to get our bearings with this new show. I’d love to know how these conversations are landing for you. If you have feedback, please get in touch and tweak my own models.