Embodied intelligence, bespoke computers, human curation and the power of dance.

This week we go a bit off-piste.

Well hello there!

This week’s issue is more of a mezze than a main course. Partly due to a new project kicking off (more on that soon!) and partly because I want to experiment with formats. I’ve also dialled up the weird and tangential, so do let me know what you think.

Beautiful conversations

This was a delightful conversation with Hirofumi Kurino, co-founder of Japanese menswear retail brand United Arrows. Imagine Kevin Kelly and Derek Guy had a baby, and you’ll be in the right ballpark. He touches on the differences between Japanese and American retail, the rise of independent bookstores, the positive effects of COVID on Japanese culture, his love of music, and how he uses clothing as a way to connect with other people. Kurino-san is a great example of the maxim that anyone sufficiently passionate and curious enough is fascinating to listen to (regardless of their specialist subject).

It was such a segue from my usual podcast diet that I was reminded of another fantastic podcast that was also nourishingly weird and wonderful. This conversation between poet Dan Gioia and Tyler Cowen is probably my favourite podcast episode of the last few years. Tyler is an outstanding interviewer simply due to his eccentric questions based on an intimate knowledge of the interviewee’s work. Dan is an accomplished poet and author, who came to his calling late in life after a career in advertising, and is erudite and entertaining on an incredibly wide range of topics. Expect to learn how an MBA made his poetry better, how he revitalised the Jelly category, why you need to learn poems by heart, the purpose of cathedrals, and much more.

[Btw if any of this reminds you of the most idiosyncratic articles or podcasts you’ve consumed, please do share them. I’m always looking for more weird!]

Rediscovering humanity

This was a lovely short meditation on rediscovering your humanity in response to the rise of generative AI and the facsimile of humanity they represent:

I needed to radically deepen my own contact with soul, my essential humanity, so that I would not be confused by these technologies. The risk facing us is that we allow this tech to function as a kind of dark mirror, reflecting back to us a partial and reduced vision of what it means to be alive. We are not strung-together sets of propositions, we are not a tangle of views. We are not (merely) our intelligence. We are a soul, a presence, a heart, a life, a story. We are our choices. AI is none of these things. This is, I think, the real koan of AI. It is, properly received, an invitation and initiation into clarifying what it means to be alive. For me, I've doubled down on the dimensions of my being that ChatGPT can't fathom: my sensitivity, my care, my intuition, my eros, my curiosity, my sense of what is good, true, and beautiful. Whatever it may or may not be like to be ChatGPT, it has nothing to do with those dimensions of being, and those dimensions of being are the ones that bring meaning to my life.

It reminds me of “The struggle to be human” by Ian Leslie, where he argues we make it easier for machines to impersonate us by acting more like robots. Instead we must respond by “raising the bar”…

“By taking seriously that which we cannot measure, and that which piques our interest but does not fit our models; by not being too confident in the models we have; by learning to appreciate ambiguity, intuition and mystery; by making room, now and again, for superstition and mad ideas. Above all, by refusing, in whatever game we’re playing, to make thoughtless and predictable moves just because they’re the moves we’ve been taught or conditioned to believe are the correct ones. We should strive to be difficult to model.”

Whole-Body intelligence

The idea of being ‘difficult to model’ then reminded me of the mind-blowing work of Philip Shepherd around ‘whole-body intelligence’ and embodied knowledge. This probably deserves an article of it’s own, but the essence of his argument is that most Western/Northern cultures are limited by our conception of ‘the big five senses’: taste, smell, touch, hearing and sight.

The five senses are a cultural construct—and as a model of understanding they just hap- pen to impair our experience of embodiment. It seems obvious to us that we have five senses, but when you look at other cultures you find that some have a completely different sensorium. For example, the Anlo-Ewe in Africa don’t even have a word for the senses as we do. What they have is the term, “seselelame.” Seselelame literally translates as “feel-feel-at-flesh-inside.”

In her book ‘Culture and the Senses’, Kathryn Linn Geurts itemizes approximately nine senses that the Anlo-Ewe recognize. For example, balance is their primary sense. And you might think, “Well that’s strange,” because in English we talk about a ‘sense’ of balance. We actually have a sense organ in the inner ear devoted to balance. Why don’t we include it as a sense? The answer to that becomes clear when you look at what the big five have in common: they all impute a boundary that separates us from the world.

For example, light crosses the boundary of the self, lands on the retina and is sent to the brain for interpretation. Smell, taste, hearing—they all conform to the same model: a stimulus from the outside world crosses the boundary of the self and lands on a receptor. So the senses we validate all uphold this idea that we are separate from the world, independent from it—contained within a boundary that helps us feel safe. The way we imagine and experience our senses, then, actually divides us from the world.

Balance doesn’t conform to that model. The earth’s gravity isn’t a stimulus crossing a boundary—it’s a felt relationship you’ve been held in since the moment you were conceived. We are utterly permeable to it. But our culture is deeply devoted to the fantasies of separation, independence and control. So we discount balance as a sense.

This model of the ‘big five’ senses that we subscribe to means we look at the world as if “we were watching it through a windshield”. This discounting of the body, and prioritising of the head, as a source of intelligence is everywhere when you start looking for it.

A look at language tells a lot. For instance, consider differences in meaning between a ‘head count’ and a ‘body count’: a head count tells us how many people are present; a body count tells us how many people are dead. We accept this, chiming as it does with the familiar messages to vacate the body and consolidate our awareness in the head. After all, our culture assures us, the body is without intelligence—why should we inhabit it?

…

If someone’s capable, she’s got a good head on her shoulders. If she faces a problem, she’d certainly want to use her head: she might put her thinking cap on and try to get her head around the issue. She might be headstrong, or have a swelled head. If she’s smart we might call her heady; if she’s not, we might call her an airhead, accuse her of being a few rafters short, or comment that the light in the attic is on but no one’s home. If we say she’s “out of her head,” we don’t mean she’s embodied—we mean she’s gone mad. The head is mission control—to leave it is to risk disaster.

Whole-body intelligence certainly feels like something AI will be unable to model, regardless of how many GPUs get thrown at the problem. It also makes me wonder whether ‘augmented reality’ and ‘mixed reality’ are really the right language to be using, for example, glasses or headsets to overlay aural and visual media over our experience, mediating our interaction with, and relationship to, the real world.

We’re deluded if we think this doesn’t crowd something out, like noise-cancelling headphones making us deaf to the throb of a metropolis. It’s not augmenting reality so much as substituting reality. Creating a selective, narrow reality. Removing the possibility for embodied intelligence and replacing it with something else.

Read an interview here to get an overview of his work, or check out the book.

The power of human curation

Earlier this year I ran a short strategy project for a philanthropic foundation dedicated to a free and open web, so this article by Kyle Chayka on Cultivating taste in an age of algorithms really resonated. He reminds us of the power of genuine human curation, the lateral leaps and links possible by hand but usually missing in algorithms.

The slower and more careful approach is to seek out these seams of culture yourself and chart your path, bookmarking accounts, connecting with other people interested in the same things, and comparing notes. This is a more conscious and intentional form of consumption—a form that was mandatory before feeds made it so easy to outsource our choices about what to consume online. It recalls the term connoisseur.

In a similar vein, this short blog post (remember those?!) on how Group chats rule the world, felt like yet another signal that the future of social media will be smaller communities, curated by humans optimising for connection, conversation and learning, rather than global cluster-fecks powered by algorithms and optimising for outrage.

Bespoke computers

I absolutely love these handmade computers. No web browsing or gaming, just an ability to write — prose, code, journal entries. Beautiful form and stripped-back function. It brings to mind the quote “we shape our tools, and our tools shape us” and feels like part of a wider movement to use technology more mindfully, much like the resurgence in feature phones and popularity of tools like Opal and Freedom.

And finally, the power of dancing!

Earlier this year the BMJ published a systematic review and meta-analysis to see how exercise compared to therapy and anti-depressants in treating depression. Whilst they discovered that exercise is about as effective as anti-depressants, it turns out dancing beats anything else they tested! It was even more effective than combinations of exercise + therapy or exercise + SSRIs. 💃🏻❤️
H/T Erik Hoel.

That’s it for this week.

Thanks for stopping by.

As ever, do let me know what you thought in the comments, and whether you want more weird or less in subsequent issues.