Can a computer write a sonnet that is as good as Shakespeare’s? No. While everyday readers couldn’t tell which sonnets were written by a computer and which ones were written by a real person, a critic could: “Adam Hammond received a random mix of human-written and machine-generated sonnets and had to rate each poem on four attributes: rhyme, rhythm, readability, and emotional impact. Hammond gave Deep-speare’s quatrains very high marks for rhyme and rhythm. In fact, they got higher ratings on these attributes than the human-written sonnets. Hammond wasn’t surprised by this result, explaining that human poets often break rules to achieve certain effects. But in the readability and emotional-impact categories, Hammond judged the machine-generated sonnets to be markedly inferior. The literature expert could easily tell which poems were generated by Deep-speare.”

In other news: How does extended smart phone use and Internet browsing affect our ability to read deeply? Adam Garfinkle explores: “Scientists continue to debate the question of addiction to technology and its effects on memory and social isolation, a question transformed anew in the dozen years since the June 2007 introduction of the iPhone. But beyond the addiction debate, few cognitive scientists doubt that so-called multitasking is merely the ability to get many things done quickly and poorly. And no one doubts that heavy screen use has destroyed attention spans. But more than attention spans are at stake. Beyond self-inflicted attention deficits, people who cannot deep read — or who do not use and hence lose the deep-reading skills they learned — typically suffer from an attenuated capability to comprehend and use abstract reasoning. In other words, if you can’t, or don’t, slow down sufficiently to focus quality attention — what Wolf calls ‘cognitive patience’ — on a complex problem, you cannot effectively think about it.”

Tim Crane writes that computers can’t think like humans now, but maybe they will one day: “Our thinking involves not just some kind of simple on-off representation of things around us, but an entire emotional and value-laden involvement with the world itself. Computers have none of this. As the philosopher John Haugeland (a major influence on Smith) used to say, ‘computers don’t give a damn’. Giving a damn is a precondition of ‘judgment’ in Smith’s sense, and anything that amounted to a real AGI would need to exercise judgment, and not simply calculate . . . Of course building an artificial copy of a real brain is nowhere close to today’s scientific reality. But if we believe that we are at bottom material beings – if we take away all our matter then there is nothing left of us – then such replication seems possible in principle, even if it is never actually realized.” Ah, that if. The problem, as many of you readers know, is that we don’t even have a plausible theory that explains how the mind is nothing more than the brain.

Is America a Christian nation? Yes and no, says Peter Leithart.

Joseph Epstein revisits Herodotus’s Histories: “Known as the father of history, Herodotus was also the father of ethnography. His interest in the customs and mores of foreign countries, his even-handed descriptions of the manners of the enemy Persians, the generally impartial tone of his Histories foreshadows modern social science. Distinctly unmodern is the credence Herodotus lends oracles and prophecies. ‘Now I cannot refute the truth of oracles,’ he writes, ‘since I cannot refute oracles that speak quite plainly.’ Thucydides, who owed much to Herodotus, became the first truly modern historian by disregarding the intervention of the gods in the affairs of men and nations. Yet Herodotus’ stories, oracles included, everywhere enliven his narrative.”

Scott Beauchamp reviews Roberto Calasso’s The Celestial Hunter: “James Joyce is said to have joked that if his hometown of Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be rebuilt brick by brick from the pages of his novel Ulysses. The Italian publisher and writer Roberto Calasso might be able to make an even bolder claim: that most of Indo-European civilization could be reengineered from his books. From the pages of works such as The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Ka, about Greco-Roman myth and the Vedic hymns, respectively, rise the dormant foundations of our deep cultural past. Calasso rewrites and analyzes these ancient stories with such intoxicating verve that they come alive again within us. He is a sort of charmed necromancer of our pagan past, and, in his latest work, The Celestial Hunter, his powers are on full display.”

Photo: Ringebu Stave Church

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