A while back, I began a series of posts on Simone Weil’s “vital needs of the human soul” found in her book, The Need for Roots. I got distracted by other things, and by the time I thought of resuming the series, I had begun my Substack “Philosophy of Human Flourishing”. So, the posts are there now! Here are the first two:
On Substack: reflections on why we self-sabotage and our need for “reality” over “experiences”
On my Substack, “Philosophy of Human Flourishing,” I’ve added a couple more posts. The first argues that sometimes people blow up their lives just to feel free. It’s written as a reading of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground as it applies to topics like free will, AI, etc.: “Why do we self-sabotage?” The second is a follow-up where I consider what Robert Nozick’s thought experiment, “the experience machine,” says about our desire to feel free: “We want more than ‘experiences’; we want ‘reality'”.
The focus of this blog
I decided to change the name of this blog from “LePortology”—which sounded kind of “cool” but also a little pretentious, especially since I’m hardly offering anything like a system of thought that can be tied to my name—to “The blog of Brian LePort” which is purely descriptive but probably more honest. Besides my concern for unearned hubris, why change the name? Well, how to put it: I’m a person, not a brand. I want to write about what I want to write about. In general, that will continue to be philosophy, religion, theology, and pedagogy, but honestly, sometimes I’m just interested in fatherhood, or events in my home state of California, or where I live now in Texas, or in the United States, in general. Maybe I want to say something cautious about politics (probably not). Maybe I want to share a podcast episode that I think is interesting, but that doesn’t match the “focus” of this blog as it’s been.
It’s not like I have a huge audience who comes to this blog to hear my professional insights on a specific topic! (My old “biblioblog” has been “retired” for over a decade and still it gets far more hits that this blog does! For example, it got 66 view yesterday while this one got…7.) I write this blog for myself. I write here because I like to write. I write here so I can “see” my thoughts. I write here because writing is an art and it’s fun to play with words, and then touch up those words to see if what I said can be said more clearly or more interestingly.
In the modern world of social media, there’s a focus on building a platform, gaining an audience, and monetizing it all. I can’t judge. The old blog that I just mentioned opened a lot of door for me, made me connections, got me free books, and even earned me a little bit of money for a time. I mean, nothing like a TikTok influencer or podcaster now, but it had its perks. And I think that there remains something to having a focus and a theme, which is why I’ve started my Substack “Philosophy of Human Flourishing”. It gives me something to hone in on. But also, I just like writing, and I like thinking, and those two work well together for me, so I want this blog to be a place where I can combine those two activities freely.
Trying Substack…again
Now, this time, I won’t be abandoning this blog, but I do want a place that’s a bit of a fresh start for thoughts I want to post related to my new “Philosophy of Human Flourishing” class. So, if you’re interested, check out brianleport.substack.com.
AI, reading, and the humanities
In a recent episode of the podcast “The Philosopher’s Zone” with David Rutledge titled “AI and Reading”, UMass-Lowell philosophy professor John Kaag was interviewed about a new project of his: “Rebind”. For your convenience, here’s a trailer for the product:
I admit, this sounds kind of interesting and I’d be interested in reading some of the books they have ready with the commentary and chat features, just to see what the experience is like.
In the interview, Kaag addresses a few topics that many of us in education know already. He talks about how learning needs to move away from information dumping and regurgitation. He addresses the problem of the perceived inaccessibility of many of the classic texts. He reminds us that the humanities have been in decline for a while now, so the AI revolution—if that’s what’s happening—can’t be blamed for growing disinterest. He’s positive toward AI. He sees it more as a solution than a problem.
As I listened, a few things came to mind:
- Kaag talks about how teaching may need to be a little more personal, a little more 1-to-1. The problem with this suggestion is practical. Class sizes are growing. If your institution—public, public charter, or private—isn’t growing, they either have a strong endowment/tax base or they’re dying. So it’s unlikely that class sizes can shrink to the place where teachers can do the type of 1-to-1 educating that Kaag suggests. We’d have to do a complete rehaul of our current system.
- Kaag sees the rise of AI’s significance and necessity as inevitable. My response would be that this is likely true but I think that the inevitability of AI’s significance can be embrace in a healthy manner and an unhealthy one. Large Language Models (LLMs) scrape the Internet for their data. We humans created that data. If we collectively become too reliant on LLMs, I fear that this will hinder human creativity. Yes, we learn from others. Yes, our learning is the ingestion and realigning of things we learn. But we do this as embodied creatures with agendas, goals, desires, motives, inspirations, imaginations, etc. We do this with an almost endless variety of purposes, as each of us contributes something unique. Our collective “hive-mind” is what it is because of individuality and uniqueness, in part. I don’t see that in LLM’s. Will LLMs have less and less truly unique and creative insight upon which to draw if we humans outsource of thinking to computers?
- Much of what LLMs produce is akin to what the philosopher Henry Frankfurt calls “bullshit” (neither truth nor lies, both which indicate intentionality, but just content that is careless about whether it is true or false). See the recent article “ChatGPT is Bullshit” by Michael Townsend Hicks, James Humphries, and Joe Slater for the journal Ethics and Information Technology.
- This may mean that there are stages to our developing skills and postures with regard to learning and learning with AI. My gut says that we should try to create a setting where young people have to develop their own independent thinking abilities in preparation for using those thinking abilities to engage what AI has to offer as active contributors and not just passive consumers. In my classes, students read from paper and handwrite on paper. Hypothetically, let’s say that your freshman/sophomore years, all reading and writing is done this way in class under the supervision of educators. Then as one becomes a junior and a senior in high school, preparing for the independence of their college and/or professional years, we focus on teaching them how to take their own original ideas and interface them with AI? An argument could be made that we have them wait until college to do this and high school focuses completely on reading/writing in a traditional, almost pre-Internet way.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that the humanities needs to embrace AI in order to be relevant in the future because this is what current cultural and market forces demand. But I’m hesitant to abandon the boring, laborious parts of learning that lay the ground work for the human brain because I worry that the quicker we outsource our thinking and creativity to AI, the sooner we’re going to realize we’ve placed ourselves in a collective spin where little creativity, innovation, or new thought can flourish.
Why do I blog?
Blogging may be an outdated form of media. I don’t think it’s dead like say MySpace. There remain many popular blogs out there. I presume their readership is mostly Gen X and older Millennials. But even if it isn’t dead, it’s not popular. You don’t start a blog in 2024 if you want to get a message to the masses. You get on TikTok, I presume.
The most “relevant” social media platform with which I engage is Instagram. Facebook is ads mixed with sadness, though it’s how I remain connected to many people. Threads is coming alive but nothing I share seems interesting to the people on there…or the algorithm! “X” is scary. I left that dystopia long ago. I’m not going to touch something like Snapchat. And though I have peers who have done well with TikTok, I’m not interested.
This is because I don’t blog for a big audience. I blog to keep myself writing with frequency. I blog because unlike keeping a private Word document to record my thoughts, occasionally people can read what I write here, enjoy it, share it, and even respond to it. But I don’t look for that sort of response in the same way social media influencers do. It’s more like when blogging first began in the late 2000s and there was the joy of being able to write and be read by a handful of people with similar interests. That was my favorite part of blogging culture and it remains so.
It’s funny because for a long while, I had a blog that was very popular by blog standards. I know these stats don’t match the stats someone might get on YouTube or TikTok but my most “successful” blog has seen almost 1.5 millions views in its lifetime and about a half-a-million unique visitors. There was a day when over seven thousand people visited back in 2013.
This blog was central to me finding my way when I moved to San Antonio. One person who read it, Greg Richards, directed “College Missions” for the Diocese of West Texas of the Episcopal Church (for whom I work indirectly now). He was my first connection with the denomination that is tied to the school where I work and he was one of the people who wrote me a recommendation when I applied for the job I’ve had for more than eight years now. Another person was Dr. Rubén Dupertuis at Trinity University here in town. He gave me two opportunities to be a “Teaching Intern” which helped my resume. Also, he wrote me a recommendation letter. So, my old blog helped me network somewhere new. This networking helped me find the job that I have now. I’m grateful for that old blog!
I had a few other blogs that started, failed to gain any readership, and/or were closed because I gave up on the theme upon which it was anchored. (For example, when I was on the doorstep of leaving Pentecostalism permanently, I abandoned a blog with the clever name “Azusa Remixed” that tried to gather together Pentecostal and Pentecostal-friendly but also forward thinking writers to talk about a future for Pentecostalism. When I knew my vision wasn’t going to match reality, and that reality was that I didn’t belong in Pentecostal circles anymore, I shut down the project. On a side note, the old saying that the Internet doesn’t forget isn’t true. If you google “Azusa Remixed” you’ll find nothing about my blog that I can see though there’s some connection to an anime character!)
I think Twitter was the beginning of the end of blogging supremacy as a novel way to communicate on the still young Internet. Now it’s something older people like me do. My old blog sits there without a new contribution since 2014 but it still gets about four times as many visitors every week as my current one. If you’re a reader of this blog, I’m grateful for you but clearly “readership” in the abstract isn’t my goal. My goal is to process my thoughts through writing. Blogging was the method of writing that has been the most successful at helping me develop consistency. So, because I value the connection between writing and thinking, and blogging helps me maintain that connection, I continue to blog.
Handwriting is good for the brain
I’ve mention a few times that my students handwrite their notes, and their exit tickets, and pretty much everything. The #1 reason for this? I can’t compete with all the tabs open on their Internet browser. When I used to allow computers, engagement seemed impossible. It wasn’t clear that they were listening to me. It was easy to have a classmate send their notes by email or messenger, which could then by copied-and-pasted. This changed after I banned computers. Students became more likely to participate in class. And even if you copy your classmates notes, you have to take time to write them out yourself, which leads to more learning than copying-and-pasting.
This leads me to the #2 reason: I think handwriting is better for learning. I can’t remember the book that I read years ago on this subject—it’s likely outdated and out of print now—but recent science seems to confirm that handwriting notes helps learning stick! For instance, earlier this year the article “Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom” was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology and they authors (F R Ruud Van der Weel , Audrey L H Van der Meer ) conclude:
“When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions. Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning. Our findings suggest that the spatiotemporal pattern from visual and proprioceptive information obtained through the precisely controlled hand movements when using a pen, contribute extensively to the brain’s connectivity patterns that promote learning.”
I’m not a scientist so I can’t evaluate these findings but PubMed has many other articles that seem to be making the same claim. My experience is anecdotal but even if there weren’t studies like this one that seem to support my hunch, I know I would continue to have my students write by hand because of the difference that I’ve experienced. And because I’m not as interesting as whatever is on tabs 7, 12, 28, and 39.
The immediate impact of ChatGPT on my pedagogy
Prior to the pandemic, our school began to make a shift toward digitizing assignments. We became “BYOD” (“Bring Your Own Device”). I followed suit by turning almost everything into something from Google Workplace: Docs, Forms, etc. When the pandemic sent us all home, I was ready for the transition to Meets (eventually Zoom) and Classroom. But once we returned to “in person” learning, it was clear something was wrong. The psychological and social impact of the pandemic, combined with what I perceive to be the ongoing influence of zero-attention span social media (e.g. TikTok), made it clear to me that basic skills like close reading, note taking, and writing needed to be retaught. So, this year I removed computers from my class, for the most part. My students receive a guided outline for each lesson. They can take notes on it. Each of my assignments is open note, in order to reword note-takers. And I don’t have my students read articles from their computers anymore, realizing I was going to lose the battles against all of the alluring tabs attracting them to some other part of the Internet. Now, they receive printed versions. It’s almost as if the Internet was never created. Almost.
I’ve continued to do assessments through Google Classroom. My students have to write somewhere between six to ten sentence “Exit Ticket” responses. For some lessons, I had them do something like a quiz that I called a “Multiple Choice Review” that was, again, open note and not really a quiz as much as a chance to have them stop and revisit key concepts, rewarding those who took notes so they could use them. The aforementioned Exit Tickets were completed through a Google Form when I wanted a very brief (six sentence) response and through a Google Doc when I wanted a slightly longer (ten sentence) response with a more formal rubric to follow.
Because of this approach, my students have been using their computers for these assessments. Also, if they miss class, they can turn these writing assignments into homework to do outside of class through Google Classroom. As you may have guessed by now, and as I should have known as a teacher in my seventh year, the temptation to plagiarize has been too strong. Now, I don’t want to make it sound like an epidemic. I’ve graded hundreds of assignments this semester but only had six or seven cases of plagiarism. That being said, several cases of plagiarism is alarming.
The alarm is going to be screaming even louder now. For those who haven’t been paying attention to education and technology news, a OpenAI, ChatGPT, has been made available to the public that’s a game-changer. It can take a prompt and write a response that’s better than most of my student’s writing. Usually, this is how I catch plagiarism. Suddenly, a fourteen year old with a perfectly fine vocabulary for their age writes something that I know they wouldn’t say. If I’m using a plagiarism checker, it’s caught, but even just copying-and-pasting into Google is sufficient most of the time. ChatGPT changes this. You can know that it’s unlikely that your students wrote what they submitted but plagiarism checkers and Google searches won’t suffice because the AI is writing fresh content.
To see why this is freaking out educators, I recommend an article and a podcast:
- Stephen Marche, The Atlantic, “The College Essay is Dead”
- Plastic Pills – Philosophy & Critical Theory Podcast: “AI & the New Crisis of Humanities Education”
As an educator, I don’t like saying what I’m about to say because I know it increases my workload as part of a profession known for being notoriously overworked and underpaid, but also I’m an ideologue when it comes to the value of a liberal education and skills that may not be valued by the Cult of STEM, like the reading, note-taking, and writing I discussed above, which I find indispensable to a healthy society and a functioning democracy. My plan is to fight the Internet’s self-deconstruction with a further return to pre-Internet pedagogy. My Exit Tickets will be hand written in class (unless an accommodation is needed) during class time with the only materials available being the physical papers notes and articles that students have been given.
The perk of doing this in the Internet age is that I can have my students submit both the physical paper itself but also take a picture of it that can be submitted as an attachment in Google Classroom as a form of safeguarding against the old annoyance of losing a student’s work or having a student falsely claim to have submitted something they didn’t submit without the benefit of having Google Classroom to check that claim.
I’m aware that grading handwritten assignments will be difficult. I’m including in the rubric the necessity for the writing to be legible and I’m keeping the length requirement short enough to prevent too much hand-writing fatigue. In a sense, I feel like I’m doubling down on the necessity of reading and writing skills in a digital age that is trying to marginalize those skills as secondary or irrelevant (say compared to coding). But I believe—and I recognize my biases here—that if the Cult of STEM dominated education, we’re in for a world of pain in the not-so-distant future.
Publication Notice: Visions and Violence in the Pseudepigrapha
While I may have been a third wheel whose most important contribution was being a gofer-editor, I’m happy to announce a volume that Bloomsbury is publishing titled Visions and Violence in the Pseudepigrapha. It was edited by Craig A. Evans, Paul T. Sloan, and yours truly. If it’s any good, they get the credit. I was happy just to be included so that I could learn a bit about editing and the publication process.
Divine command theory and Hosea’s actions
I had my students write short ‘essays’ in response to a prompt based on one of their recent homework assignments. They can choose the one with which they’re most comfortable. Here’s one of those prompts:
‘In Homework #18, you learned about the content and message of the Book of Hosea. If you choose this prompt, you’ll need to tell me the following information in a minimum of 6 sentences: (1) Do you think it was moral or immoral for Hosea to marry a sex-worker (prostitute) knowing what she would do to him and their family? (Explain why.) (2) Do you think it was moral or immoral for Hosea to give his children the names he gave them? (Explain why.) (3) Does the fact that these actions are presented as obedient responses to divine commands change how you interpret them? (In other words, if Hosea did these things without being commanded by God would that change their morality?)’
When they learned about Hosea, they learned how Yahweh God had told Hosea that his marriage and the birth of his children would be overshadowed by Gomer’s occupation, and Hosea was commanded to give his children some degrading names (e.g., Lo-ammi, ‘not my people’), yet Hosea’s often justified because ‘God said’ to do it (divine command theory).
Among the responses, there’s been a desire to say that this is an exception to a general rule, because/if God commanded it. But the ‘why?’ has been harder for them to articulate. One response (that needed to be unpacked more) was the ‘greater good’ defense. God commanded these seemingly problematic actions because Hosea’s sacrificial life contributed to the greater good for others.
While rare, there were those who pushed back against the question. One student wrote, ‘Speaking broadly, marrying a sex worker is perfectly moral.’ His problem was with Hosea marrying Gomer knowing the consequences of this decision. This student wrote, ‘…intentionally bringing his children into a broken home just to make examples of them was an immoral decision.’ But it was his final argument that I found fascinating: ‘if Hosea had done these things without God’s requesting of them, then I actually believe it would be more moral. After all, Hosea only knew for sure that his wife was going to leave him because an omniscient deity told him so. If he did not have Yahweh’s foresight on his side, then absolutely none of what he did would have been immoral — only unfortunate.’
Another student put ‘God in the dock’ if you will, writing, ‘Hosea’s actions were immoral because God’s actions were immoral.’ Now it wasn’t clarified if this means God’s command was immoral which pushed Hosea to do something immoral or if she meant that God’s actions toward Israel were immoral as modeled by Hosea’s actions toward Gomer.
It’s been interesting reading through these responses. Some students experience a real uneasiness with saying that God could be immoral or command something immoral while simultaneously struggling to articulate why an action that would otherwise be immoral (intentionally marrying someone who you know will blow up your family; giving your children derogatory names to make a point) is moral when God commands it.
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