Hotel Bar Sessions

The HBS hosts discuss why humanlike robots are sooooo creepy.In 1970, a Japanese roboticist by the name of Masahiro Mori published a short essay in the journal Energy entitled “The Uncanny Valley," in which he attempted to explain humans' reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human.  Mori hypothesized that when we encounter humanlike technological objects, our feelings of affinity toward them tend to increase as their verisimilitude increase. (To use a Star Wars example, think of the way we’re more positively drawn to C3PO than to R2D2.)  However, the moment robots appear or behave in a too humanlike way, our attitude towards them immediately shifts to revulsion. (Think about the difference in your attitude toward C3PO and your attitude toward the King from the Burger King commercials.) Crossing that line between “humanlike” and “too humanlike,” Mori hypothesized, is like stepping off a precipice. Things just get creepier and creepier.In the 50 years since Mori first hypothesized the uncanny valley, as we all know, technology has advanced at light-speed. Improvements in robotics, computer generated imagery, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence technologies have made it increasingly difficult for us to readily perceive the difference between the human and the humanlike. All of this sparked renewed interest in Mori’s hypothesis: cognitive scientists and neuroscientists engaged in experimental “testing” of the uncanny valley. Psychoanalysts reopened their Freud, Jentsch, and Lacan books for reconsideration. (Philosophers did, too, but they added Schelling, Nietzsche, and Guy de Bord.) Philosophers of technology were born, as film and literary critics congratulated each other on hitting the lottery.Also important to note: Mori’s original essay states that his was an “incomplete” theory, and he very explicitly calls for readers to “build an accurate map of the uncanny valley.”So, today, we’re going to talk about the uncanny, the uncanny valley, whether or not our ability to distinguish between the human and the humanlike is fading, and if that matters.Prepare to be creeped out.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-110-the-uncanny-valley-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Better yet, you can support this podcast by signing up to be one of our Patrons at patreon.com/hotebarsessions!Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, on TikTok, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!      ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts discuss Jordan Peele's special brand of horror with the author of Stepford Daughters, Johanna Isaacson.For a long time, or at least it seemed, horror films were considered to be beneath serious scrutiny. The problematic politics of such films were all too apparent in the violence brought to bear on women’s bodies in countless slasher films. The racial politics were not much better; the cliche of the black character dying first exists for a reason. Gradually this changed, though, first with such groundbreaking critical studies such  as Carol Glover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film and Robin Wood’s “An Introduction to the American Horror film.”In the past few years, horror films themselves have changed as well. Most notably Jordan Peele has made three films dealing with our “social demons”: Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022). To talk with us about horror, the films of Jordan Peele,  and how horror can be used to develop our critical understanding of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, we have invited Johanna Isaacson author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-109-jordan-peeles-horror-with-johanna-isaacson-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Better yet, you can support this podcast by signing up to be one of our Patrons at patreon.com/hotebarsessions!Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, on TikTok, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!      ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts ask Michael Hardt why we so quickly jump from the 60's to the 80's in our political imagination? Most histories of the present either overlook the seventies, jumping from the sixties of radical struggle to the eighties of Reagan/Thatcher and repression, or dismiss it as just the end point of the previous era struggles, the point where the sixties fell apart, collapsing into infighting, or went too far, devolving into violence. What do we overlook in not thinking about the seventies as a decade of struggle? Moreover,  what does an examination of the  history of that period offer for thinking about politics today? Joining us this week to talk about what we can learn from the seventies and his recently published book, The Subversive Seventies, is Michael Hardt.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-107-the-subversive-seventies-with-michael-hardt-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Better yet, you can support this podcast by signing up to be one of our Patrons at patreon.com/hotebarsessions!Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, on TikTok, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!      ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts wonder how a hard heart is melted and mended.In a world often colored by misunderstandings, hurtful actions, and lingering grudges, the concept of forgiveness emerges as a beacon of hope and healing. For some, its transformative power to mend relationships, free us from the shackles of resentment, and grant us the gift of emotional liberation make forgiveness a moral imperative. Forgiveness is not merely an internal journey; it's also a dynamic force that shapes societies and mends the fabric of communities torn apart by conflict and strife.  But what does it mean to forgive? What does forgiveness do, and for whom? Does forgiveness require the forgetting of wrongs done? Is real forgiveness even possible?Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-107-forgiveness -------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Better yet, you can support this podcast by signing up to be one of our Patrons at patreon.com/hotebarsessions!Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, on TikTok, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!      ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts discuss a real human drama.Note to listeners: if you haven't already, you may want to watch “Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary” (link to complete film on YouTube here) before listening!"Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary" tells the story of an annual competition held from 1992 to 2005 in Longview, Texas, in which a local Nissan dealership selected 24 contestants by lottery for a chance to win a tantalizing symbol of freedom and mobility in many rural areas: a brand-new hardbody truck. All the contestants had to do to win it was to show up at 5am in the sweltering Texas summer heat, place a hand on the truck, and wait until theirs was the last hand left. They got a 5-minute break every hour and a 15-minute break every six hours, but the rest of the time they couldn’t lean, they couldn’t sleep, they couldn’t use the bathroom, and most importantly they couldn’t take their hand off the hardbody.They could only wrestle with the relentless passage of time… and all of the boredom, exhaustion, physical pain, and quite often delirium it brought with it. So they waited. And waited. And waited…sometimes more than 80 straight hours before there was only one hand left. That’s more three entire days and nights. As the clock ticks relentlessly on and we learn more about each contestant’s hunger for a chance at prosperity, what seemed like an absurd spectacle of willpower and perseverance becomes a deeper exploration of the human condition—the limits of mind and body, amity and enmity, suffering and compassion, ambition and ability— all as these 24 contestants confront the bittersweet realities of the American dream in the hopes of escaping the suffocating shackles of their circumstances. In the words of Benny Perkins, former winner of a hardbody, return contestant in the documentary “Hands on a Hardbody,” and arguably one of the most underrated philosophers of the 20th Century: “It’s a real human drama.”Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-106-hbs-goes-to-the-movies-hands-on-a-hardbody-the-documentary-1997 -------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Better yet, you can support this podcast by signing up to be one of our Patrons at patreon.com/hotebarsessions!Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, on TikTok, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!      ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts confront the inevitable.It is most obviously true that we are all going to die. The very fact that anything is alive seems to entail that it is going to die. Death confronts us as an ultimate cancellation and nullification in the face of which one might ask, “what does it matter if I am going to die?” The chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus says that the best thing is never to have been born at all. This is especially true if one’s life is filled with suffering and then death. Kant, not able to provide a reason why living is so great, simply says that it is the parents’ job to reconcile their children to existence! On the other hand, we have the 20th century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, arguing that we will only be authentically what we are when we take on our own death as the possibility that is the condition of our existence.  Co-host Rick Lee is fairly confident that death is "stupid." As he notes, when a loved one dies, our thoughts do not go to authenticity but to the fact that it sucks and is painful that there is now a hole, a gap, in my world that cannot possibly be made good again. It’s no wonder that people turn to the hope or wish that all will be made right again in the end. So, he asks: “what is death?” and what is the “meaning" of death?Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-87-death-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts chat with Justin Joque about how we might get Thomas Bayes' robot boot off our necks. Why does Netflix ask you to pick what movies you like when you first sign on in order to recommend other movies and shows to you? How does Google know what search results are most relevant? Why does it seem as if every tech company wants to collect as much data as they can get from you? It turns out that all of this is because of a shift in the theoretical and mathematical approach to probability. Bayesian statistics, the primary model used by machine learning systems, currently dominates almost everything about our lives: investing, sales at stores, political predictions, and, increasingly, what we think we know about the world. How did the "Bayesian revolution" come about? And how did come to dominate? And, perhaps more importantly, is this the best mathematical/statistical model available to us? Or is there another, more "revolutionary," mathematics out there?This week we are joined by Justin Joque, visualization librarian at University of Michigan who writes at the intersection of philosophy and technology. He is the author Deconstruction Machines: Writing in the Age of Cyberwar and, most recently, Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism.Full episode notes available at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-78-revolutionary-mathematics-with-justin-joque-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts struggle for recognition.The dialectic of lordship and bondage, more commonly known as the “Master/Slave dialectic,” is a moment in a much longer and exceedingly difficult-to-read (much less understand!) text by G.W.F. Hegel entitled The Phenomenology of Spirit. It’s probably a passage that is referenced in a wide number of fields– psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, literary analysis, any number of “area studies,” and even economics-- though very few of the scholars who reference it have slogged all the way through Hegel’s Phenomenology. Nevertheless, like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from the Republic and Nietzsche’s story about the lambs and the birds of prey from Genealogy of Morals, both of which we’ve discussed before on this podcast, Hegel’s dialectic of Lordship and Bondage manages to capture, in a concise and powerful way, something both intuitively true and yet, at the same time, utterly mystifying. This week we ask the question, why has this passage become the hit single off of the dense concept album that is the Phenomenology.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-105-the-master-slave-dialectic -------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review!Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!    ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts discuss timing, prudence, discretion, and propriety.When we talk about propriety, there are a lot of “gray” areas, largely because propriety demands that we conform to conventional rules of speech or behavior… and “conventional rules” are often more the product of “convention” than they are actual “rules.” Propriety requires that we develop prudence and discretion, our capacities of judgment, sagacity, and interpersonal awareness, which are arguably quite different from our capacity to apply a rule or logically reason from premise to conclusion.Comics (perhaps the least interested in “propriety” among us)  call this “timing,” and they spend years perfecting optimal joke delivery. When their timing fails, or when they can’t “read the room,” they bomb. Sometimes that’s the consequence of a deficit in their delivery– their  rhythm, cadence, tempo, or pausing– but sometimes the joke itself fails. For example, in the months immediately following 9/11, most comics who joked about the attacks of that day were met with gasps and groans from their audience. "Too soon," the audience would heckle with the bad taste of “bad taste” in their mouths, too soon.Today we’re going to try to unpack what “too soon” means, how we determine how soon is “too soon,” and whether or not there are, in fact, some “rules” of propriety.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-104-too-soon -------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!   ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts discuss the pros and cons of tenure.There are many good ideological reasons to defend tenure in higher education, not least of which among them is that tenure is perhaps the only institutional guard that society has established to protect its researchers, scientists, and intellectuals against the pressures of the market. That’s no small thing. But we also understand that, to the non-academic public, tenure may seem like nothing more than a guarantee that haughty academics with cushy jobs can’t be fired unless, as the old adage goes, “they’re caught with a dead woman or a live boy”? Who doesn’t want job security?As with all things that we discuss on this podcast, though, the question of tenure is much more complicated that it appears at first glance. Once established as a institutional protection of academic freedom, the dynamics, significance, and real-world effects of the granting and/or denial of tenure have dramatically changed as the University, the culture, and the political intervention of state legislative bodies have changed. In this episode, we’re talking about tenure: “get out of jail free card” or the necessary codification of a social good?Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-103-tenure -------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★