Settled

It feels random. Not something I chose. furnished largely by hand-me-offs and chance discoveries. And yet I do love my new apartment, underheated though it is on a chill and snowed Buffalo morning, here where suicide was once redundant.

I no longer take credit for any of my choices, though I am happy if someone else seems to find them attractive, if they even were my choices to begin with. My daughter is good at scouring the Internet for buys, and she's the one who found me this place. I've always known that I am not best known by myself. Even in the mirror, when I glance, I find myself strange.

The fact is, I never did settle. I've lived on a boat, in a trailer, in borrowed space and in crappy hotels for long periods at a time. I've lived, as an old man, where students can afford, and as a not yet retired but older grad student on a fellowship, in an old-folks home, because it was cheaper, somehow, in SoCal than anything else - and all of that quite comfortably - in the one place sharing a wall with a live-streamer who couldn't understand why he didn't keep me up at night, and in the other a newly wed couple my age who did. In person, I thought the live streamer had about the best sense of humor I've ever encountered. I hope he's doing well. I never got to know the couple.

But that's not really what I mean. It's more like how, as a kid, the first and really only time I bowled, I scored a perfect score. The first time I handled a bow and arrow, I hit three bulls eyes. The first time I shot a .22 rifle I did the same, and kept the plywood target I'd made in my bedroom for most of my youth. The thing was, I could never repeat these feats, true though they were. I'm like the lessons in Zen and the Art of Archery written backwards. And sure I was able to solve Rubik's cube reliably, shortly after I first tried. I doubt that I could do it now. I know I never tried again after giving mine away.

I've tried and departed from more careers than you might even imagine. More academic disciplines. And I'm always off to a strong start, soon mastering even the arcane stuff, like network engineering, before I peter out. 

Nothing was ever compelling enough to consume a life, or maybe I just simply never achieved a comfort level to linger. I've always had claims upon my income. They wear a person down when they don't feel quite legit. Why bother kind of thing, when you're always taking time off from the real deal to pay the bills. More likely, I just get bored, or invent a grievance. Though I swear I never did do that. The grievances were very real.  

Upon graduating high-school, no joke, I had my highest net worth of my life until my Dad died and left us a little something. It was simpler back then. The cash economy hadn't yet been completed, and one could afford to live on a living wage. Minimum wage as a bike mechanic was more than enough to fill up a savings account. My high-school earnings lasted me through college, even after Dad cut me off for dropping out a few too many times. 

See what I mean? Unsettled.

And still I'm at least as content gazing over my life as I am looking around my new digs. I am just a tad ashamed of myself for attempting to scale great heights of intellectual accomplishment. I should have left that stuff to the disciplinary experts, though I hardly ever find those types to be more intelligent or aware than your ordinary Joe. 

I do wish, however, that now that I am finally settled (I say finally because I simply don't have the energy I once did) that I would find the ability to set a task before myself and see it through to completion. I don't mean like completing a house restoration or a boat rebuild. Been there, done that, and it's an easy thing to keep that motivation going. I mean more like a dissertation or a novel or something sprawling which requires more than a daily inventory of tasks and materials to complete.

This is my prayer then, to the cosmos, that I will find that resolve. By random happenstance, I just did read this tiny antique leather-bound book that has trailed with me now for a long time, across many dislocations and disbursements of all possessions. I can't remember how it came to me, and I apologize to whomever it was that gifted it to me, though I may have bought it. G.B. Shaw "On Going to Church." It's a hoot, and the proximate cause for today's epistle to the void.

I think I thought the book was pretty. I've left a good nine tenths of my books behind at various points, which I thought so important to have stacked about me in my youth. I smoke a pipe when I tended bar in London at age 18. Balkan Sobranie. What a pretentious prick I must have been. I can't even bear to look at myself then, now. 

Fact is, that's what keeps me from my big project. I cringe after the fact all the time. I wonder where I was coming from and what I was doing and why. I can't even understand what I write myself on those rare occasions when I can bear to read it. And I hardly know where the tipping point is between the amazement of learning new things and the raw fact of having forgotten what I once did know. 

And yet I’m happy for the carillon sounding from the steeple of my old church just behind me now. They reflect off the buildings in front of me. I doubt I’ll venture inside, GB, though you never know. It’s in process of reconstruction all over again.  

Review: The Ministry for the Future

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First Person.

At the outset, I had a hard time keeping track of the characters. Eventually, I realized that even the photon was a character. Much of the book is written in first-person. At points it's almost a collection of different personal stories. Still there is much humanity here, and characters to follow. There is a sympathetic stand-in for Earth, Frank, who barely lives while everyone else cooks in the 'great heat wave' zone of India. There are also familiar tropes from the author; sky ships, wild corridors. But as a novel it peters out. In a good way.

The vision is that we, as we are, discover the political and scientific and geoengineering principles for living the good life. The life that college professors already live, as they are the exemplar here for responsible sufficiency of a sort that could be available to everyone on the planet. Trumpster bikers need not apply (I say that as a biker, if not a Trumpster).

Asymmetrical warfare is applied here for the common good. By black ops driven by desperation. Untraceable drone murder and incapacitation to still the market in earth's destruction. Imagine Al Gore as a terrorist. Ah, though he lives the good life now. That being the problem. Ideas alone won't save us. The insecurity of the wealthy is what destroys us by this book. The craving for evermore when the solution would be to allow everyone security in the now.

Robinson imagines hopeful futures in the face of our collective inability to imagine solutions. In this book, improbably, the solutions represent a triumph of the body politic, globally. For any reader now, such triumph has become harder than ever to imagine.

Just now in the face of political chaos and the dissolution of even basic values here in the real world, the private sector has become our hero. Producing a vaccine, providing the shipping logistics, creating a brilliant, private, safe and secure tracking regime, even though nobody uses it. This is what pushes Robinson's new book into the region of science-fiction/fantasy. His salvation for 'the only planet we have' turns on enlightened private, but collective, enterprise and wealth generally being brought to heel. Of course he's right. A co-op model for our future.

How can there even be such a polymath? I pause to wonder. Kim Stanley Robinson has the nerve to enact what he knows and his knowledge makes it all believable. I find only the tiniest of error, here and there. Solar panels driving super-tankers, for example. That math won't work.

I do wish I had a way past the New York Review of Books paywall so that I could see what Bill McKibben has to say, although I suspect his title says it all. "It's Not Science Fiction."

I recently read Jill Lepore's New York Burning, in which she brilliantly documents the birth of the novel at a time in our pre-revolutionary history when there were as yet no rules for evidence, no principles of detection toward proper prosecution. Things we now assume have always been obvious. She documents the horrors in New York when a fiction - that blacks where plotting to burn New York - was taken as truth. The grisly features of this real-world counter-plot are those of the Inquisition, where inner horrors are turned outward. Guilt prosecuted against the enslaved other.

By now all of our realities have been conditioned by the novel, made into movies and projected onto a funhouse version of Plato's shadow play. Our fear of death is terror at loss of character. Protagonist demise. We still outer the other, even while the other is ourself. Our selfie self.

Perhaps Robinson is actually not writing fiction, and is instead writing a future history when our post-enlightenment humanity bears actual fruit. When reason prevails, and goodness. I was brought to tears in many places during my read. Everything I have always wanted started to seem possible.

But I do still suspect that there is a post-novel history yet to be written, for after our current first-person obsession subsides. (I started reading Robert Putnam's new book) Robinson celebrates collective agency, and the reinvention of the commons as our only home; our living planet. While his characters recede, they are still what moves the story forward.

His is an engineered resolution. I do believe that he and Benjamin H. Bratton are good friends. I hope that they are both correct in their assessment of the way out from our very human predicament. I hope that science fiction is not mere escapism. So much of it has stimulated a direction for actual science. We so desperately need imagination.

But I do also hope that we can move beyond childish obsession with immortality. With gods that project fantasies of earthly power, and a kind of Disney love which dissolves after the storybook wedding.

It would seem that no author can imagine anything beyond the happy ending of humanity as it is prevailing into relative eternity. Well, except for Ursula K. Leguin. She could. Still, character and characters are what we like to project into any of our infinities, or else we might stop turning the pages.

There is a very vague suggestion in this story of the need for a new religion. But any coherent definition for religion, as meant in Western languages, calls it out as insecure masculinity creating mystical patriarchal authority structures, projecting themselves onto a manly God.

Religion would be what is destroying the planet, not what can rescue it. Rescue is effected by nature, as it ever has been, world without end. Amen. It would seem that we must retreat rather than to take over.

The book does describe a kind of retreat. Conscious homeostasis for a species. It beats the goad of wealth. The economy here is turned upside down by the precarious introduction of block-chained carbon currency. A literal turning of doing well into doing good.

I still await the sequel, when science itself exceeds the scientific method, because we will have discovered that God is Love, and that Love is not only romance. That's hardly a novel thought. What's novel is the end of any possibility to model man as a rational animal. Robinson makes quick work taking down neoliberalism, but then it sneaks back in by way of the good life preserved after all.

The recent Atlantic issue calls out Facebook as a doomsday machine, focusing on the occluded nature of how ideologies are now propagated and propagandized. Creating a danger worse than Hitler. (Sorry about that Godwin slip, but it was right there in the Atlantic.) With Hitler, everyone was getting the same garbage ideology, and you could call them all deluded in the same ways. Now we have really intelligent seeming people actually believing crazy stuff. Who knows where it comes from and why it is so compelling?

In just the way that survival choices in the wild happen too quickly for cognition, so they now do for humans as our planful takeover of our planet reaches its apotheosis. Robinson's Brave New (perpetual) World is cognitively generated. That right there is purest fantasy.

But I shall be ever grateful for the imagination to depict such fantastic futures. We need something better than certainty that we will blow it. And his vision is fine and sound. His politics are true, and it's quite clear by the end of this novel that he's a true believer in a gentler kind of love. The ultimate ascendancy of decency.

Meanwhile, we still seek for the Grand Universal Theorem while the earth burns. We have yet to admit that there is no cognitive completion. We have to get out of our own way is all. Not everything can be reduced to physics. Not everything can be computed.

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What is a Meme? Trump is a Meme

First a couple of memories. One was my encounter with Bevis and Butthead. I was introduced to it by right-winger friends of mine, probably tending toward Libertarian, whose behavior and humor was kind of Buttheaded. I was taken aback, thinking maybe that I'd been all wrong about right-wingers. That they really do have a sense of humor. Maybe even edgy senses of humor.

Another friend, more of a Leftie, introduced me to the Simpsons. I thought it rather odd that the Simpsons showed up on Fox TV. Seemed against their brand. 

This all reveals my prejudices, and sure maybe Trump was elected as a kind of joke, the way that someone got a dog into Yale back in my day.

The most cogent theory I've seen about why so many people voted for Trump regards the evident fact that so many people were and remain sick and tired of being called out for behaviors which feel normal to them. They call it political correctness, but for sure it has become political now. Hillary sure blew it with her deplorables comment.

I used to drive out to the tip of Cape Cod quite frequently, out to its historically leftie tip. My extended family has a place there. We never stopped at the tourist tchotchke places, but then more recently when travelling with my daughters, we did. That was still decades ago.

I discovered that there was a mounting issue; that Chinese knockoffs of rather standardized craft works were undercutting the local artisans. 

Well, those local artisans had made their work into memes, and perhaps had even copyrighted them, but Chinese remain and always have been rather disrespectful of intellectual property. As far as I can tell from being in China recently, their reforms have mostly taken the form of happy announcement that what they are selling and what you are buying are fakes. 

Maybe there are penalties for being dishonest about it, or at least when selling to a Westerner. But there don't seem to be penalties for producing fakes. Indeed that's really what powers the Chinese economy. Their so-called meme-manufacturing depends on it. That was highlighted most prominently when hoverboards became a thing. Maybe there was a brand name on them by the time they got to the U.S., but they were hardly ever manufactured in one specific shop, or by one specific (accountable) entity.

Production could be ramped up almost instantly against demand because it was a bottom-up process. Newer small cities in China tend to form around some kind of manufacturing theme. That can mean that lots of manufacturers produce the component parts which designers might use to put together something that is hot within the theme. Or more likely, there is not specific designer and the thing gets iterated, bottom up, by a series of 'innovators.'

All that matters is that someone on the purchasing end really wants this new meme. (I nearly killed myself on my nephews hoverboard, being evidently too heavy or clumsy. It was as fun as flying a drone for me to watch him gracefully zip around though. Well, I've never flown a drone, but you get the idea.)

Anyhow, suddenly you couldn't take these hoverboards on airplanes because their batteries might explode. No quality control. Except later on, the decidedly mainstream Samsung had the same problem. They are not a meme manufacturer, though who knows? They may tend that way more than Apple does, but then you can buy seemingly bit-identical iPhones most anywhere in China for a lot less than the "real" ones. Do they fall off the back of the quality control truck? Are they meme-manufactured based on reverse engineered schematics? Some combination of both?

Then the airplane manufacturer's own batteries exploded once the new 777 (767? I don't remember) jetliner was certified. The fix looked really ad-hoc klutzy to me. Like something I might do.

The first real recognizable meme product was the pet rock. Now interestingly, these things were not all identical, though their packaging was. They were natural artifacts, of the sort that anyone could pick up anywhere. They had no intrinsic value, which was the point. 

As my good buddy who let me help him swap the reels in the drive-in movie place where he was the projectionist would comment back in my relative youth, when you buy cereal the packaging is worth more than the contents. It sure is true that if you try to buy packaging alone, it does always cost more than similar packaging with stuff in it. Anyhow, the cost of cereal has skyrocketed to right the craziness (???).

Lots of pet rocks were sold, probably on the same model that Hallmark sells a couple of vapid pages for prices similar to the cost of a book. Nobody expected the Pet Rock (c) to last and it didn't.

Meme's are a lot more complicated than genes. Or maybe they're just more evident in the macro world. Like the difference between macro and micro economics. Ha! As though economics can be related to hard science!

Anyhow, Trump is certainly a meme. He was packaged by so-called 'reality TV' as a good decider, so that became many peoples' meme. Meanwhile, we on the left have suffered four years of really painful trauma as the media can't help itself from pushing the Great Meme in Charge in a different direction. Not everyone was fond of pet rocks. Not everyone would have found it charming or even amusing to get one for Christmas. It might have felt like that storied lump of coal, which at least contained some heat value. 

Meme's goal, like the goals of genes, is to replicate. Well, you know they don't have goals. I guess you might call it their nature. Whether China is better at promoting meme innovation or the West is is the contest of the ages just now. Magically balanced for the moment, just the way the pro and anti Trumpsters remain, and maybe even as the genders are.  

With the genders, it's about sex and genes and the magic of evolution. More or less. What if it's the same with memes? The sex ratio isn't magic. It's how evolution works. But I've always thought that the two party system was rigged by 'the system.' What if the system is also nature?

More importantly, how do we get off this dangerous razor's edge (they used to call me Larry Darrow in college. It was a meme at the time - looking for oneself; something that in fact I've never indulged in, though I was surely different from my much more goal directed peers). 

I think we've all just about figured out that rational argumentation changes nothing. Except for maybe our blood pressure, in the wrong direction.

I received a tiny bit of note once as a young Chinese teacher, with a short article I wrote to be published for a conference I attended. I remember the conference mostly for sitting next to the son of the guy who "invented" (according to him) Alcoholics Anonymous on the bus ride back. I remember a train ride for a similar reason, when I sat next to a madam Quakenbush, family of the eponymous nutcracker; a business also mostly destroyed by Chinese knock-offs, as far as I can tell.

Anyhow, my article was about how learning Chinese and about Chinese civilization and culture was like gaining binocular vision; your understanding of the world would be one-dimensional without it. I still hold by that.

But the eyes have to get it together, unlike the wandering eyes of lizards. The bicameral mind of man, but I'll have to avoid that digression for now.

I had a bad winter in about 2009-2010 (I think it was). During a stroll in very subzero weather here in Buffalo with my sister, I felt as though a plug had been pulled and crumpled to the ground. I thought it must have had something to do with the bracingly frigid air hitting my lungs. I sat on someone's stoop until I felt a rush of wellbeing, and got up to continue the walk. But I had to crawl up the steps to my apartment and crumpled again on the floor. 

It was Christmas eve. The second time I'd nearly died on Christmas eve and spent it in the hospital. Frankly, I felt relieved. Off the hook. I'll bet a lot of people would. But I also have mild PTSD (sorry, very politically incorrect to make such an analogy, but it seems to fit here) on Christmas eve. I can't help it.

My nurse-practitioner sister - thank goodness she was there - asked if I needed an ambulance. Sure did. It turned out to be a pulmonary embolism, and I well remember the shrinking tunnel vision on the endless ride to the hospital. That reminded me of the time I drowned and felt my entire life present to my mind in an instant. Thankfully didn't get that far this time, although maybe it's something that can happen only once.

A few weeks later, something apparently unrelated happened. Not unrelated to me, but to my doctors (to me, Christmas eve is significant - to them it's random). Doing laundry, I lost my vision. That had happened once or twice as a child (when I sat embarrassed at the dinner table waiting for it to come back, keeping my eyes down) and again as a young adult (when a doctor friend of my wife was excited to witness a migraine in process) so I wasn't terribly alarmed.

But I couldn't see the numbers on my cellphone to call 911. My vision came back enough to take a walk to the ER I realized that my entire field of vision on my right was gone. Not in my right eye, but as in I had to turn around nearly backward to see if traffic was coming from my right to cross the street, and even still I crossed slowly waving my arms.

I still had depth perception. I still had binocular vision. Once again, the doctor was excited to see a classic revelation of what a TIA could do. He knew the locus of the clot with near absolute precision. Textbook.

I'm rather glad I've never achieved more than a modicum of note for my thoughts. I sure wouldn't want to be a one-word meme, the way that Trump and Elon and Zuck and Jobs and Bezos and even Bill surely are now. I wonder what it feels like to be a meme. I mostly doubt that these are even humans in any sense that I could understand. The replicator has overtaken the self, which seems to be what we all crave most of the time. 

Well, they aren't the meme, these single-named behemoths. The meme is something like what a super-successful startup entrepreneur has to look and act like. What a drag, man! That's what I'm glad I'm not. It would feel like a straightjacket on my soul. Look at the contortions Elon has to go through to seem human. As though he weren't a money machine.

As far as being President, I think it should be clear to anyone that Reagan set the bar. A vacant actor, but he made us all feel good. Obama, too, contributed to the meme that became Trump. Now the big O just seems a little too full of himself. Like, 'nobody can say I'm a nobody' and so I'll be and look relaxed in my skin. JFK for sure. Even Nixon, though his actual humanity dragged him down.

There's a balance left and right, see, male and female. Both sides working the memes, er I mean the memes working both sides. And you thought it was some natural balance between progressive and conservative? Silly you. Just like me, you want to blame Trump on the failure of public education. The failure of parenthood. The failure of the family. The failure of community. The failure of religion. 

When it's actually not a failure of anything. It's just the success of memes acting as memes do, as is their nature, which means riding on top of emotionally driven minds for the sake of, well, nature. We're evolving!

Now Daniel Dennett seems pleased with and by the promise of  'top-down design,' which means human design, which means artificial design. That's the bone I have to pick with him, since I find the divide between natural and artificial to be as dangerous (and as artificial!) as the divide between mind and body.

In ancient China - and to a certain extent in modern China still - there was a balance between the cultivated worldliness of Confucianism, and Daoism, the self-so retreat from the contrived world of cultivated pageantry and poetry into the world as it would be if we humans were to flow with it instead of swimming against it. Somehow it was all more civilized than our conservative/progressive divide. Well, the one percent is always rather civilized now isn't it?

Trump is hardly civilized. 

Anyhow it's the finance industry driven by digital tech that's created the soup we live in now. Civilization be damned.

So at what point do the culture-building memes that Dennett (and I!) celebrate turn sour? When do they move off in a destructive direction?

I want to offer a couple of clues. First one is, of course, the advent of artificial intelligence. My beef with Dennett is really about computing as a useful metaphor for mind. Meme production has stepped out from engagement with the continuum of life. It's running on automatic, just the way that chemical processes do in the vacant and dead parts of our cosmos. 

Consider how recently it was that we were all excited and engaged in the quest to get to outer space. Sure it was all corrupt to its core, built on cold-war narratives, and a misled populace. But it was a collective effort, like warfare once was, that promised something better than the destructive orgies of warfare. You know, those destructive orgies from which we've gotten all our new and high technology!

But now, and I mean this very morning, conquering space is a private affair. We don't have to be consulted. Indeed, following Reagan and his successors and assigns, we think private enterprise is doing it better. But we're not all watching. We're hardly paying attention. It's Elon's thing. Bezos' thing. We trust that they will make their profits off our government and that those will cost us less than NASA once did.

Who's the "us?" We haven't been consulted. We aren't going to be consulted. We're consumers. Thanks Ralph, you destroyer of worlds (Corvair was my first love) and of elections. I loved you well.

Now Facebook is being called out for its monopolistic practices. It's about time. And yet everyone I know, left, right and center still wants to fuel the meme generation there. As though distantly connected acquaintances want to share your joy and grief as you build your brand. Is performative emotion even emotion at all? I ask in the same spirit that I ask if Trump is (even) human. I mean of course it is and of course he is, but where does it all lead?

I can be mildly excited about self-driving cars when I imagine being able to call one more easily than I can retrieve my own car for less money than it costs to own that car. But where does it all lead to? What will that economy even look like? More stratified than this one, for certain. The price for using a car will be like the price for cereal.

Can the planet ever afford all of us continuing to get around in personal pods? I guess it can, if you're optimistic about the triumph of sustainable energy. About tech in general. My iPhone claims Artificial Intelligence to manage my battery. Well, if it were intelligence, I could tell it what I want it to do, but Siri can't. I would prefer a good old fashioned algorithm that I could understand in the first place. I'm not about to adjust my life to fit their notion of intelligence.

I guess I wonder if we'll all forget how to read and write, in just the way that I've lost my ability to write Chinese. Because writing in Chinese requires motor memory, which means it requires that you actually do it continually. Blasting (scrolling mostly) through the meme laden emotional roller coaster (scroller coaster?) news feeds and twitter feeds and social media feeds, addictive as it all is, isn't the same as reading a book. No matter how facile we are with the language. Heck, I can do that in Chinese with one hand tied behind my back, and I still have trouble opening up and reading all those classics now replaced on my shelves. Now that I'm living in place rather than on the road.

See what I mean?

Probably not. I'm just a killjoy crank, for sure. This science fiction dude I read sometimes, because he's such a good story teller, Douglas Richards, speculates that perhaps the better species didn't prevail when homo-sapiens won out over the neanderthalers. Our genes are blended, as newly discovered. The winning and losing takes place at a far lower level than whatever an election can demonstrate.

And so, you know, I remain hopeful. A new set of parties will arise. The corruption at the core of our democracy is being brought, gradually, to light. By definition, nature always prevails in the end. That's what nature means. I do retain extravagant hope that culture - the good stuff about the human species - can thrive as a part of nature, and not apart from it.

Now back to reading Kim Stanley Robinson, a good guy champion of technology if ever there was one. Though I inhabit an entirely different world than he does. He'll learn.

The Selfish Meme

Surely the title of this post violates some kind of copyright somewhere. I don't mean to steal it, but it just came to me and I have no attribution for it. Well, the title of Dawkins' book called out the Selfish Gene, and in it he coined the term "meme" defined as the unit for cultural evolution by analogy to the gene, which he also defines in a rather fluid, functionalist manner; steering away from primitive physically defined taxonomy. As though physical boundaries would ever magically match the real ones.

A gene is a replicator unit that persists, regardless of how many ACGT pairings are involved. It's like a word that way, as I seem to remember Dawkins suggesting. Of variable length and complexity of phonemes; syllables; whatever.

I just reviewed (posted here) Dennett's summative work on consciousness, disparaging his all-too-ready acceptance of the computer as metaphor for his dogmatically materialist conception of mind. I think I'm probably as much of a materialist as he is, though I doubt our current meaning for that term can cover the cosmos. It certainly can't quite touch a definition for mind. 

I try not to be dogmatic, though I'm sure I mostly fail. My brand of dogma engages the fact of emotion at a cosmic, elemental level. The level of protons of photons of gluons and quarks. What do these words mean, and why do they take hold? 

Most often I lack the energy to read the hard stuff. There is always something sweeter, more digestible, ready to hand. I would love to make my writing that enticing. Most often I lack the energy. Dennett is easy enough to read, though.

Much of Dennett's summation dwells on words as memes. I think here again he makes an error; one that Dawkins did not make. Whatever a meme is, it might compose multiple words, and should likely be distinguished from anything totally language-dependent. Maybe something closer to "idea," well, except that the term idea is meaningless to me. It reifies thought, as though thought could be stored and catalogued. 

To be more accurate, I can use the term 'idea' as well as you can, but I may be more attuned to how folk usage of the term can lead to consequential misconceptions. For instance, it's common to think of an idea as being 'in the head,' which really means in the brain. It's also common to think that creativity starts there, in the head, and with an idea, which then might be expressed - squeezed out - in ways that others might catch and even understand.

Plato, silly man, used the term, or a similar term, to describe something - a structure? A design schematic? - eternal and even primordial, which can be discovered by deductive reasoning alone. Squares, circles and other such stuff, but also things relating to truth and beauty. These eternal 'ideas' relate to 'ideals' as in God's creation, or something like that. Creativity, thus, relates God to man. An originator.

Right there is my beef with Dennett. He seems, by my read, to reify ideas all over again in his definition for top-down intelligent design. And it's right there that Descartes and his mind/body duality sneaks right back in through the back door. That's despite how much time Dennett spends dubunking Descartes and his Cartesian theater, which is really Plato's cave and on and on. As though there were a real real beyond what we think we know as real. As though there could be a watcher apart from the screen.

A while ago, I spent some time on a realistic challenge to Google's search model. We were attempting to deploy something like Dawkins' usage for meme - without yet having that term ready to hand - to create an infinitely dimensional space where orthogonal intersections would allow the searcher to - independent of language and largely independent of words - find the locus within a few clicks where the search object either was or wasn't. (Null searches that are reliably null are just as useful, if not more so, than successful searches). Word-based searches can't come up with reliably empty locuses. Words from natural languages are just simply inherently ambiguous. Google now makes 'helpful' suggestions about how to get better results when a search comes up vacant. 'Try to use the exact words which might be in what you are looking for." Something like that. If that's not broken, I don't know what is.

Of course the project was impossibly naive. There can be no competition to Google in its ability to replicate the entire Internet, by virtue of near monopoly power, and in particular to replicate it as quickly as it does. Their keyterm auction algorithms are their golden goose, and so long as Google's search results are unapproachable in the overall satisfaction among users for their production, including especially the speed of their production, it remains a fools game to challenge them. The kids seem happy with Google. Or they recently did.

But Google search has been broken from the beginning. Just try getting beyond the popular words, to the expression you are looking for without knowing the exact phrasing of the answer that might be there. Google's game has long been to make money, though that might now have a hitch in it, since their own workers don't necessarily like the amoral money grubbing model any more.

If we were to have an actual government again, it would reasonably exercise eminent domain over search and social networking to bring ownership of ourselves back to the people. (Now I find out that Kim Stanley Robinson proposes this old notion of mine in his new "novel." Dang! I don't think he did the math right about how valuable our individual personal information is, though. He's looking at the wrong sort of theft.) The reason a good government would do that is because the danger of wildly replicating memes is far too great. Without any trueing, wildly replicating memes demonstrably destroy democracy, among other things like scientific understanding, trust in any authority, trust in your fellow man and so forth.

Anyhow, I'm hardly happy with my review of Dennett's book, and this morning I'm struck that we both missed the obvious. That the Internet is functioning as a great accelerator for certain kinds of meme shuffling. It remains to be seen if this will be destructive of consciousness as we mean that term. My prejudice is that it already has been. My goal is to go a little deeper than the click-bait theories about how the Internet ultimately gave us the travesty of Trumpism (or 'I want to find the hope in Trumpism,' which might be the same thing). 

I, on the other very arrogant hand, do have a better definition for mind than Dennett's, but let's defer that for a moment, shall we? I haven't been very successful communicating my own definition, so I'd like to come at it the long way 'round this time.

For now, as shorthand, I'll say that mind rides along on physical structures (I can't and won't isolate the brain, for reasons I hope you shall soon see) as that set of mechanisms which host some set of memes. To be strict with the analogy to genes, I would have to say that the memes, in fact, form mind. That would be a step closer to origination than to say that memes 'inform' mind, as though mind were separate from its forming.

As is the case with genes, these memes draw from and extend throughout all of cosmic history, in particular gathering strength once life takes hold in the cosmos. Of course I would make the claim that life had already taken hold at the instant of that Big Bang in whose thrall we all remain. But once again, I'm getting ahead of myself (I wonder if I shall ever catch up). 

To this point, I'm only quibbling with Daniel Dennett. He agrees that mind is built on memes. Dennett doesn't start with words as memes. In his usage, words are a type of meme. I would say that's wrong; that words only facilitate meme formation when a certain type of communication happens. Or in other words when something like what most people still mean by an "idea" forms in another mind in a way reliably identical to what was in the mind of the "originator" of the idea - more properly the originator of the communication. The sender. Of course, I don't much believe in original ideas - inventions - either, so I still have a lot of 'splainin to do.

Interestingly, when Dennett defines "information," he does so in a way that makes information far more similar to Dawkins' memes that his usage of words would be. He points out that the same information could be had by different parties without any direct communication or sharing. But information itself, like the gene, might be embodied in a variety of forms.

Information leads to sense. Words make sense. Ideas can be communicated. My premise is that what defines an idea is its emotional valence. The person on the other end has to care about it.Want it. Need it even. Memes ride on enthusiasms. Think money. Think sex. Think what it is we do when we "read" the texts swirling on the Internet. Social media. Tweets. News. Shock. Awe. 

Several people have noted that when boats arrived in the Americas, the indigenous peoples literally couldn't see them, because they were so far off from what was real to them. I'm truly sorry that I don't have an attribution for this, but I've come across it lots of times in lots of places. Google it! I think it's an observation often made these days about UFOs. That they're real, but that, by and large, we can't see them.

Some people see ghosts. Lots and lots of people. Some people see Trump as a great leader. Some people think that it would be a kind of ultimate evil were the government to mandate vaccines on the basis of legal sanctions. Perhaps they imagine end-of-the-world scenarios, where sterilization is an as-yet-undiscovered side effect. Children of Men. Perhaps they're blind to the wanton destruction already happening by loss of trust.

I did recently find a solid definition for "idea." Simply put, it's the protected part of "intellectual property" in a capitalist "knowledge economy." This might be similar to an attribution Dennett makes to someone named McKay, that "information in general is that which justifies representational activity." That, in turn relates to a different attribution to someone called Luciano Floridi that "economic information is whatever is worth some work", which reminds me of Unger's definition. Dennett then proposes his own working definition for what he calls 'semantic information' as "design worth getting." Not bad. Now embedded in that sentence right there are a lot of problematical assumptions, which I may be too lazy to upack just now. But at least we are moving toward a workable definition for what an idea might be.

Internet search is all about money. Things (words, pictures, objects, concepts, even 'ideas') have become memes, and these memes have proper names that are trademarked and copyrighted and which might refer to actual things which are patented. That's why people like me might be so frustrated by Google. What I'm looking for is almost always buried beneath what everyone else is looking for, which generally has something to do with money, honey. On one side or the other of the search algorithm. 

Now I'm not saying that Google is not an honest broker. They know better than to allow search results to be paid for directly. Well, of course they're paid for, by way of auction, but they know that user confidence would plummet if they were to cook the search so that the highest bidder always came out on top. The bidders are making bets on what searchers are looking for when they search on certain words, or combinations of words. They're betting its worth paying for their ads to come out on top. Google is not as stupid as VW with their finger on the pollution readings. Sort of. I like VW cars, so there you go. It makes me sad that I'm stuck with Subaru. "Love" more cynical even that Google's old motto.

Even before Google got in the game, people were talking about an information explosion, and even a knowledge explosion. I thought those were perfectly ridiculous notions, but now I'm not so sure. Dennett makes a useful distinction between top-down design of the sort that human engineers might do, say, and bottom-up of the sort that happens by way of natural evolution.

My burden is to highlight what knowledge is on a deeper and to me more satisfying level than the glib term "knowledge explosion" can mean. I guess I have typically supposed that the information content of the world has always been rather constant. That may not be true if the evolution of life can be construed as an increase in information "content." But it still seems to me that information is all about what binds us and therefore less something that grows apart from us. Or in other words, it's less of an explosion than it is a consolidation of many minds to create a rather more collective design function, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and well beyond what any individual could accomplish. I quibble with knowledge as an individual possession, preferring that it always be called out in the collective.

So knowledge - individual knowledge - is a partaking in a more collective knowledge which must be, in the end, trued against something worthy to be called reality. Truing means it has to work, I guess. What a carpenter does with a straightedge ruler.

So we live in an age of consummate irony. Virtually everyone is obsessed with the selfie self, and fear of death is really fear of disappearance of something like personality. We transpose our animal fear of death into a fear of losing our Narcissus image of our self. This is the illusion that Dennett should be calling out - not consciousness, which is a very real quality shared by all the animals.

Richard Rorty's ironism comes closer to how knowledge is formed than could anything relating to artificial intelligence, computing and what-you-will. The irony is that as we become more individualistic, we do that in direct response (reaction) to the fact of a more hive-like mind in which we participate. We seek "authenticity" to the point of mutilating our bodies if we weren't born with the right one - the one that is the essential me - as though we could invent our very selves. Can you tell that I despise and eschew the term 'authenticity' even more than I do "idea?" Well, they're certainly related, those two terms are.

(Don't get me wrong, I celebrate transgendered people. It's just that I focus on the fiction of any gender binary more than I do on idealization of the body. Beauty, in the end, is a most powerful cliche. But still cliche for its power. And as though there could be anything interesting about the naked body. We're all the same without clothes on, more or less.)

Memes would enable bottom-up development of mind, I suppose, which isn't quite the same as evolution. Or maybe it could be if one understands these matters in relation to entropy, the way that information theory goes, or as life goes against the normal grain. Just as we think we're taking control, we're losing it. All of our fixes represent the triumph of Moloch. Nobodaddy. Consciousness economicus.

Now those of us who read lots of books, and who even enjoy the arduous business of thinking tend to the left of Trumpsters, I should think. We would tend to rationalize God away, say, although not always. We might even suppose that only the great unwashed masses of people who voted for Trump allow their minds to be taken in by memes, while we actually know things.

There may be some truth to that, but I rather suspect that our minds are as fully in thrall to memes as anyone's. We can be perfectly dogmatic about what we know, and damn the evidence. Academic polemical argumentation can be just as lively as a monster truck rally. 

It used to be patently obvious to me that there is no more information in the cosmos than there ever was. But that would be true only if humans (and any other critters in the cosmos with rational agency connected to their consciousness) are really not adding anything cosmically with our top-down design thinking. I still think we're probably not.

But at least I have a definition for mind. It's a social construct that can't be had by oneself alone. In essence, that's why you'll never be able to upload your mind and experience yourself virtually. Mind is not only in-formed by perception, mind is inseparable from perception. Perception relates to what Dennett calls the affordances of manifest ontology. Manifest ontology is not the same as the scientific image, which can apparently exist in mind alone in conjunction with theories and instrumentation.

What makes the scientific image more real is that it enables ever more powerful top-down design. Which really only means that the scientific image is ever more culture and language independent. Ever more universal. It has to be trueable everywhere in the cosmos.

Just now, I declare, the mind is being hijacked by the viruses of money. Apart from nature, we mostly thrive on the basis of money. It defines and guides our enthusiasms, and these, in turn, determine which replicators - memes - persist. Once money is separable from value, which it is as soon as money is separable from labor and material, it takes on a life of is own, apparently. It becomes, in essence, a deadly virus, turning all memes against us for its own spread.

How can money be separable from "value?" Money *is* value. So here again we have to make a distinction between the real and the artificial. The "real" value of anything on the market is nearly impossible to know now, no matter how much Bill Gates might not think so.

Mind is composed of and by conception, which is the holding of ideas in relation to one another. Ideas aren't acted on by forces and so can't be directly perceived. But they are formed, ideas are, by perception, and especially by the sorts of perception which enable us to read and write. Conceptions inform what we commonly think of as our will, which in turn defines agency.

I maintain that concepts are as real as percepts and that emotion exists in the place of the forces of physical reality as that which defines the relative movement of concepts. The accident of some replicator's persistence is as much emotional reality as it is the physical survival of the gene. 

So I do believe that we still require a way to distinguish the living from the deadly. I myself would make the dividing line that between digital and living models. That's because digital is divided from real in the sense that genetically derived organisms are not. While the signal to noise ratio can be improved to the point of zero noise with digital, fidelity to actual reality will always involve an absolute break. I am connected to you in ways that cannot be digitally replicated. It's an emotive and lived and living connection.

I am tired. I will have to return to this. Making sense of and with words is hard hard work. But I can tell you this much now, having nearly forgotten my promise at the beginning to come back around to mind. Mind is mostly composed on emotion, much as all survival is. There has to be an emotional valence to "ideas." Otherwise, no matter how much sense they make, they just fall dead. In the long run.

God, indeed, is love. It's what makes meaning. 

 

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read Consciousness Explained not too long after it was published way back when in 1991. Well, I read it a while after that, but time is so relative. I found the book very satisfying. This new one, not so much. There are too many discordances, which disturb my ear. Perhaps the two of us have grown distant.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t brilliant and important exposition here; there is. Indeed, I agree with almost all of what he has to say, even including the stuff about self-consciousness as illusion (I think he mistakenly leaves the self- part of self-consciousness off, though). We are of the same ilk.

But I am disappointed that Dennett has been almost entirely captivated by the computer as metaphor for machine-mind. He doesn’t seem aware that this brings Descartes back in via the back door, as it were. Dennett privileges ‘brain,’ where Descartes, at least, privileges ‘mind.’ Brain leads, rather haphazardly, to culture by way of the bottom-up work of memes. Meme’s are Richard Dawkins’ gene analogs.

Another ilk denizen, Benjamin Bratton, rehearses the rather obvious, but to me tired, trope that we will know intelligent life by what amounts to the artificiality of its structures. He’s more subtle than that, but in essence he means the unnatural stuff. Stuff derived from what Dennett calls the scientific image. The scientific image represents those affordances which are not part of the Darwinian game of life. Artificial engineering is top-down.

It may be that the thing I prize most about Dennett’s writing is that it begins to bridge the gap between the natural and the artificial. I believe that to be a chasm as dangerous as the gulf Descartes posited between mind and body. But, along with Bratton, Kim Stanley Robinson, and almost everyone else with half a brain, Dennett celebrates the artificial as the inevitable way onward.

As Mark Solms – and I’m sure others as well – has adequately demonstrated, the cognitive areas of the brain – serially or altogether – can be obliterated and yet consciousness remains for humans. It is only when the emotive areas more toward the stem are gone that consciousness goes as well. This evident fact makes it seem as though to associate consciousness with humans alone goes way too far “up” the tree of life. Surely reptiles are already conscious. I’m also sure that only humans are self-conscious. Memetically so, and in precisely the way that Dennett outlines.

Riccardo Manzotti agrees with me about the reptiles. Most decisions, and surely decisions related to survival and reproduction and therefore relevant to any discussion of Darwinian evolution, are made impulsively, which means emotively. Cognition is simply too slow. And yet neither Manzotti nor Dennett nor most other ‘consciousness’ researchers have much to say about emotion.

It would seem that this observation about how emotive impulse happens applies only to those creatures with a beating heart. Surely bacteria don’t have emotion. They play the game of survival on a much more elemental level. We shall see.

In any case, cognition is simply too slow for the important decisions. Well, that depends on what you mean by important. I mean life-or-death here, in the context of evolution. The real important decisions. The ones that grant purchase. Those are all cognitive, right?

I don’t mean that emotional response might not have access to settled cognitive understanding in mind when emotive centers take over decision-making, which they generally do, especially under duress. We can and will and do rationalize our success after the fact, as Dennett also urges us to understand, but we’d better have a pretty intuitive sense of how the world works if we hope to make it through life.

Manzotti – correctly, I believe – doesn’t locate consciousness in the brain. He locates it in what Dennett calls manifest reality, which is what we perceive all around us. Manzotti calls his theory ‘the spread mind.’ He calls manifest reality the real. That’s what we perceive, composed by what Dennett calls more broadly our human affordances. Our ontology. The things important to us.

It would be very hard to have an emotional response to what Dennett seems to believe is actually real. The stuff that is not manifest, but only available by means of the methodologies of science. He calls this the scientific image; it’s what’s required if we are to do top-down intelligent design. It’s what’s required for the really important decisions. The ones that take time.

Traces of manifest reality are not stored in the brain as memory (another term robbed of meaning by computer metaphors), but are rather, according to Manzotti, persistently present by way of the brain’s continual refreshing of actual perception. What we call memory is delayed perception, not its shadow. Dear Plato. We live in the light, in perpetual connection with the real. Present, past, and to a certain extent, future. We navigate.

What is present to the mind is always real. For me, this is demonstrated easily enough when I feel ‘memories’ flooding back as I revisit places and things which have been absent from me for a long time. Though my mind dims, I feel reasonably confident that I distinguish the real from the fantasy when I am in the presence of artifacts from my past. Details remain up for grabs, of course, especially in negotiation with members of my early cohort.

Interestingly, Dennett’s real real is largely a metaphorical real. We don’t see subatomic ‘particles’ and yet we know they are there. The word particle is just a metaphoric handle on something we will never experience directly by way of perception; we can experience such reality only by means of our mind and through our instruments, as mathematically reified. 

And yet those particles are surely real. Scientific understanding composes the means that we have for what Dennett calls top-down ‘intelligent design.’ And it is surely on the basis of that top-down designing that humanity is now far and away the dominant life-form on the planet. By Dennett’s measure some 98% of non-marine vertebrate biomass now is ours; mostly cattle. 

Sheep, I’d say. The human world is raveling, and I find Dennett to be refreshingly incisive about why, though he says nothing at all about this. Along with a few others, many of whom hold sway on the stages which form public opinion (surely it is not knowledge!), Dennett seems to celebrate this moment of tech ascendancy which gives the silliest of memes as much credence as the good stuff.

In really simple terms, the scientific image enables us to care for more than ourselves alone. Each increment in scientific understanding builds trust in a shared reality which can cross all the relativity of language and culture on manifest earth. The scientific image is not more real. It’s more universal. Is all.
Meanwhile, polling demonstrates that upwards of half our human population begs to differ.

Dennett calls out the idiots for believing in stuff that is manifestly not true. God. Creationism. Vitalism. Man as a special creature; this last even as he finds man just about that special by the end of his disquisition.

The ‘why’ (the ‘what for?’) is that much of what composes human comprehension is composed of memes, which are designed bottom-up the way that genes are. They have a life of their own, as it were, riding on our enthusiasms. Which is to say they are formed and informed emotively, though no self-respecting consciousness researcher would ever comment that way. Consciousness is serious. Emotion is not. And I’m the one who’s not celebrating tech. I guess that’s because I live by feel.

Not so very long ago, Albert Einstein made a shift among received physical knowledge which made all the difference for the twentieth century. His relativity equated mass with energy, and reality has been destabilized ever since.

There is a charming passage in Dennett’s book where he recalls being with students outdoors in the cold on a starry night, and learning to “see” the plane of the ecliptic across our solar system. The guide was an historian of science. The view apparently clicked once you did it right, in much the way that Einstein’s shift must have clicked for so many of us, as it surely did for me. I remember the very moment just as I remember Kennedy’s assassination in a younger moment.

It is time for the next important shift. Emotion is no epiphenomenon of humanity’s interactions. To suggest that emotion is limited that way is precisely how Descartes sneaks back in through the back door. He pulls Plato along by the hand. Mind is made special, even while Dennett correctly calls out consciousness as illusion. What he means, I think, is that comprehension is illusory when comprehension is by way of manifest affordances alone. 

But consciousness is very real. Just ask a lizard. Unconscious you die in the face of challenges.
Our comprehension is based on a reality at the remove of metaphor. Our consciousness is based on manifest reality, plain and simple. It makes us care about ourselves as an individual. Any creature which reproduces sexually does that. And the bacteria . . .?

We would not survive – we shall not survive – without effective engagement with our ‘affordances,’ as Dennett calls them, borrowing from gamer theory, perhaps. Gamers having borrowed it from psychology, and so forth. These are the things that we touch. The interfaces. We cannot touch what Dennett refers to as the non-illusory real world of things as they really are, though we might be able to understand them.

For some reason, Dennett is fond of kayaks as examples of bottom-up mindless design. You don’t have to understand how a kayak works in theoretic scientific detail to participate in making it better. In just the way that the thousands of workers on the Manhattan project didn’t understand what they wrought. The brains – the bosses – presumably did. Dennett calls out General Leslie Groves. Not Oppenheimer?? Groves is a barker. He orders, and not by reason alone. A mover of men. (Dennett also explains away the invisibility of women on our historical stages).

Surely now we design kayaks in the same way that we design superyachts. Top down! And yet they look the same as the received kayaks. I suppose it’s the plastic, Benjamin, which makes them better now. I’m guessing that Dennett is something of a paddler.

I am something of a dabbler myself. In consciousness, but also in computers and wooden boats and canoes more than kayaks, and physics and classical Chinese poetry, and, you know, science fiction with a little gamer theory thrown in. I’ve even been a dabbler in grad school, several times, with nothing to show for it. 

I am clearly no expert. I wear that as a badge of pride. I often see the forest for the trees. I made my shift way before 1991. This still leaves me alone and forlorn, and so my language often becomes reckless. Sorry. 

So here’s the shift, plain and simple. Let’s say some genetic mutation hits it. Dennett underplays the shifting ground for evolution – the environmental field for accident – and overplays fitness as though there could be progression up the tree of life without the challenges of environmental shiftiness. Fit requires ground. Hitting it means fitting in to the new world. And the world is always new.

The embrace of mutation is an expression of love. I mean expression in the sense that dogs express urine. It spreads. Call it cosmic love. Why not? The cumulative accidents of evolution clearly result in ever more complicated life. And so, it is no longer proper to call out random as meaningless, even though there can be no elan vital to distinguish the quick from the dead, as Dennett clearly demonstrates. Ah, but computers can’t do random, remember.

Emotion is as real as are those subatomic ‘particles.’ The trouble is that we don’t feel it the same way. It’s not perceptual, directly. Emotional affordances are rather subtle.

Just now we remain in the embrace of dead-ender understanding. Call it hate. Call it what it is. The tech titans whom Dennett can’t seem to help admiring exploit a loophole in property law (I checked with Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who should know). Click to agree that you don’t own yourself. It would be illusion to think that you did.

There is conception in the cosmos before human mind thought itself up by its bootstraps. Conception is relation without the exchange of particles. No force. No impingement. Mind is present everywhere, as time shall reveal. Mind consists in conceptual apprehension. Understanding, if you will. Comprehension without a grip.

And time is the direction set by evolution, not by physics. Physics is agnostic about time. And yes Virginia, we still do participate in evolution, but not in ways that should cause you to be concerned about your sexual prowess. We do it by way of memes. Culture is how mankind came to dominate our planet, and we did that overnight once we had domestication of plants and animals both. Once we had words.

But we have stepped out from the life force. I agree with Dennett on nearly everything he has to say, and he has laid the table perfectly for a better argument. He just simply doesn’t have his terms quite right. 

To me it does seem evident that an individual human is far more complex than a galaxy could be without us. Mostly we are the ground – the environment – for all the creatures which populate our bodies. Some share our DNA. Most don’t. Person to person communication by way of language is far more interesting and complex than whatever it is Elon Musk wants to do about Mars. 

And yet we prefer to talk to our phones. Remember when we talked through them? Half of us seem to hate the other half. No surprise in that, if we’re talking bottoms up.

We carry around a massive proportion of all the genetic success stories from our extended being on earth. We are not severable from any of earth, far far into the distant past. And into our future, if we even have a future left. Once we bring all the other creatures under our dominion, as God meant us to do, we will have lost our mind. Perhaps we already have. Truth or illusion, Martha, truth or illusion? I should know, I’ve lost mine plenty of times.

As we troll the universe searching for intelligent life elsewhere, all we know to do is to look for the artificial regularities that we are so very proud of down here to earth. But what if these clever structures, these intelligent designs of ours, are the temporary structures. The ones that can’t last because they have always – universally now – presaged the demise of intelligent life. Hubris. Trumpism. Which side are you on, brother? Which side are you on?

Walk past an overdesigned building, especially in China, which hasn’t been maintained, and it will be indistinguishable from one in the process of being built. Except for the grass and the cracks which let the light come in.

As death crystallizes all around us, life will always look like life. Messy. Bloody. Shitty. Smelly. And rich and full and good. The bread also rises. Intelligent life has better things to do than to be lured in by nature’s gambit. Nature always wins. 

One of the most interesting and exciting parts of Dennett’s disquisition involves the deception that is required to preserve our individual selves; the secrets. I’m using ‘our’ in the broadest possible sense. Nature is indeed a trickster. 

Really, at the end of my read, I retain only the tiniest quibble with Dennett. That is that he falls prey to the illusion that anything at all can be originated in the mind. He retains, in other words, a distinction between discovery and invention, which is something I, for one, cannot do. Our mind does not do work on a replica of reality. It is part of reality, as Dennett urges us to understand. The trouble is that he gives mind a severable existence. Nature will trick us out of that. We are such easy marks. We are chumps.

Ah, but the man makes me very happy! I thank you, Daniel Dennett!

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Is it Real, or is it AI Photoshop?

Yes, OK, so I'm watching Nicole Kidman on this HBO series which is a fairly formulaic murder mystery, though fun and gorgeous to watch. As an older man myself, relating more to Hugh Grant than to Nicole, I would rather like to know what she actually looks like. I do remember how stunningly gorgeous she was when she appeared on the scene, and for sure she's still beautiful. But even beyond my looking for signs of age, there's something just off, and still more off-putting. 

But then there was a timely report, in the New York Times, I think, about real-looking generated faces. The "AI" behind them was obvious enough, but really, may I have a personality with my being? I'm following on where I left off last time, more in the direction of AI scripted poetry, which my friend in the bread-line was already doing with classical Chinese sometime in the 80's. Now it's touted as something new. That's innovation for you!

Of course the various click-feeds are full of yachts and life-style scenarios generated in exotic places, with well-known faces, all over the globe and one is drawn. We might be drawn to Mars, Elon (now number two on the planet), if you were to generate something attractive about it. Let us talk with seductively generated screen projected AI women, maybe? Those of us who remain gender-retro.

My friend Benjamin just Tweeted a question asking something about whether the complexity of the non-living substrate on a planet had to be related to the advent of life. He called it a planetarity question or something like that. And where, dear Benjamin, is the divide between life and non-life? At the fingernails? Rocks are as much a part of me as the rest of creation.

Computers are rocks, for all the dynamism you may stuff them with. But these digital omnipaths are more cut off from life than the rest of the cosmos. That is by very definition. They still have to reach out and touch the real to get random. As though random were meaningless.

And so, of course, I prefer to commune with alien life while sitting still, so long as I can tell a written narrative from one produced for TV, or by Dan Brown and his massive teams. If more people had read Melville's The Confidence Man, and fewer had been watching "reality" TV, we wouldn't be in this mess. 

Well, that's hardly true. Sure we would. Anyhow, it is very pleasant to witness Joe Biden plodding along with fairly revolutionary moves. Much though I might have preferred someone younger, and to his left, it now is clear that he is likely the only one who could have beaten Trump. And I will love him forever for that.

There is real and there is Memorex (remember that one? from the dark ages when the music industry informed most of what would become IT?). There is writing and there is the Codex. Or wait, maybe I have it backwards. Maybe highly scripted is the good stuff. I know that the disappearance of handwriting is making a massive difference.

Seduce us all off-planet to relieve the burden. Hyper-fertile wanderings in the void. Eternal merriment, attracted by whatever is constructed to please our choosing. I don't buy any of it.

Desolation

I sit now in my new apartment, up high and very bright as the sun rises to my view. Worried at first that it would be too warm, now I worry that it might be chilly. The decor is mostly distributed and the boxes mostly gone. I don't understand how I put that many boxes into storage from the smallest U-Haul trailer available, pulled across the Adirondacks with a tiny Jetta wagon.

But then I am an idiot in any field where I'm not an expert, and I'm an expert nowhere. That has been a conscious choice. Of course, I'm also radically uncertain about what choice is and what consciousness is. I don't think that choice is the same thing as agency, and I have a strong feeling that agency goes along with consciousness and that, naturally, consciousness is not a specifically human attribute.

I guess that makes my world-view about as weird as a Trumpster's. They are right that we lefties confuse choice and agency though. We who have never faced down survival even for an instant. Choice is what you do while shopping. I'm not good at it.

The decor that I'm enjoying is accumulated donations and hand-me-downs, pretty much as though I were living in a consignment shop. In place of actual art, which could be gotten from actual acquaintances, I am surrounded by, well, actual art, but not edgy art. All from acquaintances, much of it Chinese. I wish I could find that gorgeous scroll that I filmed as it was painted. Where could I have put it? 

I would be in China now, if not for aging out of who they will accept and except for Trump spoiling our prospects there, and across the globe. I would feel comfortable going out and joining the teeming crowds on the street in China. Nothing would feel familiar and I would feel cramped in whatever housing I might afford. With views out the window not so comfortable as these, my hometown views.

But I would feel more comfortable than you would, and happy, and I would be rid of this sickening dread that our Republic has ended. The government in China would feel solid, even if not the government I would wish for. I have been wishing for America all my life.

Trump is hardly to blame. He is the manifest symptom of a certain brand of capitalism run amok. Where comfort was all we wanted and were finally granted. We stopped participating in community-forming conversations and spoke mostly about the world we knew from screens big and small. 

Those worlds have always been somehow more interesting than the one we inhabit. It was always a latent possibility that mobs would rule here in the US of A; that the ultimate Confidence Man would take office, because we'd long since given up on civic education. 

Ours was not supposed to be indoctrination, though it often was. We were to be allowed to form our own commitments to something that just made sense. Like More Light Presbyterian Sunday school just around the corner now (This was never my plan. I've never had a plan). Dad is buried there, his ashes placed in the memory garden, and somehow among my debris was the nap rug that Mom would have made for me on mandate for the church's preschool. I was hoping for a bathroom rug, but my kids won't let me use this one. I don't think it would survive a washing anyhow. 

We were always expected to make our own choice, and it was supposed to make sense as the right one. Now it would seem that we crave to be told by someone in television drag. God damn you Ronnie. You started it. Or was it JFK? 

I don't know why I don't have edgy in me, back to my artistic deficit again. I guess it's for the same reason that my clothes are drab, fusty, off, and tending to conventional. I always appreciate edgy, and admire those who live it. I lack a certain kind of confidence, I guess. I guess I prefer comfort and don't like being noticed. First things first, I put opaque drapes over bedroom and kitchen windows. 

Ah, but I shall soon put a loaf of bread in the oven. There is no bread to buy in stores that is worth eating. In China, where bread is not popular, the noodles, the dumplings are reliable, although they try their damnedest to replace Mom and Pop with corporate fast-food on the US model. With US money, as far as I can tell. The Age of Ambition. It's a trust thing. Germs in food when the government is not on it.

And I'm back to shopping once every three weeks. Yesterday at 6AM when I had the store to myself. Paranoid now because I'd forgotten to buy parchment paper, and doubted my ability to make bread right without it. I dashed in to the store again, but there were lines, and my throat is sore this morning. Likely because of the apartment heat. 

I discover that I'm newly incompetent, reverting to a circumstance I can't remember. I was competent in my trailer, and here I still duck in fear that the smoke alarm will go needlessly off at my cooking. The way it does in my tiny house. I have neighbors not to disturb now.

It chilled again last night after a near summery yesterday for my stair climbs. I am free now from gluten free, but also forgot to buy a pizza pan. Whatever happened to those basics? How much did I toss when I couldn't lift the tongue of the trailer? I will buy cast iron this time. Next I dare to venture out. Our polity is that destroyed.

The science fiction I will write about our future will be no fiction. The Tesla trucks and moon shots are already a joke. The MC rather charmingly full of himself, since at least he doesn't pretend to be an actor, nor even Steve Jobs. There are too many of us craving comfort and the market will supply it fine. The collapse will be for loss of will, and for agency concentrated in too few of us. The rest overtaken by frustrated ambition. Turned against one another, all over again.

Choice is what you make in the store. During leisure time after digesting what you've learned in school. Agency is about survival. Reptiles do it. There''s something in there about trust which determines the distinction. Choice requires a degree of comfort.

I am at that age when I can't remember where I saw something or where I read it, or where I put it, or what my room layout was at the last place. I can't distinguish between memories of some dream state or what I might have watched on TV. This will increasingly be the state of each of us. Call it Alzheimer's, call it what you will, it's the natural end of a mediated experience of life. 

We live on Mars already, though Werner Herzog might call the attempt to go there obscene. We have sex with onscreen obscenity. It's how we experience life. Elon Musk uses the word 'consciousness' for what it is we must preserve that he seems to presume only humans have. But reptiles were already conscious. Herzog is right that we would be locusts on the cosmos once we despoil our home and decamp elsewhere.

If by humanity we mean only that kind of clever comfort preservation that technology is so good at improving, then we are already dead and gone. The masses who will die when the machine completes its falling apart will be a redundancy. Will have been. They - we - had not been living anymore in the first place.

When yesterday - was it the day before? - I finally finished unboxing all my Chinese books, I did feel of sound mind. So much can change in a day. I went to bed too early and awakened hung over by the pain and exhaustion of moving. My daughter came by and we wore masks and opened the windows - there was a breeze and we felt safe from one another - to give me some final pointers on the picture and furniture placements. It was a completion and a start to my new life. No matter how much is left to do, I feel settled enough. I was too tired even to accept her offer of a stuffed pepper, preferring not to go down and out, and therefore preferring to eat a frozen pizza. Like taking drugs, based on how I feel this morning.

Yes, my science fiction of our future will be underpopulated and engaged in human activity, like those Chinese poets that I felt certain only yesterday that I would finally master. My little library exceeds the offerings of most university collections that I've checked out. This time, when I unboxed my collection for the upteenth time, I felt that I could finally read them and catalogue them properly on the shelf.

Was it my time in the salt-mines of translation, or was it the sheer repetition of the unboxing, or some combination of both? Could I possibly be settled enough now? Would I sit? Will I also unbox my notebooks from graduate school? Where would it get me, as though I weren't preparing for this for my whole life? I no longer have to work for the man. Or was it always for my ex? The man works for me, until the banks collapse. A small stipend for sure. Lower even than what I lived on in graduate school. I've never left that lifestyle, really. I never did graduate.

Like me, those Chinese ancients who complained of exile and destitution were elites. The Chinese knew how not to overproduce elites,  and still to honor the farmers and peasants above the businessmen (I blew my final read this side of the paywall for this link. Paywalls are being raised everywhere now, and screw the People who don't deserve elite knowledge). The library is closed. I'm reading Daniel C. Dennett's new book on electronic loan. He's wrong about consciousness, apparently, but nobody else is reading Manzotti. Hardly. I'm so surprised and disappointed to find, so far, that Dennett has retreated inside the head.

None of us can break free of our Western Platonic world of ideas, although I finally found a cogent definition for ideas - for the word "idea" - behind a paywall that lets me in just once. I struggle through the read, because it represents the dismal science, economics, where as a social scientist of education, I am by definition deficient. An amateur. An idea is that aspect of a design which can be monetized. Q.E.D.

There were so many fewer words written back when in China. And here in the West. Each one carried so much more weight. And yet those poets were in chains. They chafed. And they prevailed - they persisted through the ages - if and as they outwitted their superiors, who were never their betters. Legions of emperors will be forgotten before we forget Du Fu. Though I do have Chairman Mao's calligraphy in a place of honor. "Study Marxism and Leninism." It's beautiful. 

There were few enough words that classical Chinese became an easy candidate for computer analysis. As if the computers could find something elusive to the generations which preserved those words. It was worth reading them nevermore. I learned about that in the bread-line during the first international conference on Redology, the esoteric discipline of studying The Story of the Stone; The Dream of the Red Chamber. I was there, rubbing shoulders with the luminaries. I proved to myself that I was there when I unearthed the conference report among my excavations for this move. Trust me.

We were modern and now we are postmodern, which only means that we don't believe in anything anymore. Only power and fighting the man. That is no way to expand out into the cosmos. That is no way forward. The words were once the promise of a future. In the beginning. Now they are Sound and Fury, signifying nothing all over again.