Ktismatics

That Book is DONE, Bitches!

For months I’d been hoping to finish writing the first draft by tomorrow. Then I couldn’t quite get started, and then the writing was going slowly, and gradually I resigned myself not to finishing on time. But wait! About two weeks ago I began realizing that what I’d been thinking was the first half or first third of a fairly long novel was turning into a self-contained shorter book, with a tight story and an ending well in view. So I did a last push and voilá, this afternoon it’s done, a day ahead of schedule. Sure there’s editing to be done, but at the end of the day I kicked that book’s ASS!

Is it a short novel or a novella? I don’t give a damn what you call it, just call it DONE! Here’s the last sentence:

As he followed the hostess across the square a courier walked up to him, asked him to sign, and handed him the little white box with the gold ribbon.

The Now: Reality or Illusion?

God Detection Neurons?

Here’s a second installment on Thomas Metzinger, following up on yesterday’s post.

If certain aspects of consciousness are ineffable, we obviously cannot correlate them with states in our brains… But pinning down the neural correlates of specific conscious contents will lay the foundation for future neurotechnology. As soon as we know the sufficient physical correlates of apricot-pink or sandalwood-amber, we will in principle be able to activate these states by stimulating the brain in an appropriate manner. We will be able to modulate our sensations of color or smell, and intensify or extinguish them, by stimulating or inhibiting the relevant groups of neurons. This may also be true for emotional states, such as empathy, gratitude, or religious ecstasy.

– Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel, pp. 19-20

Neuroscientific research has already made good progress in identifying brain coordinates for color perception, and investigation of the role of mirror neurons in empathy is a hot topic in the field. But being able to stimulate the neurons directly doesn’t belie the more important empirical evidence that these neurons are usually activated by information extracted from the environment. I.e., the parts of the brain that detect the color apricot-pink are tuned in to specific frequencies of radiomagnetic waves reflected by the surfaces of objects out there in the world, detected by photoreceptor cells in the retina, and transmitted via neural pathways to the brain.

So what about religious ecstasy? Already it can be artificially stimulated by shysters and hucksters; some day brain probes might be able to do the trick. But just because the religious ecstasy neurons can be juked doesn’t imply that all religious ecstasy is an illusion. Color-detecting neurons detect features of environmental surfaces; mirror neurons detect features of other humans. Might not religious ecstasy neurons detect features of other sorts of non-human, super-powerful sapient beings that are out there in the environment somewhere?

I know this idea has been proposed before, that the gods have equipped humans with internal mechanisms for detecting the gods’ presence or for receiving their messages. Metzinger refers to our internal representation of the environment as a “tunnel” because of its narrow bandwidth. We are equipped to detect only a small fraction of the almost unimaginably rich environment in which we are immersed. Maybe the gods are out there chattering and emitting vibes all the time, but we just can’t pick up the signals.

Humans who have never previously seen a snake exhibit fear on first contact with one. Presumably this is because the instinct to fear snakes was adaptive in the environment in which humans evolved. Our ancestors who had active snake-fear neurons avoided snakes, didn’t get bit, and so survived to pass on the snake-fear gene. Surely some ancestors who didn’t fear snakes managed to survive, and so there are surely some among us today who do not instinctively fear snakes. But there’s certainly no evolutionary pressure for the snake-fearing gene to go extinct in a snake-free environment. The snake-fear neurons are still there in the brain even if the bearer of that brain never once encounters a snake in the world.

So what about the god-detector neuron? Most people in the world claim to detect the presence of the gods. In a sense it doesn’t matter whether these billions of people’s god-detector genes are activated by real gods in their environment or whether they are artificially stimulated. The point is that these hypothetical god-detector neurons can be activated. Maybe in the evolutionary environment it was adaptive for humans to be aware of the gods. Maybe the gods enhanced survival value by conveying information about where to find food or where predators were hiding or how to overcome an enemy. Still, some of our ancestors who couldn’t detect the presence of the gods might have survived anyway, passing the god-indifference genes on to subsequent generations. Just as the absence of snake-fear genes does not hinder survival in an environment in which there are no real snakes, so the absence of god-detection genes might pose no handicap in an environment where the gods have departed or where they no longer provide survival benefits to humans.

Maybe the god-detector neurons need to learn — that is, they have to be put through some input-output-feedback iterations before they become properly attuned to the signal. Neurons assigned to language processing never function properly if you happen to be raised by wolves. Exposure to language-speakers during early childhood is necessary if the child is to learn to speak and understand speech. Maybe this iterative learning circuitry is necessary also for the god-detector neurons. If during the critical developmental period a person is not exposed to the gods, that person never develops the ability to detect gods if they happen to show up later.

It’s also possible that the god-detector neurons can become hypersensitized. I’ve come to the conclusion that I have hypersensitive asshole detector neurons: they’re chronically inflamed, always alert, always receiving signals alerting my brain to the proximal presence of assholes. The problem with a hypersensitive detection mechanism of this sort (or so I’m told) is that it generates some false positives; i.e., I’m prone to detecting assholes when none are present. Maybe this same problem of false positives plagues those burdened with hypersensitive god-detector neurons: they detect divine activity everywhere and all the time, even when it’s not present. Alternatively, people with dulled, insensitive detector neurons may experience a high proportion of false negatives. They don’t detect assholes or gods even when they’re staring them in the face.

Metzinger: So Far So Good

In this book I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self.

Thomas Metzinger begins The Ego Tunnel (2009) with a bang that sounds suspiciously like the hollow clangor of “eliminativism.” Having read only second-hand, generally critical accounts, I presumed that the notoriously “scientistic” Metzinger would argue that only brain-body physiology is real, and that subjective epiphenomena generated by and emerging from neural states and processes — perception, cognition, self-awareness — are illusions. But that’s not what he says. He’s aware of his own notoriety and he responds to it. After briefly documenting the recent explosion in empirically-supported knowledge about consciousness, Metzinger acknowledges the backlash:

We have learned how great the fear of reductionism is, in the humanities as well as among the general public, and how immense the market is for mysterianism. The straightforward philosophical answer to the widespread fear that philosophers or scientists will “reduce consciousness” is that reduction is a relationship between theories, not phenomena. No serious empirical researcher and no philosopher wants to “reduce consciousness”; at best, one theory about how the contents of conscious experience arose can be reduced to another theory. Our theories about phenomena change, but the phenomena stay the same. A beautiful rainbow continues to be a beautiful rainbow even after it has been explained in terms of electromagnetic radiation. Adopting a primitive scientistic ideology would be just as bad as succumbing to mysterianism. Furthermore, most people would agree that the scientific method is not the only way of gaining knowledge.

I’ve just started reading Metzinger’s book, but I suspect that his opening salvo is more of an attention-grabber than a thesis statement, sort of like asserting two hundred years ago that there is no soul. The book focuses largely on what might be deemed component parts of selfhood: consciousness, the internal representation of the external world, the sense of being centered in one’s own body, self-reflexivity. Briefly, Metzinger argues that it’s not particularly useful to think in terms of “selfhood” as a holistic entity that we are or that we have within us. Instead he proposes the concept of a “phenomenological self-model” — a continually refreshed simulation by which the human monitors his environment, his body, and his cognitive processes. Metzinger contends that this self-model simulation is not really a subjective image of the internal and external environments in which we function; rather, it is a tunnel through which we encounter these environments. Even here, though, Metzinger seems overly dramatic in his rhetoric. Immediately after introducing the metaphor of the tunnel, he asserts that we do generate images or representations of our environment and of our internal state — that in fact we encounter the world and ourselves only through these representations. Does this make Metzinger a “correlationist”? We’ll see. I have a sense that later in the book he’s going to claim that empirical science enables us to get out of the tunnel in order to have more direct encounters with the outer and inner environments.

I like the way he begins the book, not because of the controversies he seems bent on provoking but because he purports to take empirical science seriously. Many non-scientific theorists weed through the jungle of scientific findings in order to extract a few “proof texts” that support their a priori ideas. Metzinger seems more willing to “let the data speak,” allowing empirical findings to shape and revise theory.

Unlike many of my philosopher colleagues, I think that empirical data are often directly relevant to philosophical issues and that a considerable part of academic philosophy has ignored such data for much too long.

I find this approach more comprehensible, more compatible with my own inclinations and educational background, and more likely to be true than the so-called armchair philosophy practiced by introspectors, sophists, antiquarians and other creative geniuses whose insights and literary flourishes often seem indistinguishable from bullshit.

I may have more to report from Metzinger’s book as I go along.

How Nerdy Am I?

It can get blustery here at the edge of the mountains. Yesterday was one of those days: warm, partly sunny, westerly winds 70+ miles per hour. More than once on my walk the wind stood me up and pushed me back a few steps. Grit was blowing in my eyes so I was tempted to walk backward, but I wanted to stay alert for any airborne tree branches or baby carriages that might be hurtling my way. The chain link fence around the baseball field was plastered with all manner of blasted detritus: dried leaves, cardboard fast-food containers, a long strip of danger tape carried off from some now-unmarked hazard. I tore off a segment of the tape as a souvenir and shoved it in my jacket pocket.

I made it home without incident. On the front porch the wind had pulled the plant pots right out from under their plants and carried the pots away, leaving the plants behind, root balls and all. Anne was standing in the kitchen talking to her mother on the phone, telling her about the wind. Watch this, I said to Anne. I showed her my strip of yellow tape, stepped back out onto the porch, and tossed the tape into the air. Anne looked at me quizzically when I came back inside. I threw caution to the wind, I told her.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Potocki, 1814

…My father spent three years with the Camaldolese monks. The good fathers managed by means of assiduous care and angelic patience to restore to him the use of his reason. He then went to Madrid and called on the minister. This gentleman called him into his office and said, “Señor Don Enrique, your affair has come to the ears of the king, who has blamed this mistake on me and on my office. But I showed him your letter signed Don Carlos and here it is. Please tell me why you didn’t put your own name on it.”

My father took the letter, recognized his handwriting and said to the minister, “Alas, Your Excellency, I now remember that at the moment of signing the letter my brother’s arrival was announced. The joy of hearing his name must have made me put it in the place of mine. But it isn’t this mistake which caused my misfortunes. Even if the commission of colonel-general had been sent in my name, I would not have been able to exercise the office. Today my sanity has been restored and I now feel able to carry out the plan which the king then had.”

“My dear Enrique,” said the minister, “all the proposals for fortification have been abandoned and at court it is not the custom to mention again things which have been forgotten about. All I can offer you is the office of commandant of Ceuta. That is the only vacancy I have. And you will have to leaver for Ceuta without seeing the king. I admit that the office is beneath your talents and it is moreover unkind at your age to be confined to a rock in Africa.”

“That is precisely what attracts me to the post,” replied my father. “It seems to me that I shall escape my cruel fate by leaving Europe; by going to another part of the world I shall become as it were another man, and shall find peace and happiness there under the influence of more favourable stars.”

My father quickly collected his orders as commandant, went to Algeciras, from where he set sail, and arrived without mishap in Ceuta. As he disembarked there, he experienced a delicious feeling. It seemed to him that he had reached port after many long days of stormy weather…

So my father, living the life of the mind, passed in turn from observation to meditation, nearly always confined to his residence. The continual efforts to which he subjected his intellect made him often forget that cruel period of his life when his reason had given way under the weight of his misfortunes. But often, too, the past would claim its due. This would occur mostly in the evenings, after the labours of the day had exhausted his mind. Then, since he was not used to seeking distractions outside his own company, he would climb up to the terrace and look across the sea to the horizon, edged in the distance by the coasts of Spain. This view reminded him of those glorious and happy days when he was cherished by his family, loved by his mistress, admired by men of worth, and his soul, burning with the fire of youth and lit by the wisdom of a mature intellect, opened itself to all those feelings that are the delight of human life and all those thoughts that dignify the human spirit.

Then he remembered his brother robbing him of his mistress, his fortune and his rank and himself lying on the straw, deprived of his reason. Sometimes he took up his violin and played the fatal saraband which decided Bianca in favour of Carlos. This music provoked him to tears. When he had cried he felt relief. Fifteen years went by in this manner.

One evening the Lieutenant-Governor of Ceuta, having some business to transact with my father, visited him quite late and found him in one of his melancholy moods. Having thought for a moment, he said, “My dear commandant, I beg you to pay attention to me. You are unhappy and you are sorrowful. That is no secret. We know it and so does my daughter. She was five when you came to Ceuta and since then not a day has passed without her hearing you spoken of with adoration, for you are the tutelary deity of our little colony. Often she has said to me, ‘Our dear commandant only feels his sorrows so deeply because he has no one to share them with.’ Come and see us, Don Enrique. It will do you more good than counting the waves of the sea.”

So my father let himself be taken to Inés de Cadanza. He married her six months later, and I was born ten months after their marriage.

When the weak child that I was first saw the light of day, my father took me in his arms, raised his eyes to heaven and said, “Oh almighty power, whose exponent is immensity, oh last term of all ascending series, oh my God, behold another sensible being projected into space. If he is destined to be as unhappy as his father may you in your mercy mark him with the sign of subtraction.”

Having thus prayed, my father kissed me passionately and said, “No, my poor child, you will not be as unhappy as I have been. I swear by the holy name of God that I will never teach you mathematics but you will know the saraband, the ballets of Louis XIV and every other form of impertinence which comes to my attention.” Then my father bathed me in his tears and gave me back to the midwife.

Now I beg you to note the strangeness of my fate. My father swears never to teach me mathematics and swears to teach me to dance. Well, the reverse happened. It has turned out that I know a great deal about the exact sciences and I am incapable of learning, I won’t say the saraband because that’s no longer in fashion, but any other dance. In fact, I cannot conceive how one can remember the steps of the quadrille. There are indeed no dance steps which are produced by a point of origin whose sequence is governed by a consistent rule. They cannot be represented in formulas and it seems inconceivable to me that there are people who can retain them in their memory.

As Don Pedro de Velásquez reached this point in his story, the gypsy chief came into the cave and said that it was in the interests of the band to move on and retire further into the Alpujarras mountains…

Move My Money?

Tomorrow is Move Your Money day, the day when the 99% are exhorted to transfer their cash from banks to savings and loans. I’m sort of clueless about these sorts of things, having only found out about Move Your Money on Tuesday at the Occupy Boulder. The main rationales as I understand them:

Doing business with many small credit unions helps dilute the oligopolistic power of the big banks.

Credit unions are owned by the depositors, not by outside investors, so profits are distributed in the form of lower fees and higher interest rates rather than as capital gains or big bonuses to executives.

Credit unions invest in small businesses more than in global corporations. Small businesses generate proportionately more jobs than giant companies.

These seem like pretty good reasons to participate, although as I discussed yesterday at the Occupy with Jim — a former banker, current “radical democrat,” and fellow blogger — the Move Your Money intervention is rather a “weak tea,” intended to appeal to unregulated capitalist libertarians as much as to left-wingers. My issues are these:

Are there limits on what credit unions can do with the investments they make with depositors’ money? Somewhat repulsively to me, the Move Your Money website invokes George Bailey’s Building and Loan from It’s A Wonderful Life as the exemplar for the modern credit union. Good Old George wouldn’t foreclose on your mortgage and throw you out in the street like that mean old banker Mr. Potter would. But can’t credit unions and savings & loan associations sell balloon, subprime, low-down-payment mortgages to customers just like any other home financing company? Can’t credit unions and S&Ls bundle up their mortgages and sell them to giant consolidators? Are S&L-initiated mortgages any less likely to be foreclosed? I don’t know the answer to these questions, and brief internet research didn’t throw any light on the subject.

Just twenty years ago there was a Savings and Loan Crisis, in which overleveraged S&Ls got themselves into deep shit via risky lending practices and had to be bailed out by the US government. Like credit unions, most savings & loans are mutual companies owned by the depositors. To tell the truth, I don’t know what distinguishes a credit union from a mutual S&L association. The S&L industry was underregulated, and so a lot of hotshot executives got rich quick — GW Bush’s brother Neil was one of the big players in this scandal. It’s my understanding that few additional regulations have been put in place that would prevent a recurrence. I.e., S&Ls aren’t much different from banks in corruption opportunities unless I’m missing something.

Do credit union executives in the aggregate actually earn smaller salaries and bonuses than do their counterparts at the big banks? The big banks are, well, big, with a lot of high-paid people working at any given bank. Credit unions are smaller but larger in number. Do they really pay their executives a smaller percentage of total revenues than do their jumbo counterparts? I used to work for a small mutual insurance company, analogous to a saving and loan in that the company was owned by the policyholders. The CEO and COO both earned big bonuses tied to quarterly sales and profits. State Farm and Allstate are giant mutual insurers: do their execs make less money than, say, the heads of private firms like Hartford and Aetna? I don’t know.

The small businesses to which credit unions extend loans: do they actually charge less for their products and pay their employees better than do big businesses? Based on personal experience I doubt it, but I don’t have any numbers.

When I started writing this post I figured that I’d probably Move My Money anyway, even if I didn’t do it with dramatic flair on Saturday. Diluting oligopolistic power and supporting customer-owned business both seem like better alternatives to collusive investor-owned banks. But recalling the S&L Crisis has given me pause. I’d like to know more before making a decision. Besides, It’s A Wonderful Life kind of disgusts me.

Ten Minute Occupation

3 NOV UPDATE — Two and a half hours today, but that last hour might have pushed me over the edge back into non-participation. In honor of the Greek situation I brought a hand-made REFERENDUM sign, which stimulated some good conversations with occupiers and passers-by alike. When I arrived there were maybe 8 of us, but at 5:15 it was down to me and one other person. I thought it would be solidarity-ish of me to stick around until 6, when the “GA” (general assembly — is it really necessary to adopt these off-putting abbreviations?) would convene for a planning session. The other occupier was an organizer who had taken on the task of writing an all-purpose “vision statement” (not to be confused with a “mission statement” which, I was told, comes after vision and before objectives). This person’s vision revolved around non-corrupt government; I said I thought it was a fine statement but that the idea of Occupy had to do more with Wall Street than with Washington. “We’re occupying Washington too,” I was informed. I was told that the Occupiers were working with the city to get a 24/7 occupation permit, allowing them to camp overnight. “But we don’t call it camping (which is illegal on Boulder city property); we call it occupying.” Don’t you think it would be good to support the homeless, who are not allowed to sleep out on city property? “We’ll set a precedent for them; they can call themselves Occupiers.” But only right here, at the Occupation location, right, and not in the rest of town? “The police are not the enemy; we don’t want to get arrested; we have to avoid the conflicts with ‘those people’ (i.e., the homeless) that’s happening in Occupy Denver. Plus we’re not going to sleep out until spring when it’s warmer.” If it’s still going by then. “Some of us are idealists, not skeptics.” And blah blah blah. When 6 o’clock rolled around and others started arriving for the GA I split.

* * *

1 NOV UPDATE — I went back to Occupy Boulder this afternoon. I spent maybe an hour and a half, and it was actually pretty much fun. I even held a sign that somebody handed me: “Break Up the Big Banks,” or something to that effect. Maybe ten people were occupying this time. I engaged in a few good conversations addressing economic concerns with a variety of other occupiers, including a high school student, a university grad student, a woman who brought pastries, and a homeless guy. Most Occupiers seemed to be disaffected liberals, not particularly radical. My favorite passing horn-honker was a woman driving a car with a “Palin for President” sticker on the rear windshield.

* * *

Ten minutes — that’s what I accomplished this afternoon. Late last week the Occupy Boulder people decided to ramp up from once-a-week demonstration to a daily presence, beginning today. Counting Anne and me there were five occupiers. One guy asked if we wanted to hold a sign; another asked if he could interview us for a website featuring people’s opinions of the Occupy intervention. We declined both offers. We talked about yesterday’s encounter in Denver between occupiers and the police — apparently a bicycled policeman ran over an occupier’s foot, who reacted by pushing the bike, at which point the cops amped it up with pepper spray, paintball rifles, and 20 arrests. A passer-by stopped briefly to recount the tale of a confrontation in Rome where the occupiers arrested the police. Quite a few autos tooted their horns in support of the occupation.

I said that I would return later in the week, and I will, but I have to confess that the experience seemed more desultory than inspiring. The movement is occupying the same city park where I’ve previously participated in protests against occupations — of Iraq, of Afghanistan, of Gaza. As far as I could discern the impact of those protests had been nil, except for their negative effect on my own enthusiasm for that sort of political action. To me the Occupy Boulder seemed like the same old thing, except with even fewer participants than the usual meager turnout. Frankly, I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Maybe Occupy Boulder will grow as people begin to notice the daily presence, but I suspect that this university town of 100 thousand people isn’t big enough to be Occupied for more than an hour or two per week.

One Guess

Here’s a sentence I wrote today in the novel:

A hideous underwater creature, as thick and long as his thigh, as shiny and wet and red as the jesters’ lips, would flop out onto the bar, writhing and pulsating and wafting its seaweed reek.

Last Year at Marienbad by Resnais, 1960

What is Alfred Hitchcock doing there, on the right, in the shadows, hovering a few inches above the floor?

Folk Psychology and Me

One line of research in cognitive psychology explores how people understand each other. There are variants on the theme — perspective-taking, joint intentionality, empathy, mirror neurons, theory theory, simulation, embodied/extended mind, etc. — but much of it is predicated on the subjective and often unconscious sense of the self being similar to the other, of being fellow-members of the same species interacting in a shared social space. In contrast to these investigations, one of my more common subjective experiences is how different other people seem from me, how incomprehensible their actions and reactions. Sometimes I impose speculative and scholarly abstractions on my interactions with them in an attempt to make sense. Or I invent fictional versions of real people and put them through simulated situations in an attempt to come to grips. It’s as if I’m making first contact with an alien species.

It could be that my sense of alienation from others is symptomatic of self-alienation: because I refuse to acknowledge certain characteristics in myself I am incapable of acknowledging them in others. By implication, I should be better able to understand the seemingly alien actions of others if I could create a realistic fictional version of myself onto which I would assign these seemingly alien emotions, thoughts, motivations, and actions. I could put my fictional double through simulated experiences and interactions to see how it responds. Then I could rely on my ability to empathize with my own fictional doppelganger as a means of understanding other people.

It’s certainly the case that over the past ten years or so I’ve come to see in myself the potential to be a wide variety of creepy or crazy or violent or antisocial people. Paradoxically, this self-awareness of my own strangenesses, both overt and latent, may have made me feel less alienated from a wider variety of others. I’ve also become less of an alien to various alternate versions of myself. At the same time, I feel more alienated from people who seem unaware of their own potential to be strange. Maybe they actually lack the potential to be strange, this incipient craziness. Maybe they really are quite different from me after all, quite alien from my own alienation.

It’s not particularly pleasant, this awareness, nor does it necessarily make me any happier to be in others’ company, or even in my own company. Also, becoming consciously aware of certain aspects of myself and others that presumably have been there all along but that I have ignored or repressed or failed to formulate — it doesn’t mean that I therefore find these previously hidden facets pleasurable or worthy of cultivation and full expression in the world. At the same time I recognize that others do find pleasure and value in expressing aspects of themselves, and in encountering aspects in others, that I might find distasteful or even reprehensible. I see no reason to restrict their pleasure of self-expression or social interaction. At the same time, if they infringe on my own pleasure then I’m free to walk away.

As host of a blog, do I simply ignore discussion threads unfolding here that I don’t find pleasurable, letting them play themselves out among the participants and spectators who like that sort of thing? Or, if I find it disagreeable myself, do I stifle the discussion? Do I assume that other readers not participating in the discussion are like me in their reactions and would rather see these discussions either curtailed or taken offline? Here’s the thing though: if I were to read some of these interactions on somebody else’s blog I would find them — I have found them — entertaining. At the same time, I would be reluctant to comment on that blog for fear of becoming embroiled myself in a conversation I would find unpleasant and not at all entertaining as a participant. What is that? It’s the world where Michael Haneke holds the mirror in front of my face. It makes me uncomfortable; I turn away.

Tomorrow at a literary conference in Canada a friend will be delivering a talk on “the cognitive turn” in narratology. He will explore the idea that readers invoke similar cognitive mechanisms in understanding and relating to fictional characters as they do in interacting with real people. If I were in the audience at this talk I would ask my friend something like this: Fiction reading is on the decline. Can you speculate on why this is the case, specifically in light of what you’ve said about readers identifying with, empathizing with, simulating, and taking the perspective of fictional characters?

The other day, in a completely different context, I was thinking about the “tomb world” in PK Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But empathy is after all the central theme of Dick’s book, so it’s not surprising that Dick would have a response to the question my imaginary self will be posing tomorrow at the literary conference. Here’s a passage from chapter 3:

The Nexus-6 android types, Rick reflected, surpassed several classes of human specials in terms of intelligence. In other words, androids equipped with the new Nexus-6 brain unit had from a sort of rough, pragmatic, no-nonsense standpoint evolved beyond a major — but inferior — segment of mankind. For better or worse. The servant had in some cases become more adroit than its master. But new scales of achievement, for example the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, had emerged as criteria by which to judge. An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism — an experience which he, and virtually everyone else, including subnormal chickenheads, managed with no difficulty.

He had wondered as had most people at one time or another precisely why an android bounced helplessly about when confronted by an empathy-measuring test. Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnids. For one thing, the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider’s ability to survive. It would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his prey. Hence all predators, even highly developed mammals such as cats, would starve.

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. As in the fusion with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor through this; an owl or a cobra would be destroyed.

Evidently the humanoid robot constituted a solitary predator.

Rick liked to think of them that way; it made his job palatable. In retiring — i.e. killing — an andy he did not violate the rule of life laid down by Mercer. You shall kill only the killers, Mercer had told them the year empathy boxes first appeared on Earth. And in Mercerism, as it evolved into a full theology, the concept of The Killers had grown insidiously. In Mercerism, an absolute evil plucked at the threadbare cloak of the tottering, ascending old man, but it was never clear who or what this evil presence was. A Mercerite sensed evil without understanding it. Put another way, a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever he saw fit. For Rick Deckard an escaped humanoid robot, which had killed its master, which had been equipped with an intelligence greater than that of many human beings, which had no regard for animals, which possessed no ability to feel empathic joy for another life form’s success or grief at its defeat — that, for him, epitomized The Killers.

Rick Deckard is trying to persuade himself that it’s normal not to feel empathy for the rogue replicants he “retires.” But he can’t help but wonder: if I administered the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test to myself, would I pass? Or am I a solitary predator, a Killer, surrounded by prey and competitors? I can simulate empathy when it suits my predatory purposes — gaining the trust of my victims, disguising myself from the guy who comes to retire me when my shelf life is up and I’m no longer productive — but do I really feel the connection with the others of my kind? When you read the book you ask yourself: Can I relate to Deckard? Am I sympathetic with the replicants he’s tracking down? If you never bother to read the book you don’t have to ask yourself these questions. But you ask yourself: If I did read it, would I pass the fictional empathy test? Maybe fewer and fewer people are willing to give it a try, or are even curious about the results.

Breaking Bad by Gilligan, 2011

Procession and Silesium

On my walk yesterday afternoon I found myself approaching two women walking ahead of me. Both wore broad-brimmed straw hats, held to the head against the brisk wind by a kerchief wound over the crown and tied under the chin. The two were walking in single file, with perhaps fifteen feet separating them. The second woman stayed on the concrete sidewalk, whereas the first woman walked in the grass parallel to the paved walkway. Their progress was slow and halting so I soon caught up with them. Rather than passing them by I added myself to their procession, staying about fifteen feet behind the second woman, who was very pale and who wore a heavy coat in the mild early autumn weather. Occasionally the woman at the front, whom I could now see was Asian, would raise one or both hands in the air and mumble something as if in benediction to the mountains rising sharply in the near distance ahead of us. Twice she stopped and knelt with both knees on the ground. When she did this the other woman and I both stopped and waited. We maintained our three-person procession until our pathway intersected with a road. Then the two women stopped, the leader grasping the hand of the other woman. She turned and smiled as I approached them. We exchanged hellos as I walked to the right along the roadway. About twenty strides later I looked behind me: the two women were still standing where I had left them.

About 3:30 this morning I got out of bed to write down something from a dream I had just had. I have the little square of toilet paper in front of me now, the purple ink distorted by the slash marks the pen nib made on a fragile surface not meant for being inscribed. “Silesium mud,” is what I wrote. To my recollection I had never heard this word before, so I googled it and found that it has two primary meanings. Silesia is a geographic area and an ethnic group that is currently part of Poland bordering Germany and Czech. This region gave its name to the Silesian geological epoch, which dates from around 300 to 325 million years ago. I recall that I was using my bare hands for scraping up some Silesium mud, which was light colored and quite gritty, even partly crystalized, and placing it into a container. In the dream I had some sense that this mud was either rare or valuable.