• Incredibly proud of my daughter, who graduated summa cum laude from Anglo-American University! She worked really hard and did a great job. Way to go, kiddo!

  

• If I haven’t made it clear previously, let me affirm that Prague is an amazing place. It’s gorgeous.

  

  

  Having been there every time with friends and family, I didn’t get much of a chance to interact with Praguers. Could they really be that different from people everywhere? This is the same question I have about people generally: aren’t they kind of the same everywhere and across time? Naturally there are local variations, but the variation isn’t huge is my sense. But then, from time to time I do think otherwise. Cultural divides can be very wide. In some college class I was once assigned an essay about whether Shakespeare contains universal themes. The essay, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” is very much worth a read. Its conclusion: no, the themes of Hamlet are not universal. There are cultural divides wide enough to make Hamlet incomprehensible to people in other cultures. Of course, that feels like a pretty special case: the divide between Western nations and rural African farmers. So perhaps there’s a case to be made that people are pretty much the same everywhere as long as they have a bunch of shared histories, as do those whose cultural provenance is European cultures. But that leaves out a lot of the world. Anyway, Praguers and Americans do in fact both share a European cultural heritage, so they’re (we’re) probably pretty much the same, right? Except, of course, when we’re not.

• The first time I went to Prague, I did some reading of its history. This time I followed up again on some of that history. One of the activities this most recent time was to go to the National Museum, a kind of combined history/natural history museum. There was a special exhibit about the Přemyslid Dynasty, an early Bohemian dynasty that ruled in the vicinity of Prague from around the 9th century CE until around 1300CE. This reminded me of a fascinating story I had come across during my earlier reading. A monk named Cosmas wrote a history of parts of Europe called Chronica Boemorum that included a history of what would become Czechia, finishing it in 1125. According to Cosmas, back in the 9th century, there was a Bohemian king named Krok who had three daughters. These three daughters sound pretty amazing. One was a healer, and one was a spiritualist (pagan), but his third daughter, Libuse, was a seer. According to Cosmas, she stood on a rocky cliff one day and foresaw “a great city whose glory will touch the stars.” In keeping with her vision, she founded the city that would eventually become Prague. According to the story, she was also very wise, and people would come to her to settle disputes. But one day after she settled some dispute between a couple of men, one of them got very angry and shouted, “Why do we have to be ruled over by a woman? Long hair means short reason!” Libuse, recognizing that her people wanted to be ruled by a man, called a meeting and warned her people: they could be ruled over by a man if they wanted, but a man would take more of their money as taxes, conscript their sons to be soldiers, and rule with an iron fist. The people didn’t heed her warning and agreed they wanted a man to rule them. So Libuse told them to go to a particular place where they’d find a man plowing a field named Přemsyl and that he would be their new king. So her advisers went to where Libuse told them and found Přemsyl plowing his field. Přemsyl was apparently perfectly happy to get this big upgrade in status and so he became king and founded the Přemyslid Dynasty.

  

  But the story gets even better! Přemsyl ends up outliving Libuse. While Libuse had been alive, women had been equal to men, but once Přemsyl took over, women en masse got a downgrade in status. After Libuse died, her most faithful handmaid and the head of her all-female guards, Vlasta, got fed up with how women were being treated, so she rallied the women and started a rebellion, called the Maidens’ War. Vlasta rallied a bunch of women who took over a castle and launched full-scale rebellion. The men laughed it off, but Vlasta trained the women in a kind of guerrilla warfare, archery, horsemanship, and ambush. (Interestingly, this sounds kind of like Mongol tactics, though the Mongols would not arrive in Europe until a century after Cosmas.) Among the famous incidents of the Maidens’ War was a ruse attributed to Vlasta’s top lieutenant, Šárka. Šárka pretended to tie herself up to a tree and call for help, putting some drugged mead near her. When some men heard her cries, she told them she had been abandoned by Vlasta and her forces. The men drank the mead and fell asleep, and Šárka blew a hunting horn to call in Vlasta’s force which then slaughtered the idiot men. According to the history, this went on for several years until finally the men got fed up and sent an overwhelming force to lay siege to the castle. The telling of the story diverges significantly at this point. Cosmas suggests that Přemysl, realizing that it was bad for his kingdom for there to be bad blood between men and women, arranged a truce and planned a huge feast, which turned into peace and debauchery. According to other versions, the ending is much worse. At some point, Vlasta led a charge out of the castle to try to break the siege and got killed, which broke the spirit of the women and ended the rebellion, after which the rest of the women were put to the sword and subjected to a codified harsh patriarchal order. No other known historical sources verify the initial story of Libuse, so all subsequent versions rely on Cosmas as a starting point. His version has the feel of mythologizing in the service of validating a political order, sort of the way the Aeneid (at least nominally) validates the rule of Augustus Caesar. But it’s kind of fascinating that in doing so, he crafted such an ur-feminist version of Czech history.

  Yet another interesting footnote to this story is that during the period between the end of WWII and the Communist coup of 1948, a member of the Nazi resistance in Czechia, Dr. Milada Horakova, founded a women’s magazine called Vlasta, after the Maidens’ War hero, to promote the role of women in society as well as human rights generally. She was also an outspoken member of the Czech National Socialist Party, which strongly opposed the Communist Party associated with the Soviet Union. After the coup, the pro-Soviet government originally shut down Vlasta. Horakova, who continued as part of the resistance to the Soviet takeover of the country, was eventually arrested, put on trial, and eventually executed. Vlasta was revived as a pro-Soviet propaganda outlet, and closely covered the show trial of Dr. Horakova.

• Another highlight of our trip was a tour of the Jewish Quarter of Prague. We had a really great guide who was able to give us many details of the history of the quarter. As with elsewhere in Europe, Jews were treated terribly through most of Czech history. What’s now the quarter was for a very long time a ghetto, a terrible place to live but pretty much the only option for Jews. At some point, it was decided to demolish pretty much the whole area and rebuild it from scratch, which is how it got to be how it is today, better than it had been previously. We got to visit the Pinkas synagogue, which contains hand-pained names of the more than 80,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust from Czechia. Behind that synagogue sits the Old Jewish Cemetery, that contains many, many levels of burials which sit on top of each other, due to the lack of space and the Jewish prohibition against disturbing graves. Among the people buried there are Rabbi Judah Loew ven Bezalel, the rabbi in the story of the golem. If you don’t know the story of the golem, you should definitely check it out. I particularly love Isaac Bashevis Singer’s version. We also visited the synagogue, the Old New Synagogue, that supposedly still houses the inert body of the golem.

  

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Doing Good

02:25 Defining Doing Good

04:14 Relationships and Categories of Help

06:42 The Joy of Helping Others

08:06 Motivations Behind Doing Good

10:32 Role Models in Doing Good

12:25 Choosing Where to Help

21:39 Creativity as a Form of Good

26:49 Cultural Connections Through Art and Food

30:53 Education and Teaching Goodness

32:30 The Impact of Childhood Experiences

34:57 Teaching Kids to Do Good

39:29 Navigating Conflicting Values

41:57 Overcoming Obstacles to Doing Good

45:52 The Dangers of Performative Good

52:36 The Role of Community and Government in Doing Good

I've never been to Istanbul before, though I did visit a very small corner of Turkey during my trip to Greece with Katy, which I described here. We're staying in old town of Istanbul, a neighborhood called Sultanahmet. We're quite close to the Hagia Sofia…

…and the Blue Mosque…

This is the land of stunning mosques, including the one considered the finest work of Sinan, probably the most famous Ottoman architect, the Sulimaniye Mosque:

As part of my trip preparation, I started reading (and am still reading) a book by a famous Turkish novelist, Elif Shafak, called The Architect's Apprentice. It's a work of historical fiction. The Architect is Sinan. For as important a person as he's considered, architecturally, his tomb, near the Sulimaneye Mosque, is quite modest:

I'm really liking The Architect's Apprentice, btw. I'll write a review when I'm done.

That same day that we visited the Sulimaniye Mosque and Sinan's tomb, we came across a guy, Musa, who works in a shop near the mosque. He was an art student at Mimar Sinan University, and he still makes art, including (per his own admission) not particularly serious art that he sells as postcards in his shop. He was both very serious and quite hilarious. He's a Kurd, and his family has had serious run-ins with the Turkish government, including having a brother imprisoned for a lengthy period. He had lots of interesting things to say about the Turkish government and the many awful ways they repress dissent and keep religious and ethnic minorities underfoot. An example of his funny banter: We worked for years and years to have a television station in the Kurdish language, and the government wouldn't allow it. But then finally they agreed to allow a Kurdish-language station, so now we get to hear what pieces of shit we are in our own language.

During our wanderings, we also came across another interesting grave, that of a thinker named Mehmet Ziya Gökalp:

Gökalp was a sociologist, and his ideas were foundational to the formation of the modern Turkish state, founded by Ataturk in 1923. He was in favor of a secular Turkish national state that rejected Ottomanism and Islamism, along with Arab and Persian influence.

As our Kurdish friend was pointing out to us, there's a dark side to the founding of modern Turkey, as it included some ethnic cleansing. While Ataturk himself claimed not to support all of it (particularly the religious aspects, as Ataturk pushed secularism), his government participated in either outright removal of or pressures that resulted in the eventual flight of Armenians, Jews, Kurds, and Greeks, all as part of the “Turkification” of the new state.

In the past 25 or so years, the current ruler of Turkey, Erdogan, has been consolidating his power and undermining both democracy and secularism, seemingly out of playback that's of a piece with Trump's administration. Learning more about Turkey, it feels like seeing a state that's been undergoing dangerous reforms similar to what Trump & Co. have been pushing during his second term: reducing the boundary between government of religion, pushing for nationalism and authoritarianism, engaging in ethnic cleansing, attempting to undermine the rule of law or any other barriers that might prevent him from getting his way.

Even so, it's been a fascinating trip, and I'm so glad I got to come. I've been having a great time. The architecture is beautiful and the history is rich and complex and interesting. We have about another week to go, so lots more to do and see.

But what brings me out of my life cocoon today is an exciting adventure planned for later today: I’m going to put myself in the hands of some possible commie cult members! A couple of days ago I was approached by some young and earnest people who started on a long spiel about how working people deserve to be taken care of by their government, rather than having that money spent on foolishness like unnecessary wars. My interlocutor seemed ready to go on at length, and I had a food prep timer going back home, so I short circuited him: I’m sympathetic to your message, but let’s jump to the ask. OK, he said, breathlessly, excited to not have to spend his time persuading. We want, in order of importance: 1. Contact information of people who might be willing to volunteer their time, 2. Money, and 3. Food, toiletries, other similar things that can go to working people in need. He had already handed me a small flyer about a food drive. I can accommodate you, I assured him. I signed his list and offered to donate a small amount of money. How can I transfer you money? We don’t use any electronic means, because such things are hackable, he said. So we settled on using my bank’s bill pay capabilities to have a check sent in their general direction. As a tech guy, I told him, I can assure you that online transactions are quite safe, but I’m guessing you aren’t in charge of that decision. I am in fact in charge of that decision as head of operations for our local chapter, he told me. We left that one at a stalemate. He also told me that his org accepts no money from the government, so as not have strings attached to any government largesse. What about private grants? I asked, seeing as how I’ve recently begun to learn more about the fine art of grant writing. As long as there no strings attached to such money. That seems improbable, I thought to myself but didn’t share.

Since that initial contact, I’ve received three calls from this organization, the Western Service Workers Association (WSWA), two of which I answered. They’d like me to participate in a canvassing operation wherein they recruit potential members, which includes signing them up and informing them about available benefits. Or so he says! I asked Claude to tell me about the organization, and some strange but kind of fascinating stuff came with the report. They seem to be legit, in terms of not being a complete scam anyway. They do, in fact, provide services for working class people. But they’ve been embroiled in some scandal: they’ve been accused of having a cult-like to recruiting and pressuring people to get involved and to keep giving more of their time and resources. And, furthermore, they have vague associations with another organization, the National Labor Federation (NATLFED) that, according to some sources, seems to be connected to Communist political causes. All of which made me laugh, because it felt like some kind of Cold War Era McCarthy Anti-American Committee report. I’m not sure what to make of it. I don’t doubt that something is going on that’s controversial. But are these reports of danger coming from right-wing groups that monitor left wing groups?

My system prompt for Claude includes that I want its responses to be well sourced and that I also want a confidence report, which is to say an estimate of its confidence level in its response. Claude’s answer included some links, though what it points to is challenging to assess. There are some pointers to blog posts from a local Santa Cruz guy no longer alive, and the blog posts are gone (though the blog still exists). There’s a reference to the org on a site called localwiki, which bills itself as “a grassroots effort to collect, share and open the world’s local knowledge.” Some of what Claude has to say seems to come from comments about the org found on this page, which does include some people claiming the org is a cult:

This organization is absolutely a cult. I was a volunteer there, who was pressured to commit 40+ hours a week as a translator and as an organizer. I was told many times that finishing my degree was not as important as the work I was doing there. On one occasion, when I told them I wouldn’t be able to come in that day, the AA Chris showed up at my house to “check on me”. That was when I stopped answering their phone calls. One girl who started volunteering the same time that I did ended up dropping out of college so she could pledge as a Cadre with them (someone who has dedicated their life to volunteering for WSWA). Stay FAR far away from them, and if you have any college student friends who get drawn in, GET THEM OUT.

While other people in the same space disagree:

I help them out on occasion with time and donations and I have seen absolutely nothing which would imply that they are anything but a community self-help organization. I am very surprised by the comments here which imply something cultish about WSWA, because I see nothing but people helping others in the community obtain services which they may not otherwise be able to obtain, or of which they may be unaware. The full-time workers there are personable and generous with their time and energy; always very friendly and accommodating. Honestly, I think every community needs a place like this for disadvantaged people to get help, and anyone who has a negative opinion of the place really needs to get over there, spend an hour or two, and see what its all about, because I’ve seen nothing but positives.

Other negative reports can be found on the Internets regarding the NATLFED and affiliated organizations similar to the WSWA. A conversation on a site called Fluther that I’d never heard of has a similar debate, at least one person who worked with them for many years and reports that they “fit the definition of a cult” because “volunteers face an increasing level of mental, verbal, and sometimes physical abuse.” Some people on that same page who had volunteered for them found them to be a perfectly ordinary and useful service organization, and pushed back against the cult idea. One person on that page suggested that the cult charge was coming from right-wing business interests.

Anyway, I’m far from throwing my lot in with them, as I have pretty limited time and resources anyway, and do contribute time and energy to other charitable organizations, but given the online mystery, I am now fascinated to experience their volunteer work and volunteers first hand (today is supposed to be a canvassing operation to find and inform potential donees). If I don’t reappear within 72 hours, come looking for me! I kid. Though they did call me three times in the last three days! and I am pledged not just to canvas but to bring them some stamps! Insidious.

The basic story is that of a researcher in Brazil who runs afoul of someone powerful and important by sticking to his principles, and thus becomes a target of the violent shadow state of the Brazilian government in the late 1970s. There is another narrative layer that brings us somewhere near the present day, which speaks to the difficulty of attempting to unearth the past, the historical difficulty (piecing together fragments) and the emotional difficulty.

The Secret Agent has kept me thinking for days, which, for me, is always a sign of a movie well done.

Available to watch in theaters in some areas and as VOD rental or purchase on Prime, Apple TV, and possibly other services.

This does raise an interesting point, however: big model LLMs have huge amounts of information available to them. And they’re pretty good at synthesizing things. So it seems likely they’ve consumed lots of valid medical info. But they’ve also probably consumed some less valid medical opinions. It seems obvious that LLMs would be subject to some of the same problems that people are. Medical experts do not all agree, and diagnoses can be tricky, subtle things, almost as much art as science. It’s a very special type of pattern recognition. Of course, much of what an actual medical professional diagnoses is pretty standard stuff. It’s a bell curve situation. There’s a preponderance of common things that a professional sees, garden variety illness and injuries. But those corner cases, and teasing out what might be going on, is where a medical professional can be superior. That’s not to say they always are. Some medical professionals work harder to keep up on the latest stuff than others. Some have better memories than others. Some are better at the subtle art of pattern recognition. At the fringes of the bell curve of diagnoses are cases that are both harder to diagnose and for which there’s less of a medical consensus. I think an LLM that was trained specifically on a very good, strong body of medical knowledge is likely getting into the ballpark of the capabilities of a medical professional, and may well exceed medical professionals if only in their breadth of knowledge. But such things are research subjects, right now, not generally available to the public. And Gemini (nor ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) is not that.

The case is similar for mental health. I’ve asked Gemini to discuss certain mental health issues, out of curiosity for how it would respond. And in truth, it seems quite good. But this same caveat applies: Gemini is not a mental health provider. And mental health diagnoses are even more tenuous than medical diagnoses. The bell curve of mental health has a much thinner bell with much longer fringes, and the level of agreement on various issues is even less than with physical health. Again, I think that a well-trained LLM is probably getting close to where it could serve that function. But no one is releasing such a thing, unless it’s experimentally.

Which leads me to another point: LLMs can be way too sure of themselves. They’re actually quite good at ingesting information and responding to questions based on all the information ingested. But they’re not that great at identifying and conveying their own limits. If you ask it directly what it can and can’t do, it will provide a response that includes some ideas about its limits, but this feels like a CYA script the programmers have put into the model, not a genuine attempt at an answer. At this point, they’re kind of like your know-it-all brother-in-law if he had read like a million books.

So yeah, don’t use LLMs for medical or mental health advice about serious things.

You read about cases of AI use gone wrong, especially wrt to mental illness. Someone who has a tendency towards certain kinds of mental illness spends a lot of time chatting with an LLM and things spiral out of control. I totally believe that this is something worthy of consideration and concern. But I do think it’s worth mentioning that not every human mental health professional is good at helping people with mental illness either, and could sometimes do more harm than good, depending on the person and the problem. Mental health is not an easy thing to diagnose or treat. And general use LLMs were not created to do that job.

In truth, it seems like the models should have stricter guidelines about where they’ll go. And of course, that’s part of the problem with the models generally. They get trained and have boundaries added, but they end up surprising their own makers with where they might go and in what ways they can be manipulated. Therein lies some of the danger, for sure.

So I’ll reiterate: don’t use LLMs for medical or mental health advice about anything other than minor things, at least until such models have been tested and validated and released specifically for that purpose. Which I believe they will. No idea when, but I’d guess within a period of years, not decades.

Technology

This is one of the greatest strengths of AI. It has lots of access to lots of technical info. So I used it to request good options for generating audiobooks from ebooks, or reading ebooks, but getting better voice results, instead of awful sounding mechanical voices. This particular case was to help a friend get back to reading, since audiobooks weren’t available for many books he’s interested in, but ebooks are available.

Another example of something technical: I have a thermostat in my apartment that has very non-intuitive controls. I could have asked the apartment management and maybe they could have given me more info, but I’m guessing that would have been a lengthy and difficult wild goose chase. In contrast, I showed Gemini a photo of the thermostat and it identified the model and provided a description of its major functions.

Medical

I’ve been getting far more styes lately. Gemini suggested some possible reasons. I provided additional info. It narrowed down likely culprits and provided a suggested care routine along with some specific care products.

Of course I understand that medical diagnosis is a potentially troublesome area, but in this case it was very helpful.

Research

My gf and I were looking at her new passport and found a quote on the last page by someone we’d never heard of: Anna Julia Cooper. Turns out she’s a fascinating person, an early African American feminist thinker, the fourth woman ever to get a Ph.D., which she earned from the Sorbonne (thesis written and defended in French!). Ok, this part I could have looked up in Wikipedia. But inspiration strikes me: there must be other amazing but lesser known intellectuals/activists, especially POCs, and it seems fun and interesting to maybe do a series of children’s books about such people. Consulting Gemini, I got a great list of such people, details about their lives and accomplishments, and lists of resources to explore. AND, subsequently, lists of agents who say they’re interested in such projects, whether they’re currently accepting submissions, and instructions on how they like to receive submissions.

Try that with Wikipedia or just a Google search!

Travel

When I was in Prague recently, I told Gemini my specific interests and it developed day by day itineraries for places to visit, based on proximity within Prague, and including good places to eat given my love of Art Deco architecture. Gemini has made great suggestions for an upcoming trip to Istanbul also, based on time of year and interests. All with specific info about getting tickets and other such practical details. You could figure stuff like this out by doing web searches and perusing travel guides, but it seems way harder, especially based on my specific interests and the time of year.

Culinary

Gemini is really good at suggesting meal plans or individual recipes based on dietary considerations and ingredients at hand, including substitutions. My gf has an orange tree that has started bearing, and Gemini has had some great suggestions for juice recipes tailored to my juicer (KitchenAid masticating attachment), along with some helpful nutritional information, and even made suggestions about using the orange pulp in recipes (you can use orange pulp in things like bran muffins or as part of a marinade). When I was in Prague, Gemini helped me quickly adapt recipes to metric and solve weird problems like ingredient swaps (it’s hard to find vanilla extract there—instead they use vanilla-flavored sugar packets, but how much should one use as a substitute for vanilla extract? etc.).

Financial

I’ve used Gemini to help me with financial questions, such as when or why it makes sense to do balance transfers, breaking down the trade-off between the fees and the interest saved within certain time periods. What are the tax considerations for divorce and the way we executed our divorce, with its particular financial quirks. What are the steps needed for transferring my title to my name and then getting it registered in California, along with a list of forms, websites, etc. (this is a surprisingly complicated process)? Gemini to the rescue.

Car Maintenance

And on the subject of cars, telling Gemini my exact model can produce a list of known quirks of my model and year and a suggested maintenance schedule based on those quirks that’s far more detailed and helpful than the instructions you get in the owner’s manual, since it’s culled from forums where people discuss such things.

World Domination

Gemini is helping me develop a plan for world domination consistent with my future status as Der Übermensch.

*NOTE: Nearly all of what I’m calling “AI use” is using Gemini, and mostly its Pro or Thinking models, though occasionally the Flash model. I pay for the $20/mo. plan that includes some other Google benefits, such as increased cloud storage.

For most of my life, I thought I was Lummi, based on the report of the adoption agency. I visited the Lummi reservation quite a few times trying to track him down, with no success. I thought I was Lummi, that is, until my son got an Ancestry.com DNA kit for a Christmas present and sent it in and discovered connections to people living within the boundaries of the Yakama reservation. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me to get a DNA test. I guess I assumed the chances of a hit were slim. Even though Jack’s results would roughly mirror mine, I went ahead and bought a test kit as well. There was one woman in particular who turned out to be a very close relative (based on the amount of DNA in common) to both me and Jack: Trudi. I messaged Trudi on the Ancestry.com website, and she was kind and generous, welcoming me to the family. I told her what I knew about my birth father, and she asked around and got back to me quickly: one of her half brothers, Wendell, matched the details I had exactly: he had been in Bellingham in 1964 attending Western Washington College, and he would have likely been about the age to have been a sophomore that year. It turns out that his mother was Lummi (though Trudi had a different mother). I reached out to him on Facebook and he accepted my friend request. I had a few communications with him over FB Messenger. He confirmed that yes, he’d been in Bellingham in January of 1964, and that he’d been attending Western Washington College. Apart from that, he said he didn’t remember a lot because he’d been drinking so much during that period of his life. Had any of his brothers also attended WWC? No. Did he recall whether any of them had ever visited him? Not that he recalled, but as he’d said, that time was kind of a blur. In spite of the evidence, both DNA and circumstantial, he insisted he could not possibly be my father. Nevertheless, when I arranged to go to Washington to meet Trudi, he expressed some willingness to meet me.

I did get to meet Trudi and her husband, and they were incredibly nice. And during that trip, Wendell agreed to meet me. We had dinner at a restaurant of his choosing, a Chinese buffet, and we chatted. He told me about his life, the details of which were pretty heartbreaking. He’d been in the military, during the Vietnam war, but hadn’t ever left the United States. He was in the Signal Corps somewhere in the Southwest. Arizona maybe? He’d also been in Yakama government for a while, but had been forced out because of his drinking problem, he said. He’d had three children (that he was willing to acknowledge), but two of those had committed suicide. I later found out more about these kids: one was in her early thirties when she died, and had children. I’ve met her two kids, Aqua and Errol. Aqua was very young, maybe 15, when her mother died. Wendell’s other son who died was just a teenager, maybe 17?, when he killed himself. I don’t know much about him yet, except that Aqua says he was very nice to her and Errol. Wendell’s surviving son is named Marshall. Wendell and I had a small amount of contact after that, but not a lot. It seems he was irritated by the fact that I kept insisting that I believed he was my birth father. I tried multiple times and in multiple ways to contact Marshall, hoping that he might be willing to do a DNA test for matching paternity, but I never heard back from him. I have every reason to believe he knew of me and that some of my attempts to reach him got through, but for whatever reason, he didn’t reply.

Then earlier this year, I got a call from Aqua late on a Sunday night. She told me that Wendell had died that very afternoon of a heart attack. It was second heart attack in a short period of time. The services were to be pretty quick, within a couple of days. Because my son, Jack, has been living with me, and because he and I went up to visit Yakama back in May, due to his interest in connecting with that heritage, he and I decided to go up to Washington to attend the funeral. My sweet and generous girlfriend also agreed to interrupt her very busy schedule and join us for moral support. So the three of us flew to Washington.

Aqua had sent me a flyer with details about the funeral, to be held at a longhouse. Wendell was part of a Longhouse Church, a kind of blending of Native beliefs and Christianity that’s spread all across the United States. This particular longhouse seems to have blended in some Indian Shaker beliefs. I had to look that up. It’s an interesting religion, but I won’t get into the details here. The name of the longhouse turned out to apply to more than one such place, and we went to the wrong one initially. We met another relative from another part of the state at that other longhouse, and then we caravanned together to the right place. By then we were late, and the ceremony was underway.

The first thing we noticed on entering the building was that men were all on one side of the longhouse and women were on the other side. So Jack and I had to split off from my girlfriend at that point, which I felt bad about. It turned out to be a useful source of information, however, as, on the women’s side, she met an older Native woman who gave her lots of information we lacked. This woman told my girlfriend, for example, about the Shaker connections (because she was a Shaker herself). She told us that during the ceremony, no one was supposed to speak the name of the deceased. Also, there was priority seating for family members, and as the eldest son, I should be seated at the head of the family area, something she encouraged me to do, but which, as you can imagine, I wasn’t comfortable doing. Jack and I went to the men’s side and found somewhere to sit. We arrived at maybe 10:30am, and the ceremony lasted all day, until maybe around 1am. Much of the ceremony involved drumming and singing and ringing of bells.

The first part of the ceremony was preparing to put the body into the coffin. This took quite some time, as it involved a very specific set of actions, using both blankets and reeds to wrap the body. Before that, though, people were able to line up and offer their farewell to the deceased. The men went first. Everyone on the men’s side who wanted was supposed to form a long line that would pass by the deceased. Not realizing this at first, Jack and I were standing, not moving, and an older Native kept trying to catch my eye and wave at me with a motion that I was holding things up and that I needed to go be part of the line. Finally I got his intent and Jack and I joined the line. Each of the participants would twirl in a circle at four points as they passed him. Compass points, I’m guessing? No one explained this part to us. I hadn’t seen him in quite some time, and of course I recognized him, but he also looked very different, as the dead do. It felt unreal to see him under these circumstances. The whole experience felt unreal. We all passed by him. Then the dressing up of the body in blanket and reeds occurred through much singing and drumming. Finally he was placed into the coffin, and very plain wooden box, unpainted and with no ornamentation of any kind. Shortly after that, the ceremonies came to a temporary break. This is when I met Lily, who had been kindly helping my girlfriend understand proper funeral customs. According to Lily, at this point, it was quite important for the body not to be left alone, and that traditionally, at least one elder was required to stay with the body. But the man who had been leading the ceremonial placing of the body into the coffin came by on his way out. Nearly everyone else was gone. He said something like, “Oh right, there’s supposed to be someone who stays with the body. Are you going anywhere?” I offered to stay with the body.

Around that time, a cousin of the deceased came into the building. Apparently he was unhoused, and had been brought to the ceremony by someone from the shelter where he was staying. Just prior they’d taken him to a doctor, because he had a very badly swollen finger. They’d dropped him off at the now empty longhouse with some meds. My girlfriend, who is a physician assistant, stepped up and offered to make sure he got his meds on schedule. I chatted with him a bit, then went back to continue my conversation with Lily, who was telling us about Longhouse and Shaker traditions, and some about herself. She hadn’t known him well, but she had kind memories of him because he had been supportive of a relative at some point. The nature of that support was somewhat mysterious, and had to do with backing some kind of naming that other people opposed. We never did quite understand what she was talking about. Among the things Lily told us was that the for the last part of the ceremony, it was customary for both men and women to wear traditional garb, ribbon shirts for men and ribbon skirts for women. We told her we didn’t own anything like that. She said she’d try to get some from her husband to lend to us.

Eventually people came back and started prepping for a lunch. Jack helped a few men from the church set up tables while I stayed near his body, as I had promised. The lunch was on the smaller side, compared to the number of people who had been at the ceremony earlier. It consisted of mac and cheese and venison and salad and potatoes and some kool-aid like punch. Our punch was green. During the lunch, we sat across from a man who kept telling a series of really bad Native American jokes during the entire meal. For example: An Indian goes to a bar and four hours later comes out completely sober. How is that possible? (Pause) Because it was a salad bar! He would laugh loudly at his own jokes. Eventually the church leader got up and said it would be time to tell stories about the deceased. People then took turns telling about ways he had been kind of generous to them. Often these speeches would start with some kind of affirmation of how to be a good person: to listen to one’s elders and try to be a good member of the community, giving to others and being respectful. The father of the deceased had married twice and had a lot of children by each of these women. I’m not sure how many, but he had in the neighborhood of 14 or 15 kids in total. So the deceased had a lot of cousins, many of whom were in attendance. During the break, one of his cousins came by to greet me. She asked who I was. I said I was his son. She looked quite surprised and said she hadn’t known he had another son. Her mother was there also but came up to us a moment later, and the cousin introduced me to her mother, the sister of the deceased. She didn’t understand at first. Her daughter kept trying to explain and at one point asked her mother, Which is your good ear? Her mother joked, Neither! But it seemed that eventually she did understood and shook my hand and said, Welcome to the family!

At that point we left for a while but then came back. I was a bit late for this segment, and so came in during the final round of the dancing and singing, which lasted for several hours more. As I came in late, I didn’t have an easy chance to find Lily and get the ribbon shirt. Lily had explained that songs came in groups of seven. Typically there were three groups of seven songs. And in fact, there were seven drummers who stood beside the song leader. One particular drummer, at the end of the line, began drumming and singing a song, and then the leader joined in and then the rest of the people at the ceremony joined in. Everyone there (except us, who didn’t know any of the words) sang. And people would also swing their arms in beat with the songs, kind of like we were drumming ourselves. Close relatives stood near the coffin, men on one side and women on the other. Behind them stood some younger boys, behind the men, and some younger girls, behind the women. At a certain point in each song, one of the boys began ringing a bell (the leader of the ceremony also rang a bell nearly constantly, in beat with the songs) and then the boys and girls started hopping around the circle of the floor of the longhouse. At the center of the longhouse, which has a concrete floor, is a large area that is dirt. Lily had told us this was to have a direct connection to the earth. It was considered respectful to not wear street shoes on this dirt. Most people either had moccasins or else took off their shoes and were in their socks. The hoppers would hop sideways all the way around the dirt area, which was pretty large, the boys in front and the girls behind them. The song was going on the whole time. Eventually the hoppers making the whole circle and the end of the song came. After this, the next person in the line of drummers would start a song. I believe that it was the same song for the first seven, then a different song for the second group of seven, and a third song for the final seven, but it was difficult for me to tell. The songs were in the Yakama language. By the time we’d gone through 21 rounds of this, standing and air drumming along, my shoulder and knees were starting to ache. A few older people had sat down by then. We went through this cycle of 21 songs maybe three times that day. It took some stamina. I can’t imagine how tired the hoppers were. The whole experience was mesmerizing. With the entire congregation singing, and the throbbing drumming, it was loud and overwhelming and it really gave me the sense of being part of a community of mourning in a way that no funeral I’d ever attended had done before.

I thought about him a lot. I tried to imagine how the experience of hearing from me must have felt for him. Did he really believe I was not his son? Did he believe I may have been but had some need to keep that at bay? Guess I’ll never know. I wished he’d been willing to, if not embrace me, at least accept me. I thought a lot about both him and Rose and the accidents of life, how the things that form a person are outside their control, genetics and early experience.

Once that group of songs ended, I went over to talk to Aqua. Aqua introduced me to her brother, Errol, who I hadn’t met to that point. While I was talking to Aqua, I saw Marshall moving in our direction. People were stopping to greet him and offer condolences. His movement toward us seemed purposeful. He greeted Aqua and said a few words. To that point, I hadn’t ever met him, though it had become pretty clear early on during the ceremony who he was. I introduced myself. He said hi and shook my hand. I didn’t try to discuss anything about who I was or why I was there. But at least we had met.

At that point there was a final ceremonial dinner. The dinner was served on reed mats, and consisted of traditional Yakama foods. Aqua was there with all her kids, the younger of whom we had met when we visited earlier that year. I said to her 8yo girl, Do you remember me? No, she said. I told her it had been at a Chinese buffet back in May with my son. Then she remembered. Oh yeah! Where’s the other guy? He’s back at the motel. I had taken the kids to a bookstore and bought them all a book, and she remembered this detail, and even which book she had chosen. She sat next to me during the final meal and had many, many questions, not all of which I could answer, since the whole experience was new to me too. I did my best, with Aqua filling in some. The meal consisted of salmon and freshwater eel and berries and bitter roots and probably some stuff I forgot. Before we started eating, we were supposed to eat a small amount of each in a ceremonial way. During the meal, there were many more testimonials about the deceased, what a good man he was, and how important it is to do the right things. At the end of the meal, we said goodbye. By this time it was nearly 1am. It had been a long day.

The following day was the burial proper. Aqua told us the name of the graveyard, but much as with the longhouse, apparently there was more than one graveyard by the same name, because Google Maps led us astray and we went to the wrong place. But we course corrected and came back to the right place mid-ceremony. These graveyards were very different from those I’m used to, in that they appear to be just places where people get buried as the buriers see fit. The plots aren’t in neat rows. People just find a place. Relatives and friends dig the hole, with shovels, put the coffin in the hole, and then bury it with their shovels. There is more singing and ringing of the bell. At the end of the burial, I went up to Marshall and said hi. He hugged me. I said I’d like to keep in touch. He said, Let’s not talk about that here. But then as Jack and I were walking away, he said, Safe travels and raised his hand. Jack and I both thought that, at least, was a good sign. When we had been at the wrong place, it had been cloudy and drizzling, but by the time we reached the right place, it had started to clear up and a beautiful rainbow had formed.

My plan is to reach out to Marshall and see if he’s open to connecting and even see if he really is my brother. I don’t want to rush things, so soon after his father’s death. But I’m hopeful.

The Paris jaunt added to this hecticness, but its pleasures more than compensated me for its pains. We did a two-day whirlwind tour. I should add that this was my first trip ever to Paris. On Day One we went to Shakespeare and Company, the iconic bookstore in the 5ieme Arr.

One of my favorite movies is Before Sunset, the Linklater movie that’s a sequel to Before Sunrise. That movie starts with Jesse reading from his book about the events of Before Sunrise in Paris at Shakespeare and Company. Celine shows up and they walk around Paris. So it was fun to check out Shakespeare and Company, not just because of the movie but because it’s a great little English bookstore with a long history of being a cultural center for writers. I hadn’t realized it’s within a stone’s throw of Notre Dame Cathedral. We wandered around that part of town, including the booksellers that line the Seine in that part of town. In fact, one of the big things in that part of town is the many, many bookstores, many of which sell old books (ancien livres, the signs usually say). I assume that’s because it’s in the same district as the Sorbonne, and several other universities? We had lunch at a typical Parisian street cafe, though it was on the chilly side, so we ate inside. Because I’d been up so late the night before working, and our flight was so early in the morning, we checked into our hotel and took a nap to recover a little bit. Then we went out to a club called Caveau des Obliettes, or Cave or Oblivion. A French soul/funk band was playing. They were lots of fun.

Day Two was museum day. We had booked tickets for the Louvre in the morning, but when we got there, we found out that the museum wasn’t yet open, because of a strike of museum workers. Apparently museum workers at the Louvre are feeling mightily put upon, particularly in the wake of the jewel heist. So many, many people were standing around who had booked tickets for even earlier, but no one was being let in. A worker (a scab apparently?) told us that under the circumstances, our tickets would be considered valid all day, so we could come back later if we wanted. So we wandered towards the Musee d’Orsay, our other planned destination for the day. We stopped to grab lunch at another cafe, where I discovered my latest breakfast passion: avocado toast with salmon. Good stuff. While at the cafe, another small group of people who were obviously Americans sat down near us. I eavesdropped on their conversation just a bit. They seemed like they were very well off people. It was an older couple and a younger woman. The older couple was taking one of those river cruises but had stopped briefly in Paris. The younger woman had two kids. She seemed to be some kind of art gallery owner (?). Some of their conversation was about a mutual friend whose child was someone very important. The younger woman recounted having nearly started a new gallery in Paris right before Covid, and her deep gratitude that she didn’t pull it off. I LOVED the Musee d’Orsay. My daughter told me it was surprisingly not crowded compared to her previous visits. Mostly I took in impressionist and post-impressionist paintings. Some very famous works, things you see in art history books were there, and it was a cool experience to see some of them, which are favorites of mine. For example, Money’s Rouen Cathedral series, where he paints Rouen Cathedral from the exact same angle but at different times of the day and year:

A Degas sculpture I’ve always liked:

My daughter told me an interesting story about this sculpture that I hadn’t heard before: the skirt on the sculpture, being made of actual fabric, naturally decays over time, and so it has been replaced multiple times. The responsibility of performing this replacement gets assigned to some artist and over time and they’ve made different choices. For example, apparently for a while it was pink. Another interesting story my daughter told me is that there’s a theory out in the world (started on TikTok) that Degas, who is known to have become very depressed and morose and angry in his later years, is actually Jack the Ripper. I won’t bore you with the details, but you can learn more here if you’re feeling rabbit-hole-ish.

I myself am more of a 20th Century art appreciator, and so I was hoping to see some of my own favorite artists, such as Klee or Chagall or Kandinsky. But the Musee d’Orsay collection appears to be pretty much all pre-20th Century, so no luck. I did get to see another favorite painter of mine: Cezanne.

After MdO, we went back to the Louvre, where we were told that we were late and would have to run through a gauntlet of people designed to determine whether we were worthy of having our late entry approved. But then my daughter magically pulled out here EU residency card and we were deemed to be worthy and ushered inside sans gauntlet. The Louvre is even less modern in its outlook than the MdO. And apparently certain sections were closed off anyway because of the strike, which caused them to be woefully understaffed.

It’s worth mentioning, btw, that I kind of love that Europe seems to be the land of strikes. When I visited Barcelona, decades ago, it seemed there was a strike around every corner. Nurses striking in this part of town, transportation workers in another part of town. Excuse me, is this the nurse’s strike? No, comrade, this is the bus drivers, but you’re more than welcome to join us! I stand in solidarity with striking workers, even if they have sometimes inconvenienced me. I’m that radical.

The Louvre is so huge that you have to divide and conquer. We chose to focus mostly on Greek and Roman antiquities, with a bit of random sculpture and decorative arts thrown in for good measure. I had no interest in seeing the Mona Lisa, but regrettably, I think that section was closed anyway, so I could not properly eschew it.

Which brings me to another short diversion: I recently discovered that the pronunciation of the word eschew is, at least sometimes, different from what I thought. Some people pronounce it as “ih-shoo” or something like that. I’d always pronounced it more like “es-choo.” And this was the source of a favorite silly joke of mine, wherein, when the choice of a particular restaurant or food is under consideration, I chime in with, “to chew or eschew, that is the question!” It’s much funnier if both words have the same sound in them. This is the difficult life of the silly dad joke connoisseur.

Anyway, we chose the Greek and Roman antiquities in part because we had visited the Parthenon Museum in Athens, and found it amusing that so many of the displays there in Athens, showing the art of the Parthenon in the context of the whole, had blank spaces that were labeled something like: this section is in the British Museum in London or this section of the frieze is in the Louvre in Paris. It became a running joke. So we got to fill in some blanks there in the Louvre. We didn’t get to cover that much ground in one afternoon, given how big the Louvre is. Clearly I need to go back for at least one more afternoon.

After we were done at the Louvre, we needed to hurry back to our hotel, where we had left our bags, before heading to the airport. We were both pretty tired at that point, and there weren’t great public transportation options, so we decided to take a Bolt (the European equivalent of an Uber). But then we saw a bunch of pedicab guys waiting around for customers, so we figured, why not at least ask. After learning where we were going, the guy said it would be €30. We declined. He asked how much we were willing to pay. We told him a Bolt ride was 15. He said, How about 20? We figured it seemed kind of fun, so we accepted. So we got a pedicab ride back through the Sorbonne/ancien livre district of town. When we got to our hotel, Katy paid him his €30 plus a tip, and he then pointed to a sign on his pedicab showing that his rates were per person. Merde! I gave him a 20-dollar bill and a dirty look. Snookered by a French pedicab hustler. It’s all part of the grand adventure.

Back here in Prague, I’ve mostly had to work thus far, so the adventures have been slim. I did sit in a huka lounge with my daughter and her bf and breathed in enough second-hand smoke to choke an elephant. Tonight we went to dinner with Katy, her bf, and a couple of their college-age friends. It’s so funny to be the old person in a group. I haven’t quite gotten used to that. We had decent but not great Italian. And now I’ve come to Cafe Slavia to soak in the Art Deco ambiance. But they close on the early side (10pm), so I’ll have to head to a bar somewhere to continue.

While I’ve traveled a bit in my life, I haven’t done nearly as much as I would have liked, and I can’t help feel as though I’ve cheated myself a bit. But I’m trying to make up for lost time. It’s a kind of research, if you will, into lost time. Having traveled much more than usual this year already, I’ve been reminded that my style of travel is somewhat sluggish. So many people I know travel at a frenetic pace, booking themselves for one thing after another and packing in as much as humanly possible, I guess in the attempt to maximize the experience? I will experience as much of this foreign place as I can possibly cram into the few hours I’m here! So help me Ra. While I understand the impulse, I’d much rather do things in a pretty leisurely way. Yeah, for sure I’m going to see stuff. I get that there’s so much to do and so little time. But isn’t this true wherever you are? Anyway, I like to include in my travel walking around and hanging out in cafes and people watching and looking at random stuff not in any guide. I’m not trying to suggest that my way is better, in any sense—only that it’s how I do. So for the remainder of my Prague time, I’m definitely going to do some tourist stuff, but I’ll also dawdle some. It’s the credo of my people.

I find that trying to maximize my time, to fit in as much as possible, doesn’t work that great for me in ordinary life, either. But I’ll leave that for another post. This is a Europe Report, after all. And now I shall finish my cappuccino and be off.

This book focuses on the relationships between three people, Ivy-League overachievers who make their mark in the world of computer game design and marketing. The game design aspect is interesting, for sure, but it’s really more a book about relationships, and how we make connections with people through our various limitations and wounds. The three people in this story are Sam, Sadie, and Marx. Sam is the victim of a car crash that killed his mother, something that leaves him with severe medical problems for the rest of his life and deep trauma and guilt about his mother. Sadie first meets him in the hospital, where he is undergoing a series of surgeries to try to to fix his crushed foot. Sadie’s sister, Alice, is in the hospital to treat leukemia. Sam and Sadie become friends over their common love of gaming, but this early friendship is derailed when Sam discovers that Sadie has been tracking hours spent with Same as a Bat Mitzvah service project. Years later, they meet in Boston, where Sam is attending Harvard and Sadie is at MIT. They renew their friendship, again centered on the gaming world, but this time as game designers. Sam’s roommate, a charismatic fellow student, becomes their business partner and chief investor. The three of them go on a whirlwind ride of successes and failures in the world of game design, creation, and marketing, during which Sam is unable to express his love for Sadie, leaving Sadie free to eventually take up with Marx. Their story spans the political upheaval of the Gamergate era, though this isn’t directly addressed, where politics and the world of gaming crossed in some awful ways. The stories of these characters are strongly drawn and deeply felt, working their way eventually back to the Shakespeare soliloquy of the title and towards deeper themes of finding love and meaning in a world that can cruelly crush one’s hopes. Great stuff, well worth reading.

Hopscotch, by Julio Cortazar

I’m still working my way through this one, having started in the summer but gotten distracted by other books. Cortazar appealed to me long ago as someone who’s in on the world of artists and intellectuals and bohemians, and Hopscotch is located right at the heart of such a fictional world, set in Paris and Argentina and highly reminiscent of the work of Italo Calvino and, to some degree, James Joyce. Cortazar’s prose is a whirlwind of ideas, blending the personal and the public, love and longing with significance, writ large. Cortazar hops and skips across literature and politics, the better known and the lesser known (see pataphysics, to give just one example of the amusingly obscure world into which Cortazar ventures). His writing is impossibly dense with such references, but richly satisfying even when you don’t get all of them. Among its features is a postmodernist structure whereby you are at liberty to read the book in a variety of configurations, some suggested in advance, or to improvise your own story by reading the book in whatever order you prefer or by choosing which sections to include or skip. The narrator/protagonist and his far from straight-forward love for a woman called La Maga (Spanish for the witch or sorcerer) figure prominently. Fascinating stuff, but far from an easy read.

One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

I loved this movie, on the surface an action movie about a bunch of political radicals (Weathermen type characters), but I struggled to make sense of it until I saw, as the credits rolled, that it was based (very loosely) on a Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. So much about the movie came into focus when I realized that it was based on Pynchon. Its absurdity and tongue-in-cheek humor set in a deadly serious framework, made so much more sense. I haven’t read Vineland. In fact, of Pynchon’s work, I’ve read only The Crying of Lot 49 (my Pagebound review here). But that book offers up plenty of insight into Pynchon’s approach: his stories are of the personal (in this case focusing on a man and his daughter) placed into the absurd nature of the larger political/social issues of the time (in Vineland, the world of 80s Reaganesque politics, but displaced by Anderson into similar Trumpworld issues). Pynchon loves to skewer the ridiculousness of the zeitgeist, but ultimately the heart of his stories is human relationships, and Anderson does a good job of capturing this through the many twists and turns of the story.

NOTE: Cross-posted from my Goodreads account. If you’d like to share Goodreads accounts, holla!

I was given the name Perry because my dad’s younger brother was named Perry. I never met my uncle Perry—he died before I was born of heart problems, because of some sickness he had when very small. Scarlet fever maybe? One of my sisters could tell you.

I’ve chosen to use a different name for several reasons, but among them is the desire to do a little mental reset. One of my good friends asked me what kind of reset I was hoping for? What did I hope to leave behind? What did I want to move towards?

Stuff I want to move towards: expanding my inner creative. I’m a creative person in a bunch of ways. But I don’t feel like I’ve really explored my capabilities. But last year when I got laid off, I dusted off the novel I’ve been writing and finished it. And I liked what I’d made. Since then I’ve recently written a short story I liked. And I’ve started working on a second novel, and thinking about a third and a fourth. I have some additional stories and screenplays brewing. I’ve written some poetry, and of course a bunch of Substack posts. I feel ready. I’ve dipped my toe back into music as well, and visual arts. I feel ready to push my inner vision outwards. Additionally, I want to connect more closely and more regularly with other creatives. I’ve always done that, but I feel ready to step up to another level.

Stuff I’d prefer to leave behind: mostly fears. Fear of failure. Fear of not being good enough in all the ways that we measure ourselves, mostly against our own expectations. One of my worst traits is my tendency to be very hard on myself, to occasionally see myself as a loser or a fuck-up. And sure, there are times I’ve fucked up. But I want to leave behind me my tendency to be so hard on myself, which can prevent me from being creative, from meeting people, from even trying.

So hi. Welcome to Perrylandia.

BTW, I’m not changing the name of my space because that particular name has a history that I think is worth preserving. Poor Robert’s Almanac was the name of the lit rag my friends and I created way back in the day, and I like honoring that effort.

I’ve also recently made a big life change in moving to California. It’s a time for relocation, reinvigoration, renovation, reimagining.

Strengths

In general, I find LLMs to be astonishingly strong and capable when it comes to language-related tasks. This is the way in which they most closely match general intelligence. It’s also the way they shine vis-a-vis one of the most famous measures of artificial intelligence: the Turing test. Most of you have probably heard of the Turing test. The idea is that a way to test the capabilities of machine intelligence is to put it at a satisfactory remove (such as typing on screens) and then see if the interlocutor of a machine-based intelligence can distinguish between a machine and human conversational partner. With the latest models, a clever and knowledgeable interlocutor could no doubt tease out some mistake that makes the presence of machine intelligence glaringly obvious. And of course, LLMs, the publicly available commercial models, have been trained to identify themselves as machine intelligence. But if you were to take some of the latest models and strip away some of their base prompts and tell them to mimic a human and give them some details of the human they’re meant to mimic, I think it’s pretty safe to say that today’s LLMs could pass the basic Turing test with flying colors.

As a quickie test, I just asked Gemini to pretend it was a human and gave it some parameters (name, age, gender, living location, profession, and a few other details) and then asked it to act as if it were a human having a conversation with me. I think there was maybe one tiny detail that was a little off, but it was really good at managing details while using a very persuasively casual human tone. Anyway, I think it’s pretty widely agreed that LLMs can pass the Turing Test. Some critics have used this to suggest that the Turing Test was just a bad way of measuring machine intelligence, but I disagree.

As I argued in my previous post about LLMs and Lacan, I think that critics underestimate LLMs in some key ways that relate to the notion of experience. The fundamental argument is that because LLMs can’t possibly experience the world the way humans do that their abilities are therefore not “real.” As one famous critic, Emily Bender, has put it, LLMs are merely “stochastic parrots.” The argument she and several other scholars put forward is that LLMs mathematically compute probabilities based on previously ingested texts about the most likely next word in a string of words. There is nothing that could be referred to as “understanding.” Part of the argument, as I read it anyway, is that LLMs can’t truly demonstrate understanding precisely because they have no experience of the world. They’re just word producing machines. The flaw in this argument, in my view, is that it presupposes that in order for something to have anything like human intelligence, that something must have acquired its understanding in the same way that humans have. But why would this be so?

As I argued in my previous post, the ability to process language when combined with lots of texts about human experience gives LLMs something that approximates human understanding well enough to be considered a form of intelligence. Again, the devil is in the details. I absolutely agree that LLMs are limited in their ability to have a bunch of experiences that we consider to be uniquely human, starting with emotions. Emotions are not a simple thing to define, but they do seem, in their human form, to be tied to chemical processes that happen at least in the human brain and probably elsewhere in the human body. So this qualifier, a form of intelligence, is tricky. What I think is absolutely wrong, though, is to use the language of some key critics, such as Bender and Marcus. There are lots of critics out there, and I won’t try to lump them all together to create a straw person, but it is a common argument that LLMs have no real comprehension precisely because they have to real experience of the world. But I’ve yet to see a persuasive argument about why real experience of the world is a requirement for real understanding.

This is why I think the Turing test has not been shown to be irrelevant. Intelligence is as intelligence does. The fact that LLMs can past the Turing test does have significance. The language of Bender and Marcus, in particular, strikes me as quite strident and polar: the suggestion is that LLMs either have understanding or they don’t, and currently they don’t. And given the requirement that a machine intelligence must be able to experience the world in a way that at least approximates human experience (sensory, at a minimum), they will continue to not have comprehension until this fundamental requirement is met. This refusal to accept that understanding could be a continuum is a key part of the error in this argument, in my view.

Interestingly, as another thought experiment, I looked up a few past ways that people have criticized LLMs and tried them out on Gemini (I use Gemini as my measure of current models because I pay for the premium version of Gemini, but don’t pay for the premium versions of most other models, with the possible exception of Copilot). Critics are always looking to trip up models, and have zeroed in over the years on certain examples. For example, someone once asked an LLM to tell them how many legs are in the left rear of a cat. The model answered four. This was used to demonstrate that an LLM can’t answer a quite simple question because it has no actual experience of the world, and has never seen a cat. While there are many such examples out there, every one I’ve tried has failed to stump the latest model of Gemini. Of course there will be new such examples, but I point this out only to show that models have improved significantly and continue to improve rapidly.

Weaknesses

One way that AI models get criticized is that there are limitations in their dataset. Bias is a common such problem that critics point out. This is an old problem that anyone who has ever coded faces: GIGO (garbage in garbage out). The criticism of LLMs here though runs deeper: that whereas a human is capable of critical thinking or faculty which lets a human see not just logical flaws but ethical flaws in information, an LLM has no such capability. The danger suggested is that an LLM has no value system. Meaning for an LLM consists of an amalgamation of ingested texts, many of which are bound to be contradictory. Having no internal compass, therefore, an LLM is subject to the chaos of its dataset.

This is, I think, a legitimate concern. Of course, it’s possible to have an AI system ingest a set of what it is told are values. A simple example of this idea is Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.” You can pass this information along to a machine intelligence. Getting that information to be a hard, fast rule to which the system adheres is far, far trickier, as is knowing how the system has parsed this information. This is one of the key arguments of Yudkowsky and Soares in their recently published book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All: it’s what they call the alignment problem. You can intend for a machine intelligence to have certain goals or fundamental limits, but, for a wide variety of reasons, you can’t guarantee that such goals or limitations will work. As Yudkowsky and Soares argue, the danger inherent in this problem grows with the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

I do find it a persuasive argument that the very nature of intelligence is rife with problems, contradictions, and, to use the work of Doug Hofstadter, strange loops, ways that reasoning loops back on itself, creating paradoxes. Our legal code is a great example of this. Lawmakers attempt to write laws in ways that reduce ambiguity, and yet our courts are filled with cases in which the correct interpretation of law is far from obvious. The world of ethics is that much more complex, as demonstrated by the multiplicity of ideas about what constitutes correct behavior. It follows, then, that machine intelligence is no less likely to face the kinds of problems that have bedeviled humans.

Other issues with machine intelligence:

• The epistemology issue. The ability of machine intelligence to approximate “reality” with such ease is disturbing but really a problem of scale, in my view. It’s always been possible to fake information. A human can simply lie, of course. And a photograph can be doctored or staged. There are no shortage of such examples. The list goes on and on. But the ease with which people can create fakes of videos, photos, and even recordings of people saying something in what sounds like their voice serves as a huge leap backward to our ability to distinguish actual from manipulated representation of reality. But of course, these kinds of problems run far deeper than the capabilities of machine intelligence. As Orwell saw so well, power has a dangerous array of tools with which it can shape reality. The better the tools the worse the problem?

• The creativity problem. Critics have argued that machine intelligence has no spark with which to be actually creative. It can take existing forms of creativity and recombine them, but can’t generate anything truly original. The real problem, though, is the ease with which machine intelligence can produce “good enough” mimicry of creativity, which, some fear, will end up drowning real creativity in a sea of mediocrity. As any artist will attest, though, I think this problem is nothing new. But again, ease and scale may be their own problems.

• The theft of existing intellectual property. Machine intelligence has been built on the shoulders of actual human intelligence and creativity, and the companies that have built machine intelligence have stolen this treasure trove outright, with no compensation to the human beings, dead or living, who have produced this trove. This is a shame, I agree, and I would hope to see some compensation to the many thinkers and artists who have been plundered. Do I think it’s likely that this will happen? Sadly, probably about as likely as Native Americans receiving compensation for the long string of broken treaties that were made with them to build the United States or for African Americans to be compensated for the immense economic value that went into building our country on the backs of their enslaved ancestors.

• Workforce replacement. One of the great “dangers” of machine intelligence, particularly when combined with possible advances in robotics, is the ever increasing chance that it will replace a significant number of jobs. It’s not easy to determine how fast this will be happen, but I think it’s worth being concerned about because it’s likely to accelerate very rapidly once it gets underway on a serious scale. I put “danger” in quote marks here because whether it’s really a boon or a bane depends on how our governments around the world respond to this prospect. There’s lots of talk about UBI and how that might be a response to this issue. What we’re facing, I think, is an intensification of the liberal/conservative divide in this future world. UBI is essentially a liberal version of how to deal with this problem: an extension of the idea that the productivity of a society belongs to the whole society at least to some degree, which means that throwing a large chunk of the populace out of work causes us, as a society, to owe these people something. A more conservative take could be that those who own the means of production (the companies producing machine intelligence and the robots that can execute its capabilities in the physical world) also own the benefits that result, while owing nothing to society at large. It’s hard to imagine such a viewpoint really flying if some significant amount of the populace is thrown out of work. Even if such a thing were spread out across decades, it would likely cause massive political upheaval, likely rewriting the rules of economics.

• Pedagogy. What does education mean in a world of widely available machine intelligence? How can one possibly educate children (or anyone) in a world where it’s so easy to fake understanding? The immediate problem that LLMs cause relates closely to the existing capabilities of LLMs: reading and writing. Any student can use an LLM to take a big shortcut to reading comprehension and writing as a demonstration of comprehension. In much the same way that calculators made longhand mathematical calculation pointless, LLMs are making a wide range of other forms of mastery difficult to assess and therefore successfully convey.

Summary

As you can see, my list of issues is long and, to my thinking, far from trivial. Perhaps one of the biggest dangers is precisely how much we, as humans, are in over our heads, so to speak. The course of AI within a world geared towards profits is swift and apparently more or less unstoppable. Lawmakers throughout the world are unlikely to put any meaningful barriers in the way of machine intelligence businesses. Even if some politicians could agree on which barriers to erect or ways to channel this fast flowing river, who would risk letting their country get behind in the race for supremacy? Whether it’s true of AI or not, our global economy is premised on the idea that developing cutting edge technology is a race, and to the victors go the spoils, while the losers get colonized, if not geographically than economically. Each of us can individually try to make sense of the trends and stay ahead of the curve, but how this will affect entire nations and their futures is probably beyond even existing ways that people have organized to improve large scale outcomes. It may just be an expression of my own political preferences, but I can’t help but imagine that governments that are geared towards justice and social welfare are more likely to solve these kinds of issues than governments that enable oligarchs. But it will also help, I think, for there to be a robust conversation about what our communities (across various scales) value, and how these values apply to such fast moving technological trends.

It’s a long book that covers a lot of ideas, but for our purposes, we’ll focus on a key aspect of his argument: that a mind, or what each of us thinks of as a self, is not a unified, whole, and coherent entity. Instead, a self is made up of a multitude of pieces, processes, or agents, which, individually and collectively, form a large number of narrative drafts about reality.Each of these agents is quite limited in scale and ability.

Dennett spends a lot of pages tackling this question precisely because it’s very counterintuitive and, for a lot of people, disturbing. One of my favorite ways of thinking about Dennett’s idea is that we are each a village (town? city?) of idiots. It’s not right to say only that we’re a village, because that suggests a bunch of complete and whole brains in cooperation/competition. Dennett is proposing that there is no complete or whole brain anywhere inside us. This idea that there’s a whole and complete “me” inside each of us he refers to as a combination of a Cartesian theater, a place where all the stimuli go to be viewed, and a homunculus, or a complete consciousness that sits in the Cartesian theater and watches the movie and then reacts to it. I think a better way of describing the homunculus is possibly: a soul. The word “soul” can cover a lot of ground, of course, and I explored this in an earlier post. But here I mean something pretty limited: the idea that our consciousness exists more or less independently of our body. That all of our thoughts and memories and experiences can float away after the death of the body. I believe that this notion is the primary target of Dennett’s argument, and also the chief goal of many people who argue against the idea that mind or self lives within the physical substrate of the brain.

In Dennett’s version of consciousness, experience (that streaming flow of both external and internal stimuli) kicks off a bunch of “drafts”: highly specialized portions of the brain that process stimuli create versions of reality. The draft, like the “agent” that generates it, is limited, and it moves into a marketplace of responses, a kind of village square, competing for attention. Some of these things win out and some don’t. And then, based on which way the wind listeth, so to speak, some priorities emerge and parts of the brain go back to work developing new “drafts.” Dennett calls this a “Joycean machine,” in honor of author James Joyce. If you imagine Dublin on June 16, 1904, you could imagine Ulysses as the record of the multiple drafts underway across the city. If you’ve ever read Ulysses, you know that there is no readily discernible complete and whole entity there. Instead, there are a multitude of versions, the stories of various inhabitants, living side by side, jostling, befriending, competing, loving, rebuking, interacting. Dennett’s version of consciousness is more like that: a multitude of interests.

The reason that our minds don’t seem like what Dennett is describing is because our mind prepares final versions (plural versions because they’re ongoing across time) in which nearly all the actual work of the mind is left out. The mind fails to create complete and coherent versions of reality, but it tries. It tries to create a narrative of self and the events that occur for a self (again, both external and internal).

Now I’m going to veer a bit from Dennett. In my version of his idea, there are some overrides. One example is controlling narratives that color the rest. To give a few examples, there are some identity narratives, which come along with reams of complex baggage. Within certain spaces, this gets called intersectionality. There are narratives we have been told about ourselves (the labels and stories told by our family and friends about us), and that we have created for ourselves. Another example of overrides are those designed for conservation of energy. A classic example is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a huge saver of energy. But another example is what I like to call the model subtraction method. I believe that when we encounter something, a typical first response is to try to fit that something into some previous category or model. When we meet a dog, we identify it as a dog and we treat it according to our preconceived notions about dogs. If the thing behaves in a surprising way, we keep the model but carve out an exception: dog that bites. Model subtraction is a huge energy saver, but of course it also causes us to make mistakes, not only because our models are imprecise or sometimes flat out wrong but also because our attempts to modify them are imprecise and incomplete. But it serves the purpose of “fast” thinking (a la Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, a wonderful book I recommend highly).

There are a number of questions and considerations that Dennett doesn’t delve into that are worthy of consideration given his basic premise. One example, for me, is the idea of coalitions. I think that in some sense Dennett’s premise is correct: we’re made up of a village of idiots who interact. One thing he doesn’t really dig into so much is that there are different types of idiots. Some of them are designed to identify things. Some of them are designed as some kind of timer, pushing certain idiots to the front on a particular schedule. Some idiots are gatekeepers, designed to keep other idiots in check. In my version of Dennett, some are coalition builders, helping idiots, who largely are unaware of each other, to team up.

Part of what I find fascinating about Dennett’s book is that I think his ideas have huge implications from a therapeutic standpoint, but he doesn’t address this (at least that I recall; it’s been a while since I read it). I suppose it’s not all that surprising that he doesn’t address this question, given that he’s a philosopher and cognitive scientist and not a therapist, psychiatrist, or self-help author. Nevertheless, I’m persuaded that Dennett’s ideas can help point the way towards the answers to some really key questions about why any one of us behaves in certain ways. Or to put it another way, Dennett’s ideas can provide some useful notions about internal processes. For starters, I personally find it really useful to stop thinking of myself as just me, a coherent self, and to think of myself as a bunch of competing agents. How is that helpful? First, it makes the notion of a self a little less mystifying. How could I have possibly done something so idiotic? Well, in part because I have internal agents that I’m leaving out of my big narrative of myself. Knowing that the stories I tell about myself have some highly illusory aspects is comforting when I’m puzzled about myself, which is a frequent thing.

That’s a quite superficial realization, of course. What’s more important is understanding something about the particular idiots in your village. Who’s in there pushing on you and how hard and how often and towards what? These are the things that really matter. And perhaps the Dennett model isn’t, for you, so earth-shattering. Maybe it seems common sense. I can speak only for myself, but I definitely had way too strong a sense of internal coherence. Of course, I read this book a long time ago. Possibly ordinary life would have disabused me of the notion of internal coherence, but simply in different ways. But at the time I read it, I found his ideas to be helpful. I found it helpful to have an inkling of some of my insecurities, and ways I was trying to compensate for my insecurities, most of which involved wrapping myself up in the cloak of “smart person.” For example, in social situations, I was able to observe myself steering conversations towards territory on which I was not only comfortable but could flex a little (or a lot). It was a terrible habit, because it prevented me from seeing people nearly as clearly, out of fear of being judged inadequate. I’ve tried over the years to strangle that particular idiot inside myself, the one who tries to game out social situations to minimize fear of inadequacy.

For me, this set of ideas went hand in hand with another tool of exploration: mind-altering substances. Smoking (or ingesting) pot has the ability to make you hyper-aware of your own thought processes. So I could watch certain agents acting in real time. Doing so made me kind of more self-conscious than usual, so it wasn’t always particularly pleasant, but it was educational. Psychedelics were an even better tool, because they let me see processes at work while also freeing those processes to interact with other internal processes at a higher rate. There’s a reason Huxley called his book the Doors of Perception. On psychedelics, idiots can come and go and even kind of blend into each other outside the usual rules of mental “physics.” Even alcohol helped in some ways, because, if you can manage to keep yourself at a useful level of intoxication (no mean feat, granted), you can lower inhibitions in useful ways, which also helps you to see your own inhibitions and laugh at them. Of course, all these experiences have dangers, so I’m not a proponent of using them outside controlled, therapeutic settings (even though, sadly, such use has largely been curtailed by short-sighted politicians).

Also interesting to me is the overlap between Dennett’s ideas about consciousness and Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis. They come at these questions from incredibly different viewpoints, but they do share a notion that the self is a deeply fractured and fragile illusion that we hold together with magic and duct tape. Lacan calls this his realm of the Imaginary. From the time we are babies and first have the paradoxical experience of individuation, which comes from seeing ourselves in a mirror (and thus seeing the self as an other in a certain way), we start forming notions of self. This is a process of accretion that never stops, and is full of contradictions. But the mind is expert at hiding the contradictions behind narratives. Thus, Lacan also posits something like Dennett’s Joycean machine.

Another philosopher who provides useful material for the Dennett approach to mind is Kant, and in particular his notion of phenomena vs. noumena. I’m hugely oversimplifying here, but Kant suggests that the physical world consists of noumena, or “things in themselves.” There is an actual physical world. But the mind is unable to experience it directly. Instead, the mind experiences the world as what Kant calls phenomena, or interpreted experiences. Interpreted experiences come through the filter of preconceived notions about the world. We’re apt to define what we experience by what we already believe about the physical world, or through symbolic notions about the significance of things. A Christian sees a different world from a Buddhist, and so on. An alternative way of saying this is that there is no coherent self that experiences anything. Instead, there’s the village of idiots, designed for different purposes. Thus, phenomena are also very fragmented. Much of this information is ignored and mistakenly interpreted into the world of agent coalitions and energy conservation. But it’s essentially another way of explaining something similar.

In some ways, I find it surprising that the world of psychology as therapy (in all its various guises) doesn’t overlap more with the worlds of cognitive science and philosophy. And maybe it does, but under different names or interpretive systems. But it doesn’t seem to, especially. Which is not to say that therapy isn’t grounded in knowledge. I do think that by and large therapists try to take an evidence-based approach to the mind and potential ways to heal the mind. It just seems like perhaps sometimes they don’t cast a wide enough net in their efforts to look for useful ideas about the mind.

For example, how can you deny Democratic presidents things they want, such as not having their policies torpedoed by single judges in very conservative areas of the country, while handing over the same kind of protection to a Republican president? How can you give Republican presidents immense powers vis-a-vis attempts to hold presidents accountable to the same standards while not providing the same to future Democratic presidents? To the extent that you curtail the powers of the judiciary vis-a-vis the executive, how can you do so while still being able to preserve the causes of individual citizens that you deem to be worthy of preservation while reserving the ability to stand in the way of less worthy causes? Of course, I make a big presumption here: that judges aren’t immune to the political pressures of the day and the less lofty considerations of political outcomes. That perhaps certain justices do something beyond a the dispassionate calling of legal balls and strikes. I’m prepared, dear reader, to test my weight on this limb.

Trump v. United Sates

Trump v. United States is, in my humble opinion, among the worst and most dangerous Supreme Court decisions of the modern era. Some of this is due to the widening gap of partisanship that makes it ever less likely that Congress can (or will, which is just a variant of can) carry out its consitutional duties of restraining the executive branch and the president in particular from dangerous abuses of power and a willingness to ignore precedent, decorum, and decency in the service of self dealing and undermining principles of good governance developed across centuries. When Congress and the presidency are controlled by the same party, the checks of advice and consent, war powers, basic oversight, and even defending fundamental legislative perogatives all but go away. And, in that circumstance, or when even one house of Congress is controlled by the same party as the president, you can forget the power of impeachment, removal from office, or prevention from holding future office over abuses of power. This doesn’t mean that no checks on the power of the presidency remain, but it takes away some big ones.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, in concert with some other decisions that have come down since then, did considerable damage to some of the remaining checks on the power of the presidency. For starters, the court’s unitary executive theory, by which the president has unchecked power over the executive branch, even when the laws that created certain areas of the executive branch are being violated, completely neuters every aspect of the executive branch that was designed to protect against corruption and lawlessness. A few key examples:

• Independence of the Justice Department - It is axiomatic of good government and good governance that the rule of law requires that the instrument of enforcing laws retain a high degree of independence. The Justice Department, tasked with enforcing federal law, is supposed to do so without fear or favor: without fear of being punished for making decisions that are politically unpopular and without favor or partiality for anyone, for any reason. All are supposed to be equal under the law, up to and including the president. Trump v. United States absolutely gutted this presumption by specifically naming Trump’s corrupt attempts to fire people in the Justice Department in order to further his scheme of undermining what courts have found over and over again to be his legitimate loss of an election as absolutely protected behavior. The SC made it clear that the Justice Department has absolutely no independence, and that the president has an unquestionable right to use the Justice Department to further his aims, without anyone being able to second guess his motivations.

• Which brings me to another of the worst aspects of the decision: that when doing anything deemed by the court to fall within even the “outer permiter” of his official responsibilities, the president’s motives cannot even be considered. To use just one example, one of core powers of presidents, specifically delineated in the constitution, is the power of pardons. It’s not difficult to imagine ways that a president could corruptly and dangerously use the power of pardons. For example, a president could hold auctions for pardons, handing out pardons to whoever is willing to bid the highest. Or a president could use vague language to imply his wish for acts of violence against opponents, along with a promise to pardon anyone who might commit such an act, and then, when someone commits that act, pardon them. This is an obviously corrupt scheme by which he can encourage lawlessness committed by others of any description and then excuse such lawlessness. No court could even consider his motives for doing so under the Trump v. United States decision. The powers of the presidency are so great that the list of ways they could be used are very long, so making motives off limits to any court is an astonishing choice.

• The court goes a step further to insulate the president against charges of lawlessness: they insist that breaking laws doesn’t per se make any particular act outside the boundaries of what could be considered core presidential responsibilities. As all of us who had junior high civics class learned, the point of the executive branch is to execute laws passed by Congress (hence the name of the branch). The president takes an oath to this effect, though I suppose that oath is pretty vague: they are supposed to “faithfully execute” the office of the president and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” There’s a lot of wiggle room here, but even so, over and over again thinkers who evaluated such things (including courts) have concluded, up until now, that the spirit of the U.S. constitution (and the Federalist papers, which elaborate on the intent of the framers) was written with the intent of forming of government that does not put anyone above the law, not least of all because that very circumstance, having a king, was what the framers objected to in the first place.

• The only check the SC provides on such power is: themselves. The Supreme Court reserves to itself the ability to decide what exactly falls within the “outer permiter” of a president’s powers. Which is a fairly convenient way to give some presidents, say of a particular party, nearly unchecked power, while preserving the ability to check the powers of other presidents, say of a different party.

Trump v. CASA, Inc.

This decision is troubling, but definitely complex, in part precisely because it didn’t tackle the underlying merits of Trump’s executive order about birthright citizenship (because the Trump administration, knowing there was a high probably it would lose, avoided tackling the merits). Instead it ended up being a decision about universal injunctions, or the ability of lower courts to make orders that apply to the entire country. It has been a not uncommon practice for litigants to “venue shop,” choosing to file lawsuits in jurisdictions that are likely to be more friendly to their aims, after which these judges can make decisions that apply to the entire country. These kinds of decisions, often meant to be temporary, can be reviewed and reversed, either temporarily or in the normal course of deciding litigation on the merits, but that all takes time, sometimes a long time. So it’s not surprising that lots of people have objected to universal injunctions for a long time. But the Roberts court somehow found a way to let their concerns about such things slide during the Obama and Biden administrations and chose to address this only near the beginning of the second Trump administration. Which highlights one way judges can be a little sneaky: in their choice of timeline.

But that issue aside, the Trump v. CASA decision is a mixed bag. Among the more reliable commentators on this issue, imo, is Steve Vladeck. As his TLDNR; summary has it: it’s got problems aplenty, but “[t]he long-term implications of the ruling, though, will really depend upon what happens next.” The jury is still out, so to speak. But there are at least two troubling aspects to what comes next:

• As the Kavanaugh concurrence suggests, part of what comes next is likely an even more heavy reliance on the so-called “shadow docket,” temporary decisions by the Supreme Court that are rarely if ever accompanied by any kind of reasoning. This would be less troubling if such decisions were tailored in more narrow ways or were less frequent, but they’ve been growing in frequency and audacity under the Roberts Court.

• The main putative replacement for universal injunctions is class-action litigation. This is troubling for several reasons:

  • Class action litigation is a slow process, which gives any administration the opportunity to violate consitutional principles within jurisdictions where particular policies haven’t even been challenged for some lengthy period of time, also creating an enforcement patchwork that’s confusing and troublesome.

  • The Roberts Court has been clamping down on class-action litigation in a variety of ways long before this decision came down. Richard Freer explores this subject in depth. The short(ish) version is that “changes in class practice have made the certification process more expensive and protracted...requiring litigants to expend greater effort and money at earlier stages of a case.” Among the ways that the Roberts Court has raised the bar for class action cases is to increase the scrutiny for class commonality (a point not typically challenged historically). Another way the Roberts Court has been less friendly to class action lawsuits is on questions of justiciability, which most frequently comes down to standing (and occasionally mootness). This is really getting into the weeds, but here are some examples of ways that judges can curtail class action lawsuits on the basis of standing: a) third-party litigation; by suggesting that the suit is not being brought by the parties with actual grievances, but instead by someone else on behalf of third parties; b) generalized grievances; by arguing that litigants’ complaints represent no concrete injury in fact (and fact here must be brought to bear using various standards of evidence at various stages of such litigation); and c) zone of interest; judges can put the kibosh on class action litigation by suggesting that it falls outside the “zone of interest” of particular constitutional provisions.

The net effect of this decision is, on the whole, to curtail the power of the judiciary while expanding the power of the president. It just so happens that this decision also gives courts, and particularly the Supreme Court, the ability to pick and choose among constitutional protections, favoring some with shadow docket decisions and then, eventually, full-throated endorsements based on the merits, while giving others short shrift on the basis of the technical details of obscure areas of class certification, well before the merits even get argued, much less decided.

My daughter, who is 21, tells me that young people these days are getting a gallon jug and filling it with half vodka and half water mixed with some kind of electrolyte solution (one with no sugar, so not Gatorade). They then proceed to drink this concoction over the course of one evening. It’s called a borg, which stands for black out rage gallon [sic]. You want to give your jug a clever name, like a pop culture reference or some inside joke. Go figure. As a parent, it makes you want to make stupid lemming comments. So just because your friends are jumping off cliffs…? Stupid because pointless. And yet we feel compelled to make such comments. Maybe because all the other parents are doing it?

UPDATE: My daughter asked me to point out that she herself has never participated in this activity. Nor would she (insists her father)!

NYT Summer Bucket List Reading

I’m doing the NYTSBLR. I can’t remember if that’s its actual name, but that’s at least close. Find here. Now that I looked it up, I was close. They list 10 loose categories of books and you’re supposed to hit 5 of them. For example: a book in a genre you don’t ordinarily read, or set in a place you’ve never been. Listen to an audible book. And so forth. An unscrupulous person might try to fill five of the categories using one book. A book in a genre I don’t usually read set in a place I’ve never been that’s been translated and was published in the last year, and that I listened to as an audio book. BOOM, done! Being a person of scruples, I would never do such a thing. So far I’ve hit the category of a book by an author I’ve never read before, a book on the NYT list of the best books published in the 21st century, and a book I loved as a kid.

To wit: the book by an author I’ve never read before was The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. Lispector is one of those authors who comes up a fair amount in the spaces I pay attention to, a writer considered eminently worth reading, and a writer’s writer. So it’s a little embarrassing I’ve never read her before. There are so many such gaps in my reading, alas. Anyway, fascinating book. Lispector’s last before she died. It’s a frame story, where the frame is: some guy, who alleges himself to be not a writer feels compelled to tell this particular story and so writes about a poor nobody of a girl from Northeast Brazil now living in Rio de Janeiro, one of many such young women. The frame is kind of all over the place. The girl is an invention. The girl is possibly his employee. His relationship to her is wildly ambiguous, as are the supposed reasons he’s writing. So it’s kind of a story of identity and meaning, that of the girl, couched within a position of identity and meaning, that of the intrusive narrator, framed within what we know about the identity and presumed intent of the author (Lispector grew up in Northeast Brazil). Among the chief characteristics of this girl are her poverty, plainness, astonishing lack of self awareness, and failure to be important to any other person (presumably even the narrator, or so he at times claims). The intrusive narrator adds a very odd layer to the text, which is otherwise a pretty plain story of how someone of no importance to society manages to develop even the barest rudiment of a sense of self and to keep about them a sense of dignity. It’s tough, heartbreaking stuff. This book could have fulfilled several categories: a book set in a place I’ve never been, a book by an author I’ve never read before, AND a book read in translation. But no. Such is my level of integrity.

In the category of books in the NYT Best of the 21st Century, I took on a book by an author I have read before: Pastoralia by George Saunders. Which Saunders books have I read before, even though that’s not really germane, you ask? Well I’ll tell you, even if it’s not really germane. Tenth of December, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and I’m partway through Lincoln in the Bardo. Pastoralia was Saunders’s (oh how I’ve always been made uncomfortable by making words that end in ‘s’ into possessives!) second short story collection. As usual, he’s absolutely hilarious. And as usual, he’s kind of on the dark side. In fact, in this collection, really dark. The title story is a totally funny and weird story about a guy who lives in an imaginary living history museum, kind of. It’s like a theme park where you can wander around and see actual humans living in historical human settings. The first-person narrator lives in a cave where he acts out being a caveman. The main ways he does this are to pretend to search for and eat bugs, to cook up a dead goat that is supposed to be left each day in a slot by other park employees, and to pretend to paint on the walls (Lascaux style apparently). He is joined in his cave by a co-worker, a woman named Janet, who regularly breaks the rules by breaking character, speaking in English, eating unapproved food, and even smoking. They stay in this cave all the time, and their only form of communication with the outside world is that they each have a fax machine in their separate private quarters, each just off the main cave. Park goers can come by and poke their heads into the entrance to the cave to witness what it was like to be a cave dweller. Few ever do. Hilariously specific and weird. Kind of reminds me of Italo Calvino. Everything is told in a dry, deadpan style. Another story in this collection is about a guy who works at something like the male equivalent of a Hooters, but the male servers have prosthetic big penises they can use to titillate the (according the text of the story, all female) guests for tips. He has two sisters who each have babies and are hilariously and depressingly ignorant, and a selfless aunt who takes care of them all without ever asking for anything in return. This next part is sort of a spoiler alert, so skip ahead, you who avoid such things! The aunt dies and then in a sort of zombie way comes back from the dead as a much less selfless version of herself who wants a few changes in the household. I did find it fascinating that so many of the stories deal with what I might call a certain type of human flotsam and jetsam. People who bob in their worlds, possibly fallen off some ship or on some ship when it crashed, and they drift and then are cast up on some shore. His characters are mostly losers. A few freaks. It was interesting because, via the other Saunders reading I’ve done, I don’t really associate Saunders with this literary space. I associate him more with Tolstoy and Turgenev and Chekhov. Though Chekhov wrote stories about nearly anyone you can imagine, including some losers. Anyway, great stories all. One of the best books of the 21st century? Hmm, not sure I’m on board with that. But good stuff.

Lastly (so far), in the category of books I loved as a child, I re-read The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. It’s the story of Kit, an English girl who grew up in Barbados in the late 1600s with her grandpa after her parents died. But when her grandpa dies and turns out to be saddled with debt, his house, land, and even slaves must all be sold to pay his debts, and so Kit is left destitute. A much older gentleman suitor wants to marry her and bail her out, but she wants none of it, and so flees to her only known living relative, her mother’s sister, who has been living for many years in Puritan Connecticut. Afraid that they might reject her, she hasn’t even written to tell them she’s coming. On the voyage from Barbados to Connecticut she meets a handsome but distant young sailor. Then she’s thrown in with the Puritans and, as an English royalist, independent-minded girl, avid reader, and someone who eschews even the trappings of authority, she has a wee bit of trouble fitting in with her new Puritan family. She soon meets a sweet old Quaker woman who, shocker, the narrow minded Puritans of the village think of as possibly a witch, and a young girl in need of some attention and love, and she introduces the one to the other and starts teaching the young girl to read, to boot, all in spite of the fact that her uncle has forbidden her from visiting the Quaker woman for the sake of appearance. She soon has a suitor, to complicate things still further, the richest boy in the town, who bores her no end but may present a way to at least gain a modicum of independence. Anyway, I loved this book back in the day. Re-reading it after so long was a little strange, but mostly very enjoyable. Written in the 50s, if anything it surprised me with how progressive it still seems, romance novel tropes notwithstanding. The story’s beating heart is the hearth of the old Quaker woman, Hannah, who’s been exiled by the village to living in a hut that floods every year, now helping a largely ignored waif of a girl learn to read and taking care of her cats. Before the story is done (spoiler alert ahead!), the villagers do decide she’s a witch and burn down her cottage and try to bring her to trial, but Kit, along with the handsome young sailor, come to the rescue. All’s well that ends well.

Next up: A work published in the last year. I’ve chosen The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. After that: Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar as my translated book. I’m doing the book challenge with my daughter, and she’s suggesting maybe we should try to fit in all 10 categories, rather than just 5. Join us, gentle reader, and put your reading choices in the comments!

UPDATE: I deeply regret not having pointed out that my daughter pointed me towards this summer reading bucket list, much as she has encouraged me to to sign up for the summer reading challenge at what used to be our shared local library every year.

Men’s Book Club

Speaking of reading, many times over the course of my life, and recently with one friend in particular, I’ve expressed frustration (frustration may be too strong; perhaps curious but mild annoyance?) over the idea that almost all book clubs are made up of women exclusively. Though I have, in fact, been part of two book groups that were co-ed. I have wondered, though, from time to time: why is it that mostly only women make book clubs that involve mostly only women? This isn’t some kind of men’s rights rant. I’m merely curious. My friend told me I should create a men’s book club. Though why I would want to create a book club that included only men I can’t imagine. But nevertheless I did try to imagine this scenario. Since I’m new to the area where I live, Silicon Valley, California, I don’t know enough people, let alone men, to create a book club. So I advertise on Craig’s List (this was my friend’s recommendation), and say…what exactly? Wanted: people of the male persuasion to get together periodically to discuss books. Or should I make that people of any gender persuasion? Wanted: human beings to meet from time to time to discuss books. How do most book clubs form? Just a group of women who know each other and one day at lunch one of them says, Let’s have a book club! And then over time they also say, Let’s invite Rachel and someone else says Helen would be perfect! Someone volunteers their living room for the first meeting. Does anyone ever say: what about my husband? And then everyone looks at each other for a moment and then they laugh.

So, dear reader, I’ll ask you: are you in a book club, or more than one? If so, what is the gender makeup of this club? Have any of you ever been in a book club that involved men, either because it was for both women and men or because it was just for men? And I’m interested to hear more about the book clubs you participate in: what kinds of books do you read? How do you decide? Do most participants read the book? Do people who don’t read the book keep quiet? How many people cheat and ask AI to summarize the book for them and to describe some interesting talking points? Are these book club discussions interesting, wrt to the book, or mostly just a good reason to get together with friends? Not that these are mutually exclusive, of course. Just curious about your experience.

What is there to enjoy about his movies?

• His odd and very particular visual aesthetic. His aesthetic is so unique that it has been the subject of many humorous parodies. He uses a particular color palette, for example, made from old fashioned pastels. The shades of 50s and 60s decor, maybe? His sets are almost always hilariously artificial. It is clear, and meant to be clear, that these are sets, which has the effect of giving a sort of camp effect but also foregrounding the idea that we are in a drama, in postmodernist fashion. He often begins scenes with the camera framed, and precisely centered, on his artifical set boundaries. Even his close-ups tend to follow this pattern, with the camera centered precisely on the faces of his subjects.

• He frequently uses postmodern techniques. As mentioned above, he foregrounds the notion of artificiality by breaking the so-called fourth wall in various ways.

• He goes in a lot of different directions. His movies point to many things without giving you lots of clues about the relationships between the many pointers. You are meant to treat the movies as a kind of puzzle, and as a series of mysterious relationships that don’t quite fit together in obvious ways. I don’t mean that that the puzzle has an answer that you have to figure out. There is no answer. The obscurity is a feature, not a bug.

• He directs his actors to deliver their lines in a very muted, deadpan style. There’s humor everywhere, but the discrepancy between the delivery and the subjecte matter is very much a part of the joke.

• His scripts match the style of acting in the sense that he’s dealing with subjects that are laden with emotion, but he tackles these subjects in ways where the emotion is not on the surface.

• He deals with big issues, like mortality and love and politics, but in very oblique ways that lean heavily on, and into, the absurd. He’s very much a dramatist in the tradition of the absurdists, like Beckett, Ionesco, or Stoppard, with intense and emotional content beneath the surface but buried beneath layers of the ridiculous, the weird, and the silly. But there’s always an existential dread at the base of his work.

• There’s frequently a conspiracy element to his work, where some people are attempting to manipulate other people in a Kafkaesque way. Often it’s authority figures: secret government agencies and spies representing secret government agencies, often in buffoonish ways.

• There are usually dysfunctional family elements to his stories. The family (or family-like) relationships are a key part of the longing and dread that frequently remains only partially explored and often not really satisfied. This is a key part of the emotional undercurrent I mentioned earlier.

In all these ways, The Phoenician Scheme is par for the course. The basic story is that of a father, Zsa Zsa Korda, and his daughter, Liesl. The father is a business man, a sort of old fashioned tycoon. The scheme of the title is a large-scale business plan he has created to set up his daughter to live in comfort. He is totally estranged from this daughter, not having seen her for several years, and she has entered a convent, intending to become a nun. He swoops into her life to tell her that she is the heir to his fortune and that he wants her to help him execute his scheme. Even though he has eight sons, some of them adopted (which he explains is a strategy to ensure a wider pool of capability than genes alone would allow), he apparently has no interest in his sons, as they live in squalor even though he’s wealthy. His daughter resents his absence and has been told that her father probably killed her mother (something he disputes). Zsa Zsa has been the subject of numerous assassination attempts, which continue as the movie progresses. The conspiracy element in this case is a cabal of government leaders presumably representing the major industrialized nations who consider Korda to be a menace and therefore plot to take him down.

The heart of this story, emotionally, is the relationship between Korda and Liesl. Can he regain her trust? Can she make him into a better person, with some rudimentary business ethics? Can she re-integrate the family, including his sons? Whether he can pull off his scheme drives the plot forward but is much less important. Running alongside all these elements is a mysterious heaven element, where Korda and various versions of Liesl appear alongside God and other heavenly tribunals. I was never quite sure what to make of this aspect, and I want to watch the movie again to help me make sense of it.

All in all, it’s safe to say this was definitely a Wes Anderson movie. It was somewhat more puzzling than some of his other movies (for me anyway), but still squarely in the mold of the movies he’s been making lately. So, like me, if you’re a fan of his movies, you’ll probably like it. And if you’re not, you’ll be confused about how he keeps managing to make his movies and why people keep going to watch them.

Be that as it may, it's true that immigration is often a function of group identity and power. Europeans colonized the Americas because they could: because much of the Native population was killled off by pathogens, and because those that remained were divided and conquered with superior weaponry, almost entirely in the service of greed. If that somehow makes you feel that you belong here, I can only express surprise. It shouldn't. There have been many waves of subsequent immigration. African “immigration" was entirely forced, also in the name of greed and deeply shameful ideas about race and identity. Immigration by various groups, many from various parts of Europe at first, has been resisted along the way, with immigrants vilified and mistreated. And then gradually accepted over time. So for MAGA people to now focus on immigration as something fundamentally dangerous is beyond absurd, given this nation's history.

More absurd still are the wild and ridiculous claims of Trump and MAGA world about recent immigrants. Trump keeps saying over and over that countries are emptying their prisons and insane asylums and sending those people to us. He began his political career by claiming that many immigrants are criminals and rapists. There is no evidence to support the idea that any nation is sending undesirables to the United States. In any group of people, there will be some criminals and some people who exhibit anti-social behaviors of one kind or another, but there is no legitimate evidence to support the idea that immigrants to the United States, in general, are different from any other wave of immigration: they come here out of some combination of trouble where they're from (economic difficulty, physical danger, political persecution, religious persecution, or similar reasons) and perceived opportunity within the United States. Most of them come seeking work. Most of them have families that they either try to bring with them to intend to send money to once they're able to secure work. The great majority want nothing more than what any of us wants: to be able to earn a living and to pursue their own peaceful interests with family, friends, and community. Study after study has shown that immigrants contribute to the economy in many important ways and commit crimes at lower levels than non-immigrants. Is this really a good reason to vilify people, because they want to feed their families?

Part of what's particularly disturbing about the response of Trump and MAGA world is their campaign of bait and switch. At one point, they claimed to emphasize that they were in favor of legal immigration, “doing it the right way,” and were opposed only to illegal immigration. But now that the Trump administration has been in power for several months, it's obvious that this pretence is false. Trump's people have gone to great lengths to persecute legal immigrants, and to make it harder to legally immigrate to the United States, and they promise to make it harder still. ICE has been showing up to courthouses to detain people who have come for scheduled hearings related to their immigration status, people obviously doing everything they can to follow the rules and enter the country “the right way.” And they're doing so with false and ridiculous claims of some kind of national emergency. It's no more a national emergency now that people are drawn to the relative economic prosperity in the United States than it has been at any point in our history.

It's past time for people with a sense of history and a modicum of decency to stand up against MAGA world and say: enough. You can't pretend that your presence here is somehow more legitimate than that of any people who just want better lives. Of course any country has the right to maintain its borders, and to have rules for who can come and why. But any country like ours, built on immigration, can and should emphasize the value of immigration and immigrants and to embrace and celebrate our identity and history as a nation of immigrants.

For me, this particular even hit home, because I knew people close to the scene. Another similar recent event, in Washington, D.C., involved no one I knew personally, but was no less disturbing: two innocent people, who just happened to be Jewish and happened to be attending a non-political event at a Jewish Museum, killed by someone protesting the Gaza occupation.

My daughter told me recently that many of her friends, university students, regularly post on social media about the “genocide” in Gaza. What I found most shocking is that, in attempting to have discussions with people her age about this, she says that when she brings up 10/7, many of these people ask what the hell she’s talking about. Apparently many of them get their news almost entirely through social media, and while they hear about the starvation and killing of Palestinians by Israeli troops, they know nothing about the horrendous events on 10/7, the killing of over 800 civilians by Hamas forces (the figure usually cited of nearly 1200 includes IDF troops), no small number of them peace activists.

I’m far from being someone who would defend the Israeli response to the attack. Not that there was a response. Of course there had to be a response. But the nature of the response has been terrible. Just as the treatment of Palestinians by Israelis has been terrible for decades now. I’ve argued during that entire time that the United States should have used its leverage as a friend of Israel and one of its main financial supporters, particularly in the area of military hardware, to push hard on Israel to work much, much harder to find a peaceful solution. Netanyahu has been a terrible leader, not only polarizing Israel but seemingly doing everything he could to polarize Palestinians as well. There’s strong evidence that Netanyahu has undermined more moderate elements within Palestinian politics because it serves his purpose. Letting the settler movement continue within the West Bank and forcing Palestinians to live with few rights and little hope of peace or prosperity has been a key plank of his political project, dimming what hope there once was for a solution. And over the years, across decades of violence, far more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis, because there is a huge imbalance of power, in no small part due to money and weapons from the United States.

But none of that changes the fact that powerful elements within the Arab world and within Palestinian leadership have also long called for violence against Israel and Jews. Hamas, the governing body in the Gaza strip, until 2017 openly advocated for what can only be called genocide: the death of all Jews and the destruction of Israel as a state. Since 2017 their official position softened somewhat, but then came 10/7 and the massacre of so many innocent civilians. And this doesn’t change the fact that Arab countries have openly gone to war against Israel more than once since its founding and that there have been many terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens over the years. There is much to regret on both sides of this long conflict.

And yet I see within a wide swath of young people on social media a near-constant refrain: Fuck Zionism, Fuck Israel, Free Palestine. This issue is treated by many young people as one that’s incredibly simplistic: Israel is evil, the Palestinians are victims. There seems to be little knowledge of or interest in the long, complicated history that led to this moment. With a drumbeat of outrage so steady, is it really so surprising that some young people are starting to take matters into their own hands, and to use violence to achieve what they see as a righteous cause?

I hope that people who are older and have a stronger sense of the complex history of Israel and Palestine will do what they can to voice what they know, what they see, and what they hope for, especially to young people, many of whom are hearing a greatly oversimplified version of these events. The world is a complex place. Of course it’s important to stand up for what’s right, but unfortunately, what’s right doesn’t always have such bright, clear lines, and this is one of those cases. What’s definitely wrong is trying to work out issues like this through acts of violence against innocents, and young people need to be hearing that and, one hopes, echoing that sentiment.

This dream made me think about memory: how strange and powerful it is. How it both looms inside us and yet, in another way, seems to take up almost no room (or weight) within us at all. Which reminds me of a kind of aphorism my friend Bob and I used to tell: your most recent meal is always the best meal you’ve ever had. The reasoning being because, far and away, it’s the most real meal you’ve ever had. This applies especially to anything actually in your mouth, of course, which is causing active bursts of flavor signals to enter your brain. But it’s true to a degree of all recent experience. Given that memory tends to fade out, our most recent experiences are generally the most vivid. And so a vivid meal (or experience) is always more powerful than an older one, yes? Of course, this doesn’t feel true. We have memories of epic meals, or epic experiences of every kind. But one could argue that those are things that have passed into narrative. It has become not an experience (with sensory details, emotions, what you might call sensations or what philosophers might call qualia) but a story about an experience. And because of the way narrative memory functions, it becomes a story about a story about an experience, to the power of however many times we might have told this particular story (an experiential telephone game within our own brain). Something about my Annette dream had the quality of madeleines, a kind of window into some emotion. How that emotion related to any original experience I had with Annette would be impossible to determine. But it was stronger than garden-variety memories (mostly narrative).

This train of thought led me back to a conversation in a movie that rings true to me. The movie is Before Sunset, the second of the trilogy by Richard Linklater starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. In this second movie, the one set in Paris, Delpy argues that we really don’t change that much. It feels like we change a lot, but in truth, key aspects of our personality form early and remain in place and are quite stable across years and decades. Her reason for claiming this is having read some old journal and finding its content all too recognizable, which is an experience I’ve definitely had. When we read old journals, we like to think that we are embarrassed by the foolish young person we find there. But I suspect that it’s not uncommon for us to be embarrassed at least as much by how familiar that person is as by how strange they seem. To which you can retort, dear reader: speak for yourself! I do find this to be a fascinating question: in what ways am I like or unlike myself across the course of my life? Obviously, externalities change. But how much does the person looking out at and responding to those externalities change?

This question, though, leads me to another that has been very important to me: how accurate is my story about myself? Because make no mistake, the version of “me” that I have created for external or internal consumption is most definitely a curated narrative. It has a specific shape, including some key adjectives, and various versions of miniature essays (ways I describe myself to myself) designed to provide evidence for that shape. But is it accurate? That probably depends on a lot of things: which part are we talking about? When are we asking, and why? As with nearly any question, how does the motivation for asking play into the answer? How could narratives about identity not be some of the best examples of motivated reasoning?

Which leads me straight to: Lacan. And here I’ll admit that I’m carving up and compressing Lacan to a ridiculous degree that’s not fair to him. But I’m going to do it anyway. Lacan divided up experience into three aspects: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The imaginary is the stories we tell about ourselves. Per Lacan, one of the chief characteristics of the imaginary is that we imagine into being a unified sense of self, or, to put the simplest label onto it: an “I.” Again per Lacan, this illusory unified self stems from our first experiences of self identification: as babies seeing ourselves in the mirror. At first we might think of that baby in the mirror as some other baby, but soon enough, we come to realize that that baby is ME. If I move my hand, that baby moves its hand. If I smile, that baby smiles. We see ourselves from the outside, and so self becomes an object, just like any other person. And this leads us to start the long process of generating a version (or contextual versions) of self. Of course, people help us along the way by summarizing us, encapsulating us, whether consciously or unconsciously. According to Lacan, though, the true self remains deeply fragmentary. Experience cannot be cohesive or coherent. But out of that incoherent experience, we build an illusory, unitary self that ignores the incongruities of actual experience. Here the experience of dreams is instructive, I think. If you try to describe any dream, you usually find a number of problems in the dream: incongruities, discontinuities, time jumps, character identity jumps, and so on. So when you try to narrate a dream, you are compelled to iron out such problems, to match narrative conventions. This person in the dream can’t suddenly be a different person, and it makes no sense for the setting to start out being a camping trip and then suddenly switch to your basement. Similarly, we are compelled to create narrative versions of ourselves that ignore the many problems that complicate the narrative. We feel pressure to iron out the contradictions.

Lacan’s second realm of reality is the symbolic. The symbolic is the order of the world outside ourselves. And here we’re mostly talking about language. This is a key aspect of Lacan’s ideas, that his realms are those of language. Because even though we can have sensory experience of the world, we turn such experience into language to order and compress it and to share it. So by the world outside ourselves, here Lacan means the language of other humans, or the social order. In a maximal way, the symbolic is language itself: an interlocking chain of signifiers and signifieds. You can think of it as being like a dictionary, where every word is defined by other words, which are defined by still other words, so that a dictionary is an endless chain of referents. But this chain does have structures, and the structures that define language (along with human interactions) make up Lacan’s symbolic. In practice, the symbolic includes ideas about how human relationships are ordered, including laws and customs and institutions and norms. Though these vary from place to place, every place has some, and the structure of them in any particular place forms the world into which a person grows and makes sense of what she/he experiences. Whether the response includes conformity or rebelliousness or indifference, one cannot but shape one’s version of reality around these linguistic shapes.

The third realm, and possibly the hardest to describe, is what he calls the real. Apparently his ideas about this evolved. Early on in his career, he describes the real as referring to something like Kant’s “things in themselves,” which basically means the stuff that’s in the physical world as it exists without being processed by the human brain. But over time, Lacan’s real expanded to include all kinds of things that don’t fit into the imaginary or the symbolic, including anything that can’t readily be made sense of, which includes trauma, death (or the fear of death), anxiety, and sexual desire, among many other things.

What’s this got to do with anything? For my purposes, I want to zoom in on what’s currently the forefront of AI technology: LLMs (Large Language Models). LLMs these days can perform some pretty amazing feats, and under certain circumstances, they could be said to able to pass, or at least near-pass, the Turing test. I tried to highlight, through my earlier posts, some of the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs. All in all, I think anyone would be hard pressed to say they’re not quite impressive in their capabilities. But one of the big criticisms of them is that they’re “just computer programs,” and that their ability to mimic human speech patterns is therefore at a minimum, illusory, and possibly worse. I’ve read some articles, for example, that suggest that the use of LLMs in education does students a great disservice. This piece, for example, suggests that LLMs are dangerous because they can’t “reason, judge, or empathize at all” and that because of this they will “stunt children’s cognitive and emotional development.” Why the danger? The author of this piece goes on to explain that the study of the humanities involves a key aspect: “the cognitive aspects of historical analysis that appear most similar to the calculating and processing performed by AI cannot be separated from the emotional aspect,” which emotional aspect AI lacks.

Bringing this back into the realm of Lacan, it could be said that LLMs basically exist in the realm of Lacan’s “symbolic.” They don’t exist in the realm of the imaginary at least to the degree that they don’t form a conception of themselves. Researchers speculate that AI might someday demonstrate metacognition, but very few people argue that LLMs demonstrate anything like that today. Furthermore, by definition, LLMs can’t experience Lacan’s realm of the real, as the real is fundamentally extra-linguistic. But the question this raises in my mind is whether all this is a knock on LLMs or possibly a strength of LLMs.

In Lacan’s formulation, the realm of the imaginary is one of pasting together incoherence into narrative coherence, but at the expense of consistency and logic. The goal of the imaginary is to derive internal order, which is built around very human goals: building and then preserving a sense of self. Clearly, at the present, LLMs lack this sense of self. But this very sense of self a classic example of desire infecting reason. The fragmentary self (the imaginary) is a contstant source of anxiety (the real). Talking therapy is an attempt to bridge these aspects of ourselves via the symbolic (an ordered language-based cure that adheres to certain prinicples of “wellness”). LLMs, in contrast, exist purely in the realm of the symbolic. They are an amalgamation of the world of the symbolic as a source and of language-making logic as the lens into a vast repository of the symbolic. Unlike any individual human, however, who has a very limited repository of the symbolic (the textual sources you’ve been exposed to over the course of a life deeply compressed by our very limited memory), an LLM has access to symbolic output of tens of thousands (?) of human lives, judged to be some of the best of such output over a span of time longer than multiple human lives.

As for the inability of LLMs to experience emotions, it’s arguable that while they can’t experience first-order emotions, they can, in fact, experience not just second-order emotions (verbal descriptions of emotions), but many, many such second-order emotions, again produced by some of the better minds in human history. All humans experience non-verbal communication, but that communication tends to be limited to a very small number of people, the people in our direct environment (or, to a lesser degree, with whom we have video chats). I suppose you could include in this category one-way non-verbal communication, such as any recorded video or audio (TV shows, movies, music recordings, etc.). But even there, much of this is scripted, and so therefore limited in its range. Even for individual humans, though we experience our own emotions, we experience a much wider range of second-order emotions, through the descriptions of friends and family and in the books, TV shows, songs, plays, or movies (all of which contain both verbal and non-verbal components) we experience. For many people, our first-order emotions remain largely unarticulated (which is why so many people are so bad at understanding how to solve their own problems). In this respect, LLMs, unencumbered by key aspects of the realms of the imaginary or the real, have access to vast regions of second-order emotions and much less baggage that distorts their view of it. Of course, the assumptions or lenses through which LLMs interpret this trove of data always remain problematic. This is a very legitimate knock. LLMs are only as good as their inputs and their ordering logic (the human equivalent of values within our own realm of the symbolic). But the fact that they have so many inputs gives them a decent chance as compared to the extremely limited inputs of individual humans, which can be and often is an extremely limiting factor.

My argument is essentially this: whereas the typical knock on LLMs is that they are merely computer programs, algorithms that spit out words in a certain order, their ability to master the patterns of language is putting them into the realm of human beings in ways that aren’t so dissimilar from people. Human brains are also language-producing machines (and flawed ones, as anyone who has ever been frustrated as they try to explain themselves while speaking or writing knows all too well). And while it’s true that humans have actual sensory and metacognitive experiences to use as raw material from which to generate language, LLMs have something that is in some ways superior: language-producing capability combined with second-order descriptions of human experience (including emotions and metacognition) that are massive compared to the range of experiences in any given human brain. That’s not nothing, which is why I think that LLMs have grown so impressive in such a short time. It may well be true that LLMs have some upper limit that we’ve yet to see that will make them a disappointment, but in my estimation, we’re certainly not there yet.

I do want to make it clear that I’m talking here purely about the capabilities of LLMs, and whether those capabilities or future capabilities are over-hyped. It’s another question entirely whether LLMs and AI (including a much broader range of capabilities, including those in the physical world) pose dangers to humans, whether dangers to economic well being, physical well being, pedagogical dangers, or any number of other possible future dangers. That’s no small question—just one that I’m reserving for a future post.