Blood Meridian's Place in the American Canon

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant now than when it was written. The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian, much as I appreciate his Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon. McCarthy himself has not matched Blood Meridian, but it is the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.

My concern being the reader, I will begin by confessing that my first two attempts to read through Blood Meridian failed, because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays. The violence begins on the novel’s second page, when the 15-year-old Kid is shot in the back and just below the heart, and continues almost with no respite until the end, 30 years later, when Judge Holden, the most frightening figure in all of American literature, murders the Kid in an outhouse. So appalling are the continuous massacres and mutilations of Blood Meridian that one could be reading a United Nations report on the horrors of Syria in 2019.

Nevertheless, I urge the reader to persevere, because Blood Meridian is a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. And the book’s magnificence—its language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last transcends the violence, and converts goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s. When I teach the book, many of my students resist it initially (as I did, and as some of my friends continue to do). Television saturates us with actual as well as imagined violence, and I turn away, either in shock or in disgust.

But I cannot turn away from Blood Meridian, now that I know how to read it, and why it has to be read. None of its carnage is gratuitous or redundant; it belonged to the Mexico-Texas borderlands in 1849 and 50, which is where and when most of the novel is set. I suppose one could call Blood Meridian a “historical novel,” since it chronicles the actual expedition of the Glanton gang, a murderous paramilitary force sent out by both Mexican and Texan authorities to murder and scalp as many Indians as possible. Yet it does not have the aura of historical fiction, since what it depicts seethes on, in the United States, and nearly everywhere else, in this third millennium. Judge Holden, the prophet of war, is unlikely to be without honor in our years to come. (...)

We first meet the Judge on page six: an enormous man, bald as a stone, no trace of a beard, and eyes without either brows or lashes. A seven-foot-tall albino, he almost seems to have come from some other world, and we learn to wonder about the Judge, who never sleeps, dances and fiddles with extraordinary art and energy, rapes and murders little children of both sexes, and says that he will never die. By the book’s close, I have come to believe that the Judge is immortal. And yet the Judge, while both more and less than human, is as individuated as Iago or Macbeth, and is quite at home in the Texan-Mexican borderlands where we watch him operate in 1849 and 50, and then find him again in 1878, not a day older after 28 years, though the Kid, a 16-year-old at the start of Glanton’s foray, is 45 when murdered by the Judge at the end.

McCarthy subtly shows us the long, slow development of the Kid from another mindless scalper of Indians to the courageous confronter of the Judge in their final debate in a saloon. But though the Kid’s moral maturation is heartening, his personality remains largely a cipher, as anonymous as his lack of a name. The three glories of the book are the Judge, the landscape, and (dreadful to say this) the slaughters, which are aesthetically distanced by McCarthy in a number of complex ways. (...)

My passion for Blood Meridian is so fierce that I want to go on expounding it, but the courageous reader should now be (I hope) pretty well into the main movement of the book. I will confine myself here to the final encounter between the preternatural Judge Holden and the Kid, who had broken with the insane crusade 28 years before, and now at middle age must confront the ageless Judge. Their dialogue is the finest achievement in this book of augmenting wonders, and may move the reader as nothing else in Blood Meridian does. I reread it perpetually and cannot persuade myself that I have come to the end of it.

The Judge and the Kid drink together, after the avenging Judge tells the Kid that this night his soul will be demanded of him. Knowing he is no match for the Judge, the Kid nevertheless defies Holden, with laconic replies playing against the Judge’s rolling grandiloquence. After demanding to know where their slain comrades are, the Judge asks: “And where is the fiddler and where the dance?”

I guess you can tell me. I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be? You aint nothin.

To have known Judge Holden, to have seen him in full operation, and to tell him that he is nothing is heroic. “You speak truer than you know,” the Judge replies, and two pages later murders the Kid, most horribly. Blood Meridian, except for a one-paragraph epilogue, ends with the Judge triumphantly dancing and fiddling at once, and proclaiming that he never sleeps and he will never die. But McCarthy does not let Judge Holden have the last word.

The strangest passage in Blood Meridian, the epilogue, is set at dawn, where a nameless man progresses over a plain by means of holes that he makes in the rocky ground. Employing a two-handled implement, the man strikes “the fire out of the rock which God has put there.” Around the man are wanderers searching for bones, and he continues to strike fire in the holes, and then they move on. And that is all.

The subtitle of Blood Meridian is The Evening Redness in the West, which belongs to the Judge, last survivor of the Glanton gang. Perhaps all that the reader can surmise with some certainty is that the man striking fire in the rock at dawn is an opposing figure in regard to the evening redness in the West. The Judge never sleeps, and perhaps will never die, but a new Prometheus may be rising to go up against him.

by Harold Bloom, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. The most violent book I've ever read. Glad to see it took someone else a couple tries to get it. Cormac McCarthy 1933-2023.]

The Real Lesson of 'The Truman Show'

Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness. Everything around him exists to fulfill the primary mandate of a mass-market TV show: appealing to the widest possible audience.

The Truman Show hits a snag, though, and the problem is Truman. As he grows up, he proves himself to be less a bland everyman than someone who is quirky and restless and, in the best way, kind of a weirdo. Truman is also unusually inquisitive—a great quality for anyone who is not a piece of IP. Christof, consequently, has spent much of the show’s run trying to squelch Truman’s curiosity. He wants to be an explorer, an excited Truman tells a teacher. “You’re too late,” she replies, on cue. “There’s really nothing left to explore.”

The Truman Show, the film, premiered in June of 1998: a summer blockbuster guided less by literal explosions than by metaphorical ones. Its durability is typically attributed to its insights about technology: Through Truman’s story, the movie predicted, with eerie acuity, the rise of reality TV, the transactions of social media, the banality of surveillance. But Truman is not the story’s true everyman. The people who watch The Truman Show are. As the years go by, Christof’s efforts to keep Truman in Seahaven become more extreme and more cruel. The viewers watch anyway. The series, we learn, has a global audience of more than 1 billion people. That audience, for Christof and for all those who defer to him, rationalizes everything else. This is what elevates The Truman Show from prescience to prophesy. The viewers are watching a captive. They believe they are watching a star. (...)

On day 10,909 of The Truman Show’s run—the day the film begins—a klieg light falls from the sky. The intrusion of accident into this meticulously manufactured world leads Truman to do what his show cannot abide: to question. Is his reality … real? Is he part of an elaborate show? Truman confesses his doubts to his best friend, Marlon. Christof dictates Marlon’s response through the actor’s hidden earpiece: If Truman’s life is a show, Marlon says, then he would have to be in on the ruse. And “the last thing that I would ever do is lie to you.”

For the film’s viewers, scenes like this—gaslighting by way of a flamethrower—can be difficult to watch. And yet: In the movie, people do watch. Some do so fervently, invested in the life of Truman, the human character. Others tune in because there’s nothing else on. The movie interrupts its show-within-a-show to remind us that the series has made Truman not only a subject of sanctioned voyeurism but also a superstar. We see, at various moments, a Truman-themed bar—think TGI Friday’s, crowded with kitschy Trumanabilia—where fans go to watch the show together. (I’m a Tru Believer, announces a bumper sticker pasted next to the TV.) We meet two older women seated next to couch pillows emblazoned with Truman’s face. We learn of the existence of TruTalk, a show dedicated to discussions of The Truman Show. We see the one-sided dynamics of the parasocial relationship, and the ease with which one person’s life can be repackaged as other people’s gossip. “I can’t believe he married Meryl on the rebound,” one woman tells another, her voice sharp with indignation.

Truman’s partnership with Meryl—she is named, like Truman’s best friend, for a famous actor—is another slow-moving manipulation. Hannah, the actor who plays Meryl, is unable to disguise her dislike for Truman when she’s not facing him. Their dialogue in the film consists mostly of chipper banalities; Meryl is most animated, in Truman’s presence, when she is reciting the marketing copy that allows the show to double as an endless act of product placement. For Truman, too, the film implies, his marriage is an act of concession. The woman he really loves was an extra on the show: a fellow student at his college, meant to function, primarily, as scenery. He fell for her at first sight. The producers quickly removed her from the show. Attraction is unruly, Christof knows, and Meryl has already been cast in the role of “Truman’s love interest.”

Christof is the direct agent of Truman’s abuse, but the show’s audience enables it. Captivated by the storylines, they see nothing wrong with the fact that Truman’s freedom is the cost of their fun. We learn, eventually, about a group of people who protest Christof, his show, and the general assumption that bad behavior can be justified by good TV. But those people are “a very vocal minority,” TruTalk’s host says, dismissively, as he conducts a fawning interview with Christof.

They may be, or they may not. One of the still-resonant messages of The Truman Show is that mass media has a way of making, and then simply becoming, reality. However numerous the protesters are, they are, on their own, ineffective: There Truman remains, tracked by 5,000 cameras. And there is his audience, despite it all, like a merch-laden Greek chorus. They speak across time, to the people viewing the film: Would you watch The Truman Show? Or would you be one of the people who speak out against it? (...)

Today, when works of pop culture revisit the 1990s, with all its ambient cruelties, they tend to do so with a tone of self-congratulation: Things might not be great now, they typically suggest, but look how much worse they were then. The Truman Show preemptively questioned some of that smugness. The film predicted how the louche voyeurism of that decade would settle into the muted voyeurism of this moment. It presaged the immense popularity of true crime, a genre that treats murder as a puzzle to be solved, abuses as stories waiting to be spun. It anticipated how readily we would come to see people as characters—the ease with which we would treat their lives as our entertainment.

by Megan Garber, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Paramount/Everett

Adventures in Reading

Anthropic leapfrogs OpenAI with a chatbot that can read a novel in less than a minute

An often overlooked limitation for chatbots is memory. While it’s true that the AI language models that power these systems are trained on terabytes of text, the amount these systems can process when in use — that is, the combination of input text and output, also known as their “context window” — is limited. For ChatGPT it’s around 3,000 words. There are ways to work around this, but it’s still not a huge amount of information to play with.

Now, AI startup Anthropic (founded by former OpenAI engineers) has hugely expanded the context window of its own chatbot Claude, pushing it to around 75,000 words. As the company points out in a blog post, that’s enough to process the entirety of The Great Gatsby in one go. In fact, the company tested the system by doing just this — editing a single sentence in the novel and asking Claude to spot the change. It did so in 22 seconds.

You may have noticed my imprecision in describing the length of these context windows. That’s because AI language models measure information not by number of characters or words, but in tokens; a semantic unit that doesn’t map precisely onto these familiar quantities. It makes sense when you think about it. After all, words can be long or short, and their length does not necessarily correspond to their complexity of meaning. (The longest definitions in the dictionary are often for the shortest words.) The use of “tokens” reflects this truth, and so, to be more precise: Claude’s context window can now process 100,000 tokens, up from 9,000 before. By comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4 processes around 8,000 tokens (that’s not the standard model available in ChatGPT — you have to pay for access) while a limited-release full-fat model of GPT-4 can handle up to 32,000 tokens.

Right now, Claude’s new capacity is only available to Anthropic’s business partners, who are tapping into the chatbot via the company’s API. The pricing is also unknown, but is certain to be a significant bump. Processing more text means spending more on compute.

by James Vincent, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Anthropic

[ed. See also: Everyone Likes Reading. Why Are We So Afraid of It? (NYT):]

"Everyone loves reading. In principle, anyway. Nobody is against it, right? Surely, in the midst of our many quarrels, we can agree that people should learn to read, should learn to enjoy it and should do a lot of it. But bubbling underneath this bland, upbeat consensus is a simmer of individual anxiety and collective panic. We are in the throes of a reading crisis. (...)

Just what is reading, anyway? What is it for? Why is it something to argue and worry about? Reading isn’t synonymous with literacy, which is one of the necessary skills of contemporary existence. Nor is it identical with literature, which designates a body of written work endowed with a special if sometimes elusive prestige.

Reading is something else: an activity whose value, while broadly proclaimed, is hard to specify. Is any other common human undertaking so riddled with contradiction? Reading is supposed to teach us who we are and help us forget ourselves, to enchant and disenchant, to make us more worldly, more introspective, more empathetic and more intelligent. It’s a private, even intimate act, swathed in silence and solitude, and at the same time a social undertaking. It’s democratic and elitist, soothing and challenging, something we do for its own sake and as a means to various cultural, material and moral ends. (...)

But nothing is ever so simple. Reading is, fundamentally, both a tool and a toy. It’s essential to social progress, democratic citizenship, good government and general enlightenment. It’s also the most fantastically, sublimely, prodigiously useless pastime ever invented. Teachers, politicians, literary critics and other vested authorities labor mightily to separate the edifying wheat from the distracting chaff, to control, police, correct and corral the transgressive energies that propel the turning of pages. The crisis is what happens either when those efforts succeed or when they fail. Everyone likes reading, and everyone is afraid of it."

Why I Am Not (As Much Of) A Doomer (As Some People)

The average online debate about AI pits someone who thinks the risk is zero, versus someone who thinks it’s any other number. I agree these are the most important debates to have for now.

But within the community of concerned people, numbers vary all over the place:

Scott Aaronson says says 2%
Will MacAskill says 3%
The median machine learning researcher on Katja Grace’s survey says 5 - 10%
Paul Christiano says 10 - 20%
The average person working in AI alignment thinks about 30%
Top competitive forecaster Eli Lifland says 35%
Holden Karnofsky, on a somewhat related question, gives 50%
Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to think >90%

As written this makes it look like everyone except Eliezer is <=50%, which isn’t true; I’m just having trouble thinking of other doomers who are both famous enough that you would have heard of them, and have publicly given a specific number.

I go back and forth more than I can really justify, but if you force me to give an estimate it’s probably around 33%; I think it’s very plausible that we die, but more likely that we survive (at least for a little while). Here’s my argument, and some reasons other people are more pessimistic.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. More AI prognosticating (but in this case, more signal than noise). See also: the comments.]

Tolstoy and Chill

[ed. Adventures in non-reading.]

In 1883, Evert Nymanover, a Swedish scholar at the University of Minnesota, proposed a new invention that some thought would affect the future of humankind: a device that played recordings of books. Nymanover called the device a “whispering machine” and suggested that it could be placed inside of a hat so that someone walking down the street or reclining in bed “could be perpetually listening” to great works of literature. (...)

It took a full century, but the technology finally did catch up to Nymanover’s vision of a world in which people could walk down the street listening to books. And yet, by the time portable cassette players became ubiquitous in the 1980s, the mood about listening to books had changed in a way that would have surprised 19th-century audio enthusiasts. Listening to novels no longer seemed like a utopian fantasy at all. To most, it seemed entirely unappealing. In a 1993 Wall Street Journal article on stagnating audiobook sales, one Random House executive lamented that “too many people still think audio books are only for the blind.”

Prominent literary figures tended to be particularly skeptical of listening to books. Strangely, the problem with the audio format was not that it made books less enjoyable. It was the opposite: Audio made books so relaxing and pleasurable that a listener couldn’t engage critically with the text in a way a serious reader should. Listening to literature, the essayist and critic Sven Birkerts argued in his 1994 book, The Gutenberg Elegies, was like “being seduced, or maybe drugged,” a very different experience from “deep reading,” which Birkerts characterized as “the slow and meditative possession of a book.”

According to Matthew Rubery, the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, a fascinating history of the audiobook, the notion that listening to a book is too absorbing to lend itself to deep reflection is the “most enduring critique” of the format. “It was striking to me when I began researching audiobooks how many people in Edison’s time welcomed efforts to make books more entertaining,” Rubery, a literature professor at Queen Mary University of London, told me. “The idea of books needing to be hard work, difficult, and read firsthand in order to be deemed valuable only took hold in the next century.”

That audiobooks have tended to produce anxiety in literary critics is perhaps not surprising. As film and television became the dominant modes of storytelling in the 20th century, book lovers were forced into a defensive crouch, left to argue that the very aspects of reading that made it more rigorous than watching a movie or a show were, in fact, precisely what made reading superior. Audiobooks were suspect because they turned reading into an easier, more passive experience. As the Irish novelist and critic Colm Tóibín once put it, the difference between reading a book and listening to a book was “like the difference between running a marathon and watching a marathon on TV.”

The stigma associated with audiobooks hasn’t gone away since The Wall Street Journal published its 1993 article on audiobooks’ failure to catch on. Daniel T. Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who studies reading, says that the most common question he gets is whether listening to an audiobook for a book club is “cheating.” But if anxiety surrounding audiobooks lingers, it’s no longer stopping Americans from purchasing them. Audiobook sales have seen double-digit increases each year since 2012. Last year, the increase was 10 percent, amounting to $1.8 billion in sales. The trend is only likely to accelerate in the years ahead given that Spotify recently made a major push into the market, and Google and Apple are racing to produce AI-narrated books. (Even the dead can now narrate audiobooks.)

Still, if the audiobook moment has arrived, that doesn’t, of course, mean that all of the concerns about the format have been misplaced. I suspect that listening to a novel truly is less likely to elicit critical engagement. What I’m less sure about is whether that’s such a bad thing.

Like many fans of the format, I turned to audiobooks out of convenience. I was teaching a graduate course on contemporary American writers at Johns Hopkins, and it occurred to me that speeding through audio editions of the novels and memoirs I’d assigned could be a good way to refresh my memories of the books in the days before a class. But, along the way, something happened that surprised me: I started to fall in love with the audio novel. It took me a little while to admit it to myself—I had internalized the stigma so deeply that even entertaining the possibility felt heretical—but, in many cases, I was enjoying the books even more when listening to them.

The next surprise arrived when I began listening to audiobooks in bed. In recent years, I’d been reading much less at night. Exhausted from long days of parenting and emailing and Zooming, I would often end up watching a TV show I was not at all excited to watch rather than reading a book I was genuinely excited to read. Then, one night, I put in my earbuds and downloaded Maggie Gyllenhaal’s wonderful narration of Anna Karenina. Listening to a skilled actor read a literary masterpiece was every bit as blissful as the 19th-century utopians had imagined. “Netflix and chill” became “Tolstoy and chill,” and then “Jane Austen and chill,” “James Baldwin and chill,” “Kafka and chill!”

Was I being seduced? Was I missing out on the wisdom these great authors had to offer by listening instead of reading? Maybe. There’s not a lot of science on the differences between reading and listening to books. The existing research suggests that adults score the same on reading-comprehension tests whether they read or listen to a passage. But it’s one thing to comprehend a book and another to think deeply about what you’ve comprehended. And Willingham, of the University of Virginia, told me there’s good reason to suspect that reading books does, indeed, lend itself to more intense critical engagement than listening to books does.

by Sam Apple, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic/Getty

‘I’m Not Just Faster, But Taller’: How I Learned to Walk Properly

In all the time I spent with Joanna Hall, she barely stopped walking. I would see her coming towards me in Kensington Gardens, London, gliding past the other strollers as if she alone were on a moving walkway. When she reached me, I would fall into step and off we would walk, for an hour. At the end, Hall would stride into the distance and keep walking, for all I knew, until we met the following week.

Hall’s WalkActive system, a comprehensive fitness programme based around walking, aims to improve posture, increase speed, reduce stress on joints and deliver fitness, turning a stroll into a workout and changing the way you walk for ever. She says she can teach it to me, and we have set aside four weeks for my education.

It is easy to be sceptical when someone claims you can reap huge health benefits simply by learning to walk better. You think: I’m already good at walking. And sometimes, I walk a long way.

But according to Hall, a fitness expert who enjoyed a three-year stint on ITV’s This Morning, almost nobody is good at walking: not you, not me and not all the other people in the park, who provide endless lessons in poor technique. I notice they are still managing to get where they are going. Are we not in danger of overthinking something people do without thinking?

Hall tells me: “If you ask someone, ‘When you go for a walk, do you enjoy it?’, they will say, ‘Yes’, but if you ask, ‘Do you ever experience discomfort in your lower back?’, quite a few people will say, ‘Yeah, I do get discomfort in my back, or I feel it when I get out of bed, or I’m tight in my achilles or stiff in my shoulder.’ And those are all indicators that an individual is walking sub-optimally.”

What are we doing wrong? Most of us, she says, tend to walk by stepping into the space in front of us. “I want you to think about walking out of the space behind you.”

If that sounds a bit abstract to you – as it did to me, at first – think about it this way: good walking is an act of propulsion, of pushing yourself forward off your back foot. Bad walking – my kind of walking – is overly dependent on traction: pulling yourself along with your front foot. This shortens your stride, relies too much on your hip flexors and puts unnecessary stress on your knees.

The struggle to get me to absorb this basic concept takes up most of our first hour together. My opening question about optimal walking was: “Will I look mad?” I imagined great loping strides and pumping arms.

“I promise you, you won’t look mad,” Hall said. But when you stroll haltingly through a public park while someone instructs you on heel placement, you do attract a certain amount of attention. People think: poor man, he’s having to learn to walk all over again.

They are not wrong. It takes a tremendous amount of concentration to do something so basic, and so ingrained, in a different way. It begins with the feet: I am trying to maintain a flexible, open ankle, to leave my back foot on the ground for longer, and to peel it away, heel first, as if it were stuck in place with Velcro.

“Feel the peel,” says Hall. “Feel. The. Peel.”

Second come the hips: I need to increase the distance between my pelvis and my ribs, standing tall and creating more flexibility through my torso. Then my neck: there needs to be more distance between my collarbone and my earlobes. I need to think about maintaining all of these things at the same time.

Hall acknowledges that, for beginners, there will be what she calls “Buckaroo! moments” – named after the children’s game featuring a put-upon, spring-loaded mule – when too much information causes a system overload. This happens to me when, while I’m busy monitoring my feet, my stride, my hips and my neck, Hall suggests that the pendular arc of my arms could do with a bit more backswing.

“What?” I ask. My rhythm collapses. My shoulders slump. My ribs sink. My right heel scuffs the pavement. I can feel, for the first time, just how not good my normal walking is. How did I get like this? (...)

Hall’s programme may be low-impact, but it is not low energy. By the end of our second session together, I am exhausted, because of the concentration required and the distance we have covered. A study that Hall commissioned showed that participants who completed a month of WalkActive training increased their walking speed by 24%. This alone amounts to a pretty big lifestyle adjustment – and you suddenly find that everyone is in your way. I’m not just faster, but taller, and my arms swing with a natural, easy rhythm, exuding a confidence wholly at odds with the rest of my personality. It feels, frankly, amazing. (...)

Perhaps the most significant claim Hall makes is that, in terms of fitness, walking can be enough. It can complement other forms of exercise, such as yoga and pilates, but if you don’t do anything else, improving your walk can still confer major health benefits.

“I’m not anti-running, I’m not anti-gyms, I think they all have a role to play,” she says. “But I also think, sometimes, if we just think about the simplest thing that we could all do, and just get people to do it better, even if someone doesn’t necessarily feel as if they want to walk for longer, even if they just looked at changing their walking technique and applied it to their commute, that can be powerful.”

by Tim Dowling, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
[ed. This sounds like good advice. Joanna's WalkActive channel on YouTube can be found here.]

Design Fakes

Automakers can’t quit manual transmissions so they’re cramming fake stuff into EVs (The Verge)

There’s no question that the rise in electric vehicles represents a wholesale shift in the auto industry. But while most car companies appear ready to embrace the electric future, a lot of them are having trouble letting go of the past.

Take Toyota, for example. The biggest automaker in the world is reportedly working on an electric vehicle prototype that mimics the feel of driving a manual transmission, complete with a gear shift that’s not connected to anything and a floor-mounted speaker to pipe in fake engine noises. The car will even pretend to stall out if you fumble the controls — in order to deliver drivers the complete experience of driving a manual car.

Keep in mind this is an electric vehicle. There is no engine, no drive shaft, no gears to speak of. All of this is achieved using software and a bit of smoke and mirrors. Toyota says the goal is to preserve the driving experience for car enthusiasts, but it’s unclear whether people actually want this.

***

Shutterless cameras deserve good shutter sounds (The Verge)

Snapping a camera’s shutter to take a picture is one of the best feelings in photography. You get a timeless, tactile feedback as you capture every decisive moment with a satisfying auditory “click” sound. But we’re slowly losing this hallmark of picture-taking. Not only because smartphones are replacing full-size cameras for most people but because more cameras are being built without mechanical shutters at all.

by Andrew J. Hawkins, and Antonio G. Di Benedetto, The Verge |  Read more: here and here
Images: Toyota/Becca Farsace

[ed. Sensing a trend here...]

National Security at Mar-a-Lago

The Trump indictment is out, and it is amazing. Please take the time to read it HERE. The evidence and charges are so sprawling and impacting I barely know where to start. And yes, Trump is charged with 31 counts under the Espionage Act. (...)

Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document [and] willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it . . . Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

Keith via: (Read more:)
Image: uncredited

Is It Possible to Be Both Moderate and Anti-Woke?

The organization would be called FAIR: The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. The name was an initial act of defiance, implicitly painting the group’s opponents, self-described “anti-racists,” as the real racists. The founders’ dream was for the group to replace the A.C.L.U. as America’s new defender of civil liberties—a mission they believed the A.C.L.U. had abandoned. The vision involved a three-pronged approach: legal advocacy, via letters and lawsuits; grassroots advocacy, via a network of volunteers; and education about the issues, spread through projects such as explainer videos and training programs. (...)

FAIR launched in March of 2021. “An intolerant orthodoxy is undermining our common humanity and pitting us against each other,” Weiss tweeted in an announcement. Bartning was featured in the Wall Street Journal, telling the story of the changes at Riverdale and writing that “millions of American children are being taught to see the world in this reductionist way.” According to Bartning and others involved in the founding, FAIR was immediately flooded with hundreds of inquiries from people who were interested in donating and volunteering, many of whom were worried about their children’s schools. Bartning became the organization’s head—in his view, the whole thing had been his idea. The other founders were fine with the arrangement. Chen had her nonprofit, and Weiss was launching a new media company. They were too busy to run FAIR, anyway.

The world of anti-woke nonprofits is relatively small. There are the alarmed-parent groups, like Parents Defending Education, which aims to “reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas.” There are the anti-anti-racist groups, such as Free Black Thought, with its “mission of uplifting heterodox Black voices.” And then there are the catchall groups that purport to oppose any kind of ideological orthodoxy, such as the Institute for Liberal Values.

Few of these groups have true influence. The most effective actors in the anti-woke space tend to be overtly political: the activist group Moms for Liberty, for example, or Rufo, whose rhetoric seems to have single-handedly shaped the way that conservative politicians such as Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, take stands against progressive movements. Their unabashedly partisan approach offers useful ideological clarity: these activists share core values and beliefs, and they know precisely who and what they’re fighting against.

Bartning, though, felt strongly that FAIR should take a nonpartisan stance. “I saw the solution to these issues as something that is relentlessly positive,” he told me recently. He was interested in articulating a mission that wasn’t primarily against things—anti-woke, anti-orthodoxy, anti-critical race theory—but rather for something. He settled on a term: “pro-human,” which he described as “seeing yourself and other people as a unique individual who is connected with everyone else through our shared humanity.”

At first, the money came easily. One Boston-based donor, who asked not to be named, told me that she had come across FAIR on Twitter, where she had started reading about identity politics during the pandemic. fair’s nonpartisan, “pro-human” mission “just really resonated,” she told me. “It was the only organization that was actually trying to do something a better way.” After attending a FAIR meetup in her city, she started getting to know the organization’s leaders, and eventually offered a million-dollar donation—the largest amount that her family had ever given away. Ken Schwartz, a former AIPAC volunteer who supported FAIR, told me that Bartning, “without a lot of experience, raised a hell of a lot of money” for the organization. 

But it was Weiss, more than anyone else, who was clearly the group’s big draw. She brought in a half-million-dollar donation from Harlan Crow, a Texas real-estate developer who, ProPublica recently reported, paid for years of undisclosed vacations and private-jet travel for the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Suzy Edelman, another donor, who gave FAIR a million dollars in 2021, wrote in an e-mail to Weiss, “It’s your courage that inspired me to join the movement—not just to reform what’s been captured, but to build new, wonderful things.” I know Weiss a little bit—we’ve hung out in professional settings a few times over the years. When FAIR was founded, she had just left the New York Times in a very public way, and she was focussed on launching new organizations. “I think we are in a moment of profound change in American life, in which many old institutions are crumbling or have lost trust,” she told me recently.

Under Bartning’s direction, FAIR created its own ethnic-studies curriculum, which was free for teachers and school districts to adapt. “Bion, it seemed to me, really pinpointed what our culture needs, which is an understanding of identity that is both culturally nuanced and culturally sensitive, but that also puts that in the context of what we share,” Adam Seagrave, a professor at Arizona State University who helped to develop the materials, told me. In one lesson, called “Our Shared Human Story,” students are presented with cartoons about the overwhelming biological similarities of all humans, including across racial groups. “Students will understand that people are all members of one human race, Sapiens,” the objectives read. FAIR also started developing a corporate diversity-training program—taking a kind of Goldilocks approach, neither woke nor anti-woke, which acknowledged the need for education about diversity while avoiding, for example, separating participants by affinity group. Sodexo, a food-services company that provides school lunches, gave FAIR a contract after Weiss introduced Bartning to one of the company’s executives.

There are roughly eighty FAIR chapters around the country, and the organization claims to have thirty-five thousand members, but it counts everyone who signs up on the group’s Web site, so that figure isn’t necessarily meaningful. The organization named chapter leaders all over America, and made them responsible for starting local groups. The model was challenging: FAIR was trying to achieve professional-level work with volunteers, often inexperienced ones. Some volunteers found it difficult to make much progress. Rob Schläpfer, a volunteer state coördinator in Oregon, told me that he worked on a plan to mobilize parents to attend school-board meetings, but it “didn’t go anywhere. I was just spinning my wheels.” He found it hard to get direction from the national office about what to focus on, or how his chapter’s work should fit into FAIR's mission. As time went on, other volunteer chapter leaders around the country started calling and texting Schläpfer to vent their frustrations. “FAIR was basically virtue-signalling for the anti-woke,” he said. “It was not an organization designed to actually do anything.”

FAIR's main activity was talking about stuff. It produced a series of animated videos, with titles such as “The Media’s Haste to Cry Race,” narrated by Chen, and “The Spiral of Silence in Social Justice,” narrated by the conservative-leaning Brown University economist Glenn Loury. They held Zoom Webinars on subjects such as parental rights in K-12 education. The group started publishing a Substack and hosting panel discussions—the bread and butter of the heterodox crowd. FAIR was preoccupied with language; its leaders discouraged staff, contractors, and volunteers from using terms like “neo-Marxism” and “critical race theory” because they were too charged, for example.

By the summer of 2021, there was discontent brewing. The organization had around a half-dozen staffers and contractors, who mostly answered to Bartning. A few workers started chafing under his leadership, complaining that they felt simultaneously micromanaged and unable to get clear direction on projects. They started calling around to anyone who had had contact with Bartning or FAIR, compiling a dossier of complaints. Jason Littlefield, an employee at the time who contributed to the dossier, told me that Bartning seemed to see other similar organizations as competitors: “It felt like he was trying to corner the market on humanity.” Paul Rossi, a former private-school teacher who helped to compile the dossier, reported that Bartning was “unreceptive to any constructive criticism about how to be a ‘good citizen’ in the movement.” Leaders of other organizations in the broadly defined anti-woke space were willing to promote FAIR's work but felt like FAIR wasn’t willing to promote theirs. Shaw, the former Smith College administrator, who also contributed to the dossier, told me that she came to see FAIR as “a make-work program for journalists and podcasters.”

by Emma Green, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ben Hickey

June K., Water Bottle Chihuly
Image: markk

June K., Warhol
Image: markk

June K., Sunflowers (Van Gogh)
via: markk

F-35 Sustainment Costs: $1.27 Trillion

DOD Needs to Cut Billions in Estimated Costs to Achieve Affordability

DOD plans to acquire nearly 2,500 F-35 aircraft for about $400 billion. It projects spending another $1.27 trillion to operate and sustain them—an estimate that has steadily increased since 2012.

The military services collectively face tens of billions of dollars in sustainment costs that they project will be unaffordable. For example, the Air Force needs to reduce estimated annual per-plane costs by $3.7 million (47%) by 2036, or costs in that year alone will be $4.4 billion more than it can afford. (...)

F-35 mission capable rates—a measure of the readiness of an aircraft fleet—have recently improved, but still fall short of warfighter requirements. Specifically, from fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2020, the U.S. F-35 fleet's average annual (1) mission capable rate—the percentage of time during which the aircraft can fly and perform one of its tasked missions—improved from 59 to 69 percent; and (2) full mission capable rate—the percentage of time during which the aircraft can perform all of its tasked missions—improved from 32 to 39 percent. Both metrics fall below the services' objectives. For example, in fiscal year 2020 the Air Force F-35A full mission capable rate was 54 percent, versus a 72 percent objective.

Since 2012, F-35 estimated sustainment costs over its 66-year life cycle have increased steadily, from $1.11 trillion to $1.27 trillion, despite efforts to reduce costs. The services face a substantial and growing gap between estimated sustainment costs and affordability constraints—i.e., costs per tail (aircraft) per year that the services project they can afford—totaling about $6 billion in 2036 alone (see fig.). The services will collectively be confronted with tens of billions of dollars in sustainment costs that they project as unaffordable during the program.

by US Government Accountability Office (GAO |  Read more:

Image: US Air Force/Senior Airman Alexander Cook via

[ed. Why? See also: Flying the F-35 stealth fighter can leave pilots looking 'like they are 100 years old,' says test pilot (Business Insider).]

Will GPT Models Choke on Their Own Exhaust?

Until about now, most of the text online was written by humans. But this text has been used to train GPT3(.5) and GPT4, and these have popped up as writing assistants in our editing tools. So more and more of the text will be written by large language models (LLMs). Where does it all lead? What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute most of the language found online?

And it’s not just text. If you train a music model on Mozart, you can expect output that’s a bit like Mozart but without the sparkle – let’s call it ‘Salieri’. And if Salieri now trains the next generation, and so on, what will the fifth or sixth generation sound like?

In our latest paper, we show that using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects. The tails of the original content distribution disappear. Within a few generations, text becomes garbage, as Gaussian distributions converge and may even become delta functions. We call this effect model collapse.

Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web, giving an advantage to firms which already did that, or which control access to human interfaces at scale. Indeed, we already see AI startups hammering the Internet Archive for training data.

After we published this paper, we noticed that Ted Chiang had already commented on the effect in February, noting that ChatGPT is like a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Internet, and that copies of copies get worse. In our paper we work through the math, explain the effect in detail, and show that it is universal.

by Ross Anderson, Light Blue Touchpaper |  Read more:

Image: Reddit via:

[ed. Do read Ted Chiang's excellent essay - ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web; and also: The Age of Chat (New Yorker - excerpt below). I had to work with N.P.C's all my career and until now didn't have a good term for them, other than idiots...lol.]

"The gaming industry has long relied on various forms of what might be called A.I., and at G.D.C. at least two of the talks addressed the use of large language models and generative A.I. in game development. They were focussed specifically on the construction of non-player characters, or N.P.C.s: simple, purely instrumental dramatis personae—villagers, forest creatures, combat enemies, and the like—who offer scripted, constrained, utilitarian lines of dialogue, known as barks. (“Hi there”; “Have you heard?”; “Look out!”) N.P.C.s are meant to make a game feel populated, busy, and multidimensional, without being too distracting. Meanwhile, outside of gaming, the N.P.C. has become a sort of meme. In 2018, the Times identified the term “N.P.C.” as “the Pro-Trump Internet’s new favorite insult,” after right-wing Internet users began using it to describe their political opponents as mechanical chumps brainwashed by political orthodoxy. These days, “N.P.C.” can be used to describe another person, or oneself, as generic—basic, reproducible, ancillary, pre-written, powerless.

When I considered the possibilities of N.P.C.s powered by L.L.M.s, I imagined self-replenishing worlds of talk, with every object and character endowed with personality. I pictured solicitous orcs, garrulous venders, bantering flora. In reality, the vision was more workaday. N.P.C.s “may be talking to the player, to each other, or to themselves—but they must speak without hesitation, repetition, or deviation from the narrative design,” the summary for one of the talks, given by Ben Swanson, a researcher at Ubisoft, read. Swanson’s presentation promoted Ubisoft’s Ghostwriter program, an application designed to reduce the busywork involved in creating branching “trees” of dialogue, in which the same types of conversations occur many times, slightly permuted depending on what players say. Ghostwriter uses a large language model to suggest potential barks for N.P.C.s, based on various criteria inputted by humans, who then vet the model’s output. The player doesn’t directly engage the A.I.

Yet it seems likely that “conversations” with A.I. will become more common in the coming years. Large language models are being added to search engines and e-commerce sites, and into word processors and spreadsheet software. In theory, the capabilities of voice assistants, such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, could become more complex and layered. Call centers are introducing A.I. “assistants”; Amazon is allegedly building a chatbot; and Wendy’s, the fast-food chain, has been promoting a drive-through A.I. Earlier this spring, the Khan Lab School, a small private school in Palo Alto, introduced an experimental tutoring bot to its students, and the National Eating Disorders Association tried replacing its human-run telephone helpline with a bot dubbed Tessa. (neda suspended the service after Tessa gave harmful advice to callers.)

Chatbots are not the end point of L.L.M.s. Arguably, the technology’s most impressive capabilities have less to do with conversation and more to do with processing data—unearthing and imitating patterns, regurgitating inputs to produce something close to summaries—of which conversational text is just one type. Still, it seems that the future could hold endless opportunities for small talk with indefatigable interlocutors. Some of this talk will be written, and some may be conducted through verbal interfaces that respond to spoken commands, queries, and other inputs. Anything hooked up to a database could effectively become a bot, or an N.P.C., whether in virtual or physical space. We could be entering an age characterized by endless chat—useful or skimmable, and bottomless by design."

This C.S. Lewis Novel Helps Explain the Weirdness of 2023

Recently I reread C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel, “That Hideous Strength,” the last book in his Space Trilogy, and since I wrote about aliens last weekend it seems like a good week to talk a little bit about the novel’s contemporary relevance.

For those who haven’t read it, the book is a curious hybrid, mixing the anti-totalitarian style of dystopia familiar from Lewis’s contemporaries like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley with a blend of supernaturalism and science fiction that anticipates Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” among other works. (Lewis’s preferred subtitle for “That Hideous Strength” was “A Modern Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups.”)

The story introduces a near-future Britain falling under the sway of a scientistic technocracy, the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), which looks like the World State from Huxley’s “Brave New World” in embryo. But as one of the characters is drawn closer to N.I.C.E.’s inner ring, he discovers that the most powerful technocrats are supernaturalists, endeavoring to raise the dead, to contact dark supernatural entities and even to revive a slumbering Merlin to aid them in their plans.

I’ll say no more about the plot mechanics except to observe that they boldly operate in the risky zone between the sublime and the ridiculous. But just from that sketch I’ll draw out a couple of points about the book’s interest for our own times.

First, the idea that technological ambition and occult magic can have a closer-than-expected relationship feels quite relevant to the strange era we’ve entered recently — where Silicon Valley rationalists are turning “postrationalist,” where hallucinogen-mediated spiritual experiences are being touted as self-care for the cognoscenti, where U.F.O. sightings and alien encounters are back on the cultural menu, where people talk about innovations in A.I. the way they might talk about a golem or a djinn.

The idea that deep in the core of, say, some important digital-age enterprise there might be a group of people trying to commune with the spirit world doesn’t seem particularly fanciful at this point. (For a small example of what I mean, just read this 2021 account of life inside one of the stranger tech-associated research institutes.) Although like some of the characters in “That Hideous Strength,” these spiritualists would probably be telling themselves that they’re just doing high-level science, maybe puncturing an alternate dimension or unlocking the hidden potential of the human mind.

Then, too, the book’s totalitarian dystopia is interesting for being incomplete, contested and plagued by inner rivalries and contradictions. Unlike in “Brave New World” and “1984,” we don’t see a one-party regime holding absolute sway; in Lewis’s story, we see a still-disguised tyranny taking shape but still falling prey to various all-too-human problems, blunders and failures that contrast with the smooth dominance of Orwell’s O’Brien or Huxley’s Mustapha Mond.

Lewis, no less than his fellow mid-20th-century speculators, feared the rise of what he dubbed the “controllers” — basically a hyper-intelligent, omnicompetent bureaucratic caste granted extraordinary powers by modern science and technology and bent on reshaping human nature to fit some ideal of stability or ideology or both. And that vision still informs a lot of contemporary anxieties, from Covid-era fears about biosurveillance and digital censorship to more recent anxieties about what the invention of super-intelligence might mean for human equality and freedom.

But the relative incompetence of the would-be controllers in Lewis’s novel, their prideful overestimation of their faculties and their reckless spiritual gambles seem better fitted to the world we inhabit — in which powerful institutions seeking global mastery are constantly frustrated by the blowback to their stratagems, and our elites are storm-tossed by social, political and psychic forces they don’t expect or recklessly unleash. (...)

I’m a defender of conspiracy theorizing as a legitimate form of speculation — because conspiracies and weird secrets really are part of the fabric of existence, official knowledge only goes so far, and if you leave certain kinds of speculation to the paranoid, you’ll be constantly surprised when it turns out they were on to something. But a typical folly of conspiracists is to leap from a weird pattern (which the U.F.O. phenomenon certainly presents) or a scattering of bizarre details to a scenario that requires everyone to be in on the secret, at least aware of the mind-blowing truth if not participating in the plot.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Alain Pilon
[ed. In a sense, everything is a conspiracy - business, politics, national security - everything - if one defines it as an act of people conspiring with each other to achieve some specific purpose. Propaganda is conspiracy. Advertising. The world is a complex place, and conspiracy thinking is fundamentally a response to the helplessness/ambivalence many people feel when buffeted by forces over which they have little or no control (and even then, perhaps, a hope that someone or something actually is in control). And, as Lauren Oyler has observed: "something of a misdirection... a tool for distraction and a way to manipulate people who might need a sense of purpose, clarity, or self-esteem. (...) You could say conspiracy theories are like bad fiction, which attempts to tie everything up and explain it all. Neither leave room for randomness or pointlessness or meaninglessness. But life is full of all these, and our desire to eliminate them leads us down narrower and narrower paths." See also: Does the U.S. Government Want You to Believe in U.F.O.s? (NYT):]

"The possibility of literal spacecraft stashed in U.S. government hangars, meanwhile, piles up two immense-seeming improbabilities. First, that inhuman species cross oceans of space or leap interdimensional barriers using unfathomable technology and yet somehow keep crashing and leaving souvenirs behind. Second, that human governments have been collecting evidence for generations without the truth ever being leaked or uncovered or just blurted out by Donald Trump.

But this whistle-blower’s mere existence is evidence of a fascinating shift in public U.F.O. discourse. There may not be alien spacecraft, but there is clearly now a faction within the national security complex that wants Americans to think there might be alien spacecraft, to give these stories credence rather than dismissal.

The evidence for this shift includes the military’s newfound willingness to disclose weird atmospheric encounters."

Turnpike Troubadours

[ed. A buddy's favorite. Texas honky tonk.]

Image: uncredited
via:
[ed. A strong disincentive to moving.]

Cultural Amnesia: Revisiting Doom-and-Gloom Forecasts

Netflix movies by decade

Last year I looked skeptically at the myth of the long tail—a theory that promised more cultural choices and options in the digital age.

“The Long Tail is a cruel joke,” I wrote. “It’s a fairy tale we’re told to make us feel good about all those marginalized creative endeavors. . . . We live in a Short Tail society. And it’s getting shorter all the time.”

And what’s happening now? (...)

Here’s a breakdown of movies on Netflix by decade—the online archive where cinema history goes to die. (above)

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: AdWeek

[ed. Interesting graphic. See also: Where Did the Long Tail Go? (THB):

"Not only has Netflix sharply reduced the number of movies it offers on its streaming platform, but now has a lot of competitors (Disney, Apple, Paramount, etc.) that are also tightly managing the titles they feature."

Also, this: I warned in December that TikTok may have already peaked. But new numbers show how quickly the decline is taking place.

AdWeek

Tom Gauld
via:

Travelers to Unimaginable Lands

The complex relationship between the mind of someone with dementia and the mind of the person caring for them.

Travelers to Unimaginable Lands is that rarity: true biblio-therapy. Lucid, mature, wise, with hardly a wasted word, it not only deepens our understanding of what transpires as we care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, it also has the potential to be powerfully therapeutic, offering the kind of support and reorientation so essential to the millions of people struggling with the long, often agonizing leave-taking of loved ones stricken with the dreaded disease. The book is based on a profound insight: the concept of “dementia blindness,” which identifies a singular problem of caring for people with dementia disorders—one that has generally escaped notice but, once understood, may make a significant difference for many caregivers. (...)

Travelers is sorely needed, for several reasons. As of this moment, none of the mainstream drugs for dementia disorders does much to reverse cognitive decline, except to offer a few months of lessening symptoms. When it comes to the treatment of people with Alzheimer’s, all the promissory notes of medical science, and the monthly hype about a single magic bullet that will cure this disease, clash with real-world medicine. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that the amyloid hypothesis upon which so many of these claims have been based—the idea that Alzheimer’s is caused by nothing but the buildup of plaque in the brain—is woefully inadequate to explain the disease.

In the meantime, it is up to family members and friends, where possible, to take care of their loved ones for much of the duration of their cognitive and physical decline. And yet there has been far too little clinical attention paid to the caregivers themselves. How can we help them through a process that is profoundly difficult, if not traumatic? Remember, alongside the rigors of providing day-to-day care, the caregivers often suffer from what might best be called “anticipatory grief,” as familiar aspects of their loved ones slip away. And this may be compounded by a fear, in family members, that they might inherit the disease unfolding in front of them. (...)

Alzheimer’s has different presentations and takes a different course in each patient, depending, in part, on where the process begins in the brain. That said, it’s often noted that Alzheimer’s interferes with short-term memory, leads to other deficits, includes a lot of denial, and, ultimately, leads many victims to gradually “lose their minds.”

The genius of this book is to show more precisely the process of resisting such losses as it unfolds between patient and caregiver, affecting not just one but both. To learn about this process is surprisingly helpful—not curative, but helpful.

Travelers to Unimaginable Lands clarifies why we, the caregivers, often behave like Sisyphus of the Greek myth, doomed eternally to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again. In similar fashion, we find ourselves repeating the same errors, making the same requests, and getting pulled into the same power struggles, pointless quarrels, and seething ambivalences as we care for our patients. This is partly because Alzheimer’s patients seem unable to learn from their mistakes. But it is also because, weirdly enough, caregivers experience the same problem. In an uncanny mirroring, we get pulled into a parallel process with our charges, forgetting what happened yesterday, repeating what didn’t work last time, becoming ever more prone to agitation and impatience, even as we’re engaged in a trial of devotion that pushes love to its limit.

Why does this happen? Precisely because, as Kiper shows, the healthy brain has evolved to automatically attribute to other people the existence of a self that is sustained over time, has self-reflective capacities, and is capable of learning and absorbing new information. This attribution is the brain’s unconscious default position, or cognitive-emotional bias, and does not simply disappear when we become caregivers for people whose own brains begin to falter. It is the invisible projection upon which each human encounter begins, a projection that is implicit in our every conversation and even in the structure of human language itself.

When we say “you,” we believe we’re talking to another “self,” an essence, or perhaps process, that somehow persists over time. But this self—and the continuity it implies— depends on having the memory capacity to knit together our different mental states. This same capacity contributes to the ability to self-reflect, which is a key component of human consciousness. Alzheimer’s and related dementia disorders silently strip their victims of the cognitive infrastructure that helps construct this self.

The “loss of self” described in the Alzheimer’s literature can happen slowly—over a decade in some cases—and may be stealthy enough that neither the victim (and this is the key point) nor the caregiver appreciates its full extent. Alzhei­mer’s notwithstanding, the person remains in front of us, in their usual form and appearance, exhibiting the same expres­sions, carrying the same music in their voices, evoking in us thousands of familiar memories and emotional associations. There are better and worse days, and sometimes the old self seems to return, with strong will intact—a viable simulacrum of who they once were. Clearly, there is a person there.

Yet as the disease advances, we may come to see just the shell or the husk of the self we once knew. But this new understanding does not stop us from projecting a continu­ous self, because, as Kiper explains, it is the brain’s default position—that is, we cannot help but see what was once there. This brilliant insight is the entry point into the hitherto difficult-to-imagine land she goes on to describe.

We often say of people caught in this bind—knowing the loved one’s self is diminished but continuing to see it as whole—that they are “in denial,” as if this was only a defense mechanism at work. But that is a misapplication of the valuable term “denial.” Yes, there can be denial, and Kiper describes some of it. But those caught in the Sisyphean entanglement are not simply denying that their loved ones are ill—after all, they’re the ones accepting infirmity and trying to help. Though it may accompany denial or even reinforce it, dementia blindness isn’t simply the defense mechanism of a stressed mind; it is, as Kiper shows, a product of how the healthy mind normally works.

by Norman Doige, Tablet |  Read more:

Image: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images