George Saunders (yeah, I'm breaking my vow, but this is too funny not to quote):
Think of it this way: there’s plenty to do, right now, with just these minds we’ve been given: fight our anxiety, temper our cruelty, foster loving-kindness, try to figure out just what a mind is and what sort of trap it’s making for us in every moment. (Or: learn to skate, make a better omelet, play Bach, etc.) These things make up the (honorable, pleasurable) work of a lifetime. In what way does AI make life better, really? And for whom? In the end, will AI be there to guide us across to the other side and soothe our fears? (God, I hope not, but maybe we’ll all have DeathCope 3.0 loaded into our MindChip, and the last thing we’ll hear will be Claude, going, “You’ve got this!”)
The pre-dawn walk with Angus is one of the best times of my day, especially as I usually listen to the Church of England’s service of Morning Prayer as we walk. This morning’s service was especially lovely.
Yesterday evening as I was setting the table I experienced The Transfiguration of the Watermelon.
Watched: High and Low — for the third time. An absolutely bonkers and absolutely brilliant movie, profoundly influential on everything from Schindler’s List to modern heist movies to any number of animes. 🍿
Currently contemplating: Portfolios of Ansel Adams by Ansel Adams, John Szarkowski. I bought this book in 1982, but this is the first time I’m going through it systematically and very slowly. 📚
Ansel Adams, Moon and Half Dome (1960). Larger version here, and you have to see the larger version. It’s worth remembering that, as Louise Story wrote some years ago, “Yosemite does not often appear as it did at the moments Adams tripped his shutter. Nor is it easy to stand where he stood and capture the same images.”
When I finish reading James on Spencer, as when I finish reading Robinson or David Bentley Hart on Dawkins or Tallis on Dennett or Midgley on everybody, I appreciate again the infinite variety of consciousness, the plurality of its ends. Its excessiveness.
And James's last point reminds me why people like Hart and Robinson and Tallis and Midgley keep having to do this over and over again: it's about desire. Some people want the mind to be a machine, and they will jerry-rig the worst arguments together in order to have it so, and they will patch those arguments as many times as they need to. It's a longing to be unburdened from consciousness, to just be chemicals again. Some people desire this, as some people think Maria the robot from Lang's Metropolis is hot. I don't get it, but it's clearly a real thing that people feel. The facts, however, do not care about their feelings, any more than Maria the robot does.
Walking Angus this morning we passed a house with an enormous murder of crows on it, maybe thirty or forty of them, all cawing as loudly as possible. I remembered E. B. White’s poem:
In their assemblies at the edge of town,
Crows introduce resolutions, then vote them down.
How many times in summer, waked early by the mosquito,
Have I lain listening to the crow’s loud veto!
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