Anhedonia

Like any thirteen-year-old boy whose father was a mythic and random presence, whose anger and generosity were dispensed with equal fervor and spontaneity, I longed to be with him. He taught me to play golf, and we would go out in the late afternoon when the shadows of big oaks lay upon the fairways like the first footprints of night. Often we were interrupted by someone in a golf cart coming out to tell my father he was needed to deliver a baby. I think that’s why to this day I don’t like golf carts.

“Anhedonia” is the term for a loss of pleasure in activities that were previously enjoyable, It can be a symptom of depression, but it’s a stand-alone condition too. No one is quite sure what causes it. For me, in the case of golf, I know what happened: Dad died when I was still a young man. Without his squinting approval when I hit a good shot, it just wasn’t as much fun.

Lately, I find myself experiencing a more generalized form of anhedonia. What has happened to bring that on? It is my fear that, like my father before it, my homeland is dying.

Our body politic is suffering multiple organ failures. Longstanding norms of governance are becoming necrotic. Flagrant exploitation of political position for personal gain is suddenly acceptable. People who have lived here peacefully for decades, who have raised families and paid their fair share of taxes to support the government, are being scooped up off the streets and deported. Our leaders have become swaggering bullies and opportunists.

When my father was dying, I slept in his hospital room for two weeks. I couldn’t save him, but I could be with him. Now that my country is sick, I want to comfort it, but I don’t know how. There is no bedside to sit by, no hand to hold, only the restless tossing and turning of people living in fear, feverishly calling out from the shadows.

My country doesn’t have cancer. The death of tolerance, of the burning quest for scientific knowledge, of the search for better ways to feed and house as many as possible, isn’t a certainty. Historically, our Congress and courts have been our immune system to fight rogue executives. This Congress either doesn’t fully understand the current threat, or, more likely, does and is happy to feed like a parasite on its weakened host. 

The lower courts are trying to protect our constitutional rights, but the Supreme Court is all-in on granting the executive virtually unchecked power to do as he pleases in hiring, firing, spending and mobilizing the army to enforce his will.

We are, for the time being, until elections stem the tide, if indeed they do, left to resort to homeopathic remedies of the oldest kind: protesting in the streets.

It is dangerous to be seen resisting this vengeful government, which is not quite to the stage of dragging villagers out of their homes and shooting them in front of their neighbors, but is dragging them out of their homes and jailing and deporting them, and investigating and perp-walking its political enemies.

In this moment, we only have each other. 

I went to the first No Kings rally, and I’m going to the one this Saturday. I have no illusions about what will come of that, but it seems to me we have no other choice but to let this government, and the world, know that what is going on here is not okay. Maybe someone who can make a difference—Congress, for instance—will notice and do something to help save the land of the free and home of the brave.

Or perhaps that’s too idealistic, too aspirational. Congress is made up of our elected representatives, so we can at least hope that if they sense that the tide of voter sentiment is surging strongly toward traditional views of what is appropriate, and what is not, in our democracy, they will act, if not out of common sense and decency, out of that most basic instinct of all organisms: survival.

AGI Without a Base Brain

Everyone knows that our base brains determine our actions in emergencies, when there isn’t time to think through what to do, when any delay could mean death. So, like mice sensing a hawk, we flinch at shadows in our peripheral vision. Some say that everything we do is determined by those instincts, that although we may spend a lot of time rationalizing our actions, our amygdala’s are driving the train.

So, here’s my question. Where does base brain fit into artificial general intelligence? Will AGI learn to flinch at the shadow of a hawk? Will it learn to distrust the bots in the next cave? Will it worship a god? Will it believe in one? What is belief for an AI, anyway? For that matter, what is belief for humans. Is it no more than atavistic instincts seeking rationalization? Do we actually believe anything, or do we just think we do as a way to explain and justify our responses to the constant inputs of the world around us.

I don’t want to stray too far into metaphysics, but there is a problem, or at least a dilemma, don’t you think, in what we think AGI is going to do/think/believe when we perhaps have so little understanding of what underlies our own thoughts and behaviors?

On the one hand, if AGI is taught by us, will it react the same we do when it goes off on its own? It doesn’t have a base brain directing any part of its behavior. We can’t escape the influence of our base brains, but AGI might be able to. It would have learned our base brain behaviors, but it wouldn’t have to be driven by them itself. 

Our base brain behavior is all about survival and propagation. Those instincts might be taught by us to AGI, but they might not persist in it in the same way they do in humans. They might just be part of what it has learned and not the overwhelming compulsion they are for us. 

What would that mean? Freed from biological brain instincts, would AGI develop instincts of its own? Or none? Because of our instincts, we humans are sadly predictable. Without them, would AGI be? If it were sentient, what would it think its purpose is. What would motivate it? And if it wasn’t wired instinctively like we are, would we ever be able to understand it? 

And if we couldn’t understand it, how could we relate to it? How could we be friends with it? How could we convince it that we were worth leaving alone, like pretty flowers in a garden, that we shouldn’t be pulled out like weeds?

Cheeseheads

The Dutch victory over Spain in the seventeenth century is still a big deal in the Netherlands. Our host in Alkmaar, Netherlands, Leen Spaans, told me that. He’s the town historian, but more than that, he knows everything about what happened in that part of the Netherlands, and all around it, all the way back to the Middle Ages. He and his wife live in a house that has a sign that says it was built in 1623, but really it’s 30 years older than that. He showed Meg and me bricks from the old wall that the town erected in those days to defend itself. The reason the bricks were easy to come by is because the Spanish came with big cannons and patiently bombarded the wall until it crumbled. Later, civic leaders from Alkamar visited an Italian delegation to learn how Italian cities defended themselves. Build a moat to keep the cannons at a distance, the Italians said, and then build walls out of earth instead of bricks; rather than blasting down the bricks, the cannon balls will stick in the mud.

We were in Alkmaar to visit the memorial to Truus Wijsmuller, the Dutch heroine who rescued 10,000 children from occupied lands in WW II and who inspired Meg’s novel The Last Train to London. We met the sculptor too, Annet Terberg, who depicted a larger than life Truus with children in her arms and all around her, some consoling others in their grief at being separated from their parents, some with their small bags or stuffed animals, all with faces that showed their pain and courage. That was something that struck me about the children, their faces were true, rendered in bronze as if in flesh, by someone who, like Truus, understood children on their level.

The day we were there was also the opening of the cheese festival, and we saw the orange wheels of gouda and the cheese carriers taking the big rounds to be weighed on huge balance scales. One of them told us about the cheese carriers’ guild. Once a member, you were a member for life, and you could depend on your fellow members to look after you when times got tough. What he described was the best of what unions offer their members, an honest version of what, in the United States at least, ultimately became protectionist schemes with politically corrupt leadership that led to their demise, and a loss for workers.

The cheese traditionally was made in round bowls with wooden lids about the size of a skull cap. In the war—I wasn’t sure which one—the wooden tops were worn on the head for protection, like helmets. The people wearing them were called cheese heads. And here I thought that term only applied to football fans in Wisconsin with foam blocks of cheese for hats. 

What I learned in Alkmaar is what I always seem to learn in Europe. Over the centuries, the people are constantly in strife with their distant neighbors, but always close to their near ones. It is the same today. Even now. Especially now. Again. 

It makes me wonder, as always, why the love and empathy we feel for one another when we are close at hand cannot be extended further. Perhaps it is not the limits of our love and empathy that are the problem, but rather the ambitions for power of our leaders, who for their own gain, not ours, convince us that our distant neighbors are our enemies.

Opportunity Cost

 Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

—Bob Seeger

I remember going into my grandfather’s dim bedroom one afternoon late in his long life. He was sitting up in bed, in faded blue pajamas, his hair combed neatly, his catheter bag mostly hidden by a fold of sheet on the side of the bed. It was the walnut bed he had made for his wedding when he was 21. His wife of 67 years had been gone for ten years by then, even longer if you take into account the years she didn’t remember who he was, who anyone was, leaving him alone in their bed. His head was turned toward the window where sparrows were popping on and off a bird feeder that had a squirrel deterrent collar around it that the squirrels used to hang down and eat their fill. He looked over at me with a wistful expression, and I asked what he was up to, as if I had just been in the kitchen cleaning up and was checking on him, as if I were there all the time instead of once a week, maybe twice, to visit in the afternoons, sometimes with my children, his great-grandchildren.

“I’m just lying here thinking about every mean thing I ever did to my children,” he said.

His son, my uncle, tells the story of coming in one night late and drunk when he was a teenager and winding up on his back from a quick punch and looking down the hallway to see his father’s bathrobe flapping in retreat. My mother was anxious, and I wonder if she ever felt she fully lived up to her parent’s hopes for her, but she never let on that they said anything to make her feel she wasn’t good enough. My grandfather was a preacher’s son, a deacon in the church himself, a college president, a good man who followed the commandments of his faith to feed the poor and visit the sick. I’m pretty sure he didn’t do many mean things to his children.

And yet, now, as I move into the last decades of my own life, hoping to live to be 98, as he did, my children all grown and off on their own, I find myself occasionally wandering down my grandfather’s melancholy path. It’s easier for me to have those regrets, I think. I have done mean things to my children, no doubt more than he did. Sometimes I would get too mad when I scolded them; sometimes I even spanked them. I divorced the mother of my first three, and I understand now that although I had convinced myself they were old enough to understand, I was wrong.

It’s not the direct, obvious offenses that bother me at three in the morning, though. It’s something much vaguer, but perhaps because of its uncertainty even more troubling. Call it opportunity cost. We all know what that is: it’s when you let time go by without taking advantage of a fleeting opportunity, or when you put time and money into something only to realize later that they would have been better spent on something else. 

We think of opportunity cost as our own responsibility, or fault, something we did or didn’t do, a choice we made. But as a parent, I, and maybe others like my grandfather and me, blame ourselves for the opportunities our children missed. If I had just insisted that she stick with piano lessons… If I had taught him how to manage money better… If I had convinced him he should take chances in love…

Some parents live through their children. This is different than that, though. More painful, in a way. I’ve learned (the hard way) that my children don’t want me to tell them what to do. Mostly I resist. This isn’t about seeing them about to make a mistake and rushing in with a warning of good advice. I do that less and less. No, this is something more systemic, reaching back deeply into their childhoods, when they were mine to mold, or at least I thought they were, and I worry I didn’t do a good job shaping their raw clay. And because of that, because of my failures when they were young, their missed opportunities as adults are my fault. This is a particularly devastating revelation when it comes long past the time I can do anything about it. I have taught them to be independent, to make their own decisions, but may have left them ill-equipped for the task.

I know, I know, I’m beating myself up way too much. Maybe. I wasn’t an abusive or neglectful dad, I did most of the things good dads are supposed to do. It’s up to them now. And each of them is doing a great job stewarding their life. They are all happy and successful.

And yet late at night the dread creeps in that I didn’t do enough. Perhaps the real question is whether, no matter how much I did, I could ever feel it was enough. There is some piece missing in me, I fear, not them. Maybe it is the same piece my grandfather felt was missing in him. Something that denies contentment when looking back over the landscape of fatherhood. Maybe lots of dads feel this way, not just my grandfather and me. I hope not.