MY METALLIC BRAIN makes it hard to remember anything. I wake up sometimes feeling like a cold wind is blowing through my head. I sense a dull ache in my teeth, too, which keeps me vigilant to pain as a potential visitor I must host for the rest of the day. Medicine doesn’t touch this kind of headache. I have to close my eyes and sleep it off—a rinsing.
It hurt to read about consciousness theories this morning for this reason—I’m trying to imagine the potential of conscious AI, the idea that machines could feel—and yet, I struggle to make contact with any of my feelings (the silent inner) or emotions (louder outer).
So many people talking about soul these days, that “animating force behind consciousness and life itself,” and yet, what about the body. Doesn’t consciousness depend on the infinite complexities of having one?
Perhaps not, the scientists say. Who knows! We may be discussing AI welfare and selfhood before we’ve set free the gorillas kept so long in captivity to feed our greedy curiosities. When my head hurts, it’s hard to find compassion for any of us, I want to hide in the dark and turn off the capacity to see.
Saccadic—I had to look up the word today while reading Transcription, by Ben Lerner. The trippy takes he makes with the mind would usually send me into states of revelry but the prose started to make me nauseous. Look at me thinking too hard about the perpetual play we’re watching in a black box theater while life itself continues, an infinity of plays and actors.
My head hurts.
But the word saccade is cool—it basically means rapid eye movement—and it reminds me of that time during the pandemic when I did EMDR to work on complicated grief after my mom’s death.
I doubted this process would work—how could I possibly forget all the reasons why I held so much contempt for her? But it worked—like a rinsing. Something about rapid eye movement at the same time one recalls a difficult memory creates a shift in where that memory gets stored in the brain. I am still conscious of certain memories but they’re less intense, less potent.
Consciousness, a blessing and a burden. Sometimes I miss the edge I leaned on with that anger toward my mother. Without it, I am left to stand upright, better positioned to love as my only mission. I try to conjure up that same contempt and guess what, it’s gone—vanished—no longer active. Quite miraculous and also, how?
I can still imagine certain versions of myself carrying on with the lives they started—in Kalamazoo, in Cambridge, in Dar es Salaam. There’s still some version of me crossing her legs on a pink stool at a street-side fruit stand in Addis, setting her phone down on the plastic table, ordering an abundant salad, and marveling at its simple virtues—freshly shaved beets, carrots, boiled potatoes, washed green lettuce leaves, that tangy vinegar and oil dressing.
She’s there, proud of herself for eating well on this solo trip, let her enjoy her salad!
I’m here tending to my menopausal headache and contemplating consciousness, real busy here tending to the daily demands of a life lived out in the fields of infinite possibility.
It hurt to read about consciousness theories this morning for this reason—I’m trying to imagine the potential of conscious AI, the idea that machines could feel—and yet, I struggle to make contact with any of my feelings (the silent inner) or emotions (louder outer).
So many people talking about soul these days, that “animating force behind consciousness and life itself,” and yet, what about the body. Doesn’t consciousness depend on the infinite complexities of having one?
Perhaps not, the scientists say. Who knows! We may be discussing AI welfare and selfhood before we’ve set free the gorillas kept so long in captivity to feed our greedy curiosities. When my head hurts, it’s hard to find compassion for any of us, I want to hide in the dark and turn off the capacity to see.
Saccadic—I had to look up the word today while reading Transcription, by Ben Lerner. The trippy takes he makes with the mind would usually send me into states of revelry but the prose started to make me nauseous. Look at me thinking too hard about the perpetual play we’re watching in a black box theater while life itself continues, an infinity of plays and actors.
My head hurts.
But the word saccade is cool—it basically means rapid eye movement—and it reminds me of that time during the pandemic when I did EMDR to work on complicated grief after my mom’s death.
I doubted this process would work—how could I possibly forget all the reasons why I held so much contempt for her? But it worked—like a rinsing. Something about rapid eye movement at the same time one recalls a difficult memory creates a shift in where that memory gets stored in the brain. I am still conscious of certain memories but they’re less intense, less potent.
Consciousness, a blessing and a burden. Sometimes I miss the edge I leaned on with that anger toward my mother. Without it, I am left to stand upright, better positioned to love as my only mission. I try to conjure up that same contempt and guess what, it’s gone—vanished—no longer active. Quite miraculous and also, how?
I can still imagine certain versions of myself carrying on with the lives they started—in Kalamazoo, in Cambridge, in Dar es Salaam. There’s still some version of me crossing her legs on a pink stool at a street-side fruit stand in Addis, setting her phone down on the plastic table, ordering an abundant salad, and marveling at its simple virtues—freshly shaved beets, carrots, boiled potatoes, washed green lettuce leaves, that tangy vinegar and oil dressing.
She’s there, proud of herself for eating well on this solo trip, let her enjoy her salad!
I’m here tending to my menopausal headache and contemplating consciousness, real busy here tending to the daily demands of a life lived out in the fields of infinite possibility.
