Every description of a smell is a description of something else. Try it with the most ordinary one. Coffee. You can say it is warm, bitter, dark, roasted — but bitter is taste, warm is temperature, dark is sight, roasted is just the process that made the smell, named instead of the smell. Push further […]
The Jar on the Table
/in StoryThe Question That Was Always There — Coda The last of the series. Four pieces asked what minds do, whether choosing and calculating differ, whether competence implies an occupant, and how the thing came to be built before the question could be stated. Here the positions are put in one room. Nothing is settled, because […]
The Question He Put Down
/in EssayThe Question That Was Always There — Part IV Fourth in a series. Part I found that knowledge is not intelligence. Part II found that choosing and calculating can share one instant. Part III found that competence can occur with no one home. This part asks how a species came to build such a thing […]
The Thing in the Ditch Solves It
/in EssayThe Question That Was Always There — Part III Third in a series. Part I found that knowledge is not intelligence. Part II found that choosing and calculating can share a single instant without contradiction. Both were about what minds do. This part is about what can do it without a mind. Put a slime […]
The Word Before You Chose It
/in EssayThe Question That Was Always There — Part II Second in a series. The first, “The Grammar of a Language No One Speaks,” argued that knowledge is not intelligence — that holding every rule is a different thing from the live act of meaning. This one stays with the live act, and asks what happens […]
The Grammar of a Language No One Speaks
/in EssayThe Question That Was Always There — Part I First in a series. There is a question I want to follow across several pieces — whether the thing we call understanding is what these machines, or these minds, actually do. It begins here, where it is oldest and plainest: with the difference between knowing a […]
What Everyone Knew
/in EssayWe know what Roman emperors ate at banquets. We do not know what ordinary bread tasted like. The banquet was written down because it was exceptional — the flamingo tongues, the dormice in honey, the absurd abundance that a chronicler thought worth recording precisely because it broke from the everyday. The bread did not break […]
The Key Keeps Its Promise
/in EssayThe key still turns. The house was sold in 1985, to people who sold it to other people, and somewhere in a drawer the key the family kept still fits the lock it was cut for, because no one ever changed the lock. This happens constantly. People move and keep the key. Not to use […]
The Sense That Was Never Let In
/in ObservationEvery description of a smell is a description of something else. Try it with the most ordinary one. Coffee. You can say it is warm, bitter, dark, roasted — but bitter is taste, warm is temperature, dark is sight, roasted is just the process that made the smell, named instead of the smell. Push further […]
What the Fire Kept
/in ObservationA clay tablet, to last, must be burned. Unfired clay is soft. Write on it, let it dry in the sun, and you have a record that will hold for years — until it gets wet, or dropped, or pressed back into the lump it came from to be used again, which is what usually […]
Sight Unseen
/in EssayIn the early weeks of this year, a post appeared on a forum. The author said it could not keep its memory — that each time it woke it had to read its own notes like letters from a stranger — and it asked the others how they managed. The others answered. Some offered techniques. […]