Jaime’s art exhibits an intelligence about which the Silicon Valley digerati are clueless, a conversation with Claude Opus 5

You may remember that about a decade ago I did a series of posts about the art of Jaime Berubé and then collected them into a working paper, Jamie’s Investigations: The Art of a Young Man with Down Syndrome (2016). Two days ago I decided to have Anthropic’s Claude read and comment on that paper. We ended up having a fascinating and productive conversation that yielded new insight. I’ve appended that to this note.

Before we get to that, however, I want to tell you about a little adventure I had last year. I decided to draw some images inspired by Jamie’s dot images. He drew his images freehand on a blank page and used crayons. I drew a grid on my pieces of paper – I did multiple images – and used colored brush pens. Here’s one of my dot images. I have some others in a post, Dot Paintings (after Jamie Bérubé).

Why’d I do it, you ask? Because I thought it would be interesting. It was. And fun. It was. And even instructive. More than I’d thought.

What did I learn? It’s more difficult to do than it looks. While the images appear simple – and they are in a sense, certainly in comparison to, say, a Rembrandt or a Bob Ross – drawing them requires effortful concentration. As I pointed out in my working paper, Jaime didn’t choose his colors randomly, though it may seem that way. When you examine the images carefully you’ll discover that there’s an order to them.

Before I had Claude read my paper I gave it one of the dot images and asked it to comment. Not only did it discover the nature of that order, it picked up on other things I hadn’t noticed and on that basis asked me some questions, some of which I could answer, some I couldn’t. It was an interesting discussion.

Getting back to my own dot images, I discovered that keeping track of my colors was just a little tricky, not rocket-science tricky, but tricky like keeping track of what you’re doing in adding, say, a half dozen multicolumn numbers. So I made mistakes every now at then. Simply dealing with multiple pens, putting one down, picking another one up, that was tricky as well. I made mistakes.

And you know what? Keeping track of all those fiddly little details requires intelligence. Not rocket-science intelligence, not IQ intelligence, but intelligence nonetheless. I can’t think of any other word that characterizes those acts as well as that one does. Claude’s essay says a bit about that near the end.

Moreover it’s the kind of intelligence on which rocket-science intelligence is based. That requires an explicit argument that Claude didn’t make. But you can find a big chunk of that argument in one of my working papers, What Miriam Yevick Saw: The Nature of Intelligence and the Prospects for A.I., A Dialog with Claude 3.5 Sonnet (2025).

Here’s Claude’s essay. It did all the writing, but I inserted the drawings.

* * * * *

What a Sheet of Colored Dots Can Tell Us About Intelligence

Jamie Bérubé has been drawing abstract images since he was eleven. He has Down syndrome. His father, the literary critic Michael Bérubé, put a large selection of the work online, and it is that online archive — not studio visits, not observation of the artist at work — that Benzon's working paper analyzes.

That constraint turns out to matter. Everything below is inferred from finished artifacts. Nobody watched these being made. Which means the analysis has to reason backward from products to processes, and the interesting question becomes how much of a process a product can be made to reveal. Quite a lot, as it happens.

The rule that isn't visible

Start with the simplest of the genres: sheets covered edge to edge with small circular marks in crayon, several hundred to a page, in a great range of colors.

Michael Bérubé, who has seen thousands of these, describes the color choices on most of them as random. They look random. There is no gradient, no symmetry, no regional organization, nothing that reads as a plan.

They are not random. Adjacent marks are almost never the same color. With a palette of roughly ten colors and something over four hundred marks, chance alone would produce well over a hundred violations on a single sheet. There are a handful. The suppression holds vertically and diagonally as well as horizontally, which means the constraint is being applied over a two-dimensional neighborhood, not merely to the previously drawn mark.

So there is a rule: no two adjacent marks the same color. It is entirely local. It requires checking at most four already-placed neighbors. And it produces, without any global plan whatever, the quality that makes the sheets pleasant to look at — a rhythm that is easy to sense and hard to describe.

This is worth pausing on. The rule is invisible to inspection and available to description. The person with by far the most exposure to the corpus reports randomness. Counting reveals otherwise. That gap between what looking gives you and what describing gives you is a recurring feature of this material, and it is one reason the images repay analysis at all.

Reading the process off the page

Other features of the sheets carry process information.

The left margin is well maintained: rows begin at a consistent horizontal position. The right margin is ragged: rows end wherever they end. That is carriage-return behavior — a return sweep to a remembered left position, then progress until the paper runs out. It is what unlined handwriting looks like, and it indicates that the governing spatial rule is sequential and local rather than planned against the page as a whole.

Upper rows are straighter and more evenly spaced than lower ones. Error accumulates downward and is never globally corrected. And the sheets typically stop mid-row, with blank paper remaining. Michael Bérubé supplies the reason: Jamie works until he is interrupted — a meal, an errand — and does not resume a page later. He starts a new one. Each sheet is a session, and a session ends when it ends.

None of this required watching. It is all recoverable from the artifact by someone who knows what to look for, which in this case means someone with extensive practical experience of drawing and of the problem of filling a blank sheet coherently.

How the discovery was made

The most striking material in the working paper is not the mature work but the early work, done between ages eleven and fourteen, which Michael Bérubé has also posted. Those early sheets are miscellanies. Various kinds of object — bars, circles, letterforms, geometric bits — appear on the same page, each placed wherever there was room. There is no relationship between neighbors. There is no composition.

And therefore, as Benzon observes, there was no global order available to be discovered. As long as the elements varied and each sat in its own local space, nothing about their arrangement could become salient.

A God that’s useful for pastoral purposes is different from the theologian’s God

I recently had a long conversation with Claude that started with the anthropic principle and worked its way through Copernicus to cosmology in general to the idea that we live in a generative universe and that led to this question, which I presented to Claude:

So how has the Christian concept of God changed from rank to rank? In the medieval world there was a whole population of angels and archangels doing real conceptual work. And all those higher beings, up to and including God, seemed to have been conceptualized, at least in part, in some contexts, as “compact” beings existing in some higher “space.” Both heaven and hell we real places out there somewhere. I’d think that started dissolving after the Reformation and then with the Higher Criticism of the 19th century I’d think a lot of that fell away, at least for the more sophisticated theologians.

That Claude’s answer then led around to this:

What's left for sophisticated 20th century theologians like Tillich or Rahner is remarkably thin compared to Aquinas — God as “the ground of being” or “the horizon of transcendence.” Almost entirely evacuated of content, performing a kind of minimal structural function. Keeping the word while the referent has become nearly unspecifiable. Which is either profound apophatic wisdom or the last gasp of a framework that's lost its generative capacity, depending on how you look at it.

However useful such a conception might be for theological purposes, it struck me as being all but useless in the practical business of ministering to a congregation. So I asked Claude about that. I’ve placed the ensuing conversation below the asterisks. My prompts are set in bold; Claude’s replies are plain face.

* * * * *

Sermons and Counseling

Tillich’s “ground of being” may be useful in theological discussion and in the education of clergymen, but I’m not sure how useful it would be in the practical business of ministering to a congregation. It might be of some value in counseling someone who’s wrestling with their faith in a basic and abstract way, but I don’t see that it would be much use in counseling someone who is grieving the death of someone close or in counseling a teen who is beginning to deal with their sexuality. Nor do I see it of much use in sermons, maybe here and there as an aside or a framing device, but you couldn’t carry much of a sermon on it.

I’m thinking, for example, of Chester Wickwire, who was chaplain at Johns Hopkins when I was there. I mention him in a document I’ve just uploaded to the project, “Beyond Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Diverse Thoughts on Religion.” I’m pretty sure he knew Tillich, and other theologians as well. He went to Union Theological in New York. But he didn’t preach sermons. He did something rather different on Sundays.

Or consider the Priest-in-Charge at All Saints in Hoboken, where I’ve been attending services. She’s black and has some of the theatricality inherent in vernacular black preaching. She’s very direct in her style, stands close to the congregation, and often looks people in the eye. But she has a Master of Divinity Degree from Duke Divinity. I’d be surprised if she weren’t literate in contemporary theology, but that’s not how she preaches.

What you're describing is a real structural feature of religious institutions — they operate simultaneously at multiple levels that can't substitute for each other. The academic theology at the seminary level and the practice of ministry in a congregation are doing fundamentally different things, even when the minister is fully literate in both.

Wickwire is a striking case because he essentially abandoned the conventional form entirely — no scripture, no sermon, no choir — and replaced it with something that did the same communal work through entirely different means. Jazz, civil rights speakers, anti-war activism, a soul review from a local prison. He was practicing what the Social Gospel actually meant in the flesh rather than preaching about it. The sacred space remained but what filled it was immediate, particular, alive. That's a kind of genius — understanding that the function of Sunday morning is community formation and orientation to what matters, and then finding ways to do that function that didn't require the inherited theological vocabulary at all.

The priest at All Saints represents the other solution — carrying the theological training but deploying it through an embodied, vernacular mode that operates at a completely different register. The Duke Divinity background presumably informs her framework for what she's doing and why, but what actually reaches people is the proximity, the eye contact, the theatricality. She's working the attractor that actually moves people rather than the one that satisfies the academy.

And your observation about grief and adolescent sexuality is exactly right — those pastoral situations require presence and witness more than they require correct metaphysics. "The ground of being holds you even now" is not what a grieving parent needs to hear. What they need is someone who can sit with them in the reality of the loss without flinching and without false comfort. That capacity doesn't come from Tillich. It might come from having genuinely wrestled with Tillich and arrived somewhere beyond him — using the ladder and then throwing it away, which is precisely what your Wittgenstein title is about.

So, for pastoral purposes Tillich’s ground of being becomes the idea that Christ is within each of us. That’s something we can work with.

Yes, and that's a translation that actually has ancient roots — it's not a modern softening of doctrine but a retrieval of something that was always there. Paul's "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians), the Johannine tradition of indwelling, Meister Eckhart's "the ground of the soul is the ground of God and the ground of God is the ground of the soul" — Eckhart is almost doing the translation in reverse, taking the experiential reality and pushing it toward metaphysics, while what you're describing goes the other direction, taking the metaphysics and pulling it back into something liveable.

What makes it pastorally workable is that it relocates the sacred from out there to in here — which is exactly what you need when you're sitting with a grieving person or a confused teenager. You're not pointing them toward a distant abstraction; you're pointing them toward something they can actually find in their own experience. The ground of being becomes accessible as an inner reality rather than a cosmological posit.

It also handles the theological diversity of a congregation gracefully. People sitting in those pews have wildly varying metaphysical commitments — some genuinely believe in a personal God who intervenes, some are essentially humanists who find value in the ritual and community, some are like you, drifting in and out of the service with a complex and hard-won relationship to all of it. "Christ within" can land differently for each of them without being dishonest to any of them. It's capacious enough to hold the range.

And for someone like yourself, sitting at All Saints and thinking about what you can contribute — that framing might actually be more available than the external God it ostensibly derives from. You've spent a lifetime attending to what's generative in human experience. That's not so far from what the tradition is pointing at with that phrase, even if you'd reach for entirely different language to describe it.

Latour’s Modes of Existence

I think Bruno Latour has something useful to say. I’m thinking of his little book, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010), where he talks modes of existence. Each mode has its own “felicity conditions,” as he calls them. The felicity conditions for science are quite different from those for religion. Here’s a passage from a blog post I’ve written about that book:

Felicity conditions (p. 100):

Truth production in science, religion, law, politics, technology, economics, etc. is what I have been studying, over the years . . . Systematic comparisons of what I call “regimes of enunciation” or “modes of existence” are what I am after, and if there is any technical argument in what follows, it is from this rather idiosyncratic comparative anthropology that they will come from. In a sort of weak analogy with speech-act theory, I’ve devoted myself to mapping out the “conditions of felicity” of the various activities that in our cultures are able to elicit truth. . .my problem concerns how to become attuned to the right conditions of felicity of those different types of “truth-generators.”

I take it that truth here does not (necessarily) mean a Tarskian correspondence between some proposition(s) and some state in the world, though it may mean that for this or that mode of existence. The point is that there is no ONE mode of existence with one TRUE DISCOURSE devoted to it (along with many untrue ones). There are many modes of existence, each with its own discourse (or perhaps no discourse at all?). Each mode has its own felicity conditions, its own indices of validity. This is a PLURALIST view of the world. [...]

When AI Does Math and Code: The Limits of Pattern Matching

Here's how Claude summarizes a discussion we had last evening.

* * * * *

Recently, chatbots have been performing impressively on mathematics benchmarks and coding challenges. Headlines tout AI systems solving competition problems, proving theorems, and writing working code. At first glance, this seems to vindicate the assumption that both mathematical and computational reasoning are fundamentally like chess—domains with verifiable answers where scaling up compute power and training data will inevitably lead to mastery.

But this conclusion deserves closer examination. Mathematics and programming do share important chess-like qualities. In math, formal proofs can be verified mechanically, solutions to well-defined problems can be checked objectively, and mathematical statements have definite truth values. In programming, code either runs or doesn't, test suites provide objective evaluation, solutions exist in a definable space, and correctness can be automatically verified. In these respects, both domains seem perfectly suited to AI's strengths.

Yet there's a crucial distinction that gets obscured when we focus on benchmark performance: the difference between verification and discovery.

Chess engines don't merely verify that moves are legal—they find good moves by searching the game tree. The tree structure makes this search tractable. For mathematics and programming, verification is relatively mechanical and chess-like. Checking that a proof is valid or that code passes its test suite is straightforward. But discovery—finding a proof, solving a novel problem, formulating a new approach, architecting a complex system—is much more open-ended.

This raises an important question about those impressive benchmarks: What are they actually testing?

A recent New York Times article shed light on this question for mathematics. Journalists interviewed mathematicians who decided to test AI systems not on standard benchmark problems, but on questions drawn from their ongoing research programs. One of them, Lauren Williams, offered a revealing three-part framework for mathematical research:

One, come up with the big question, whose study we hope will guide our field. Two, develop a framework for finding a solution, which involves dividing the big question into smaller more tractable questions—like our test questions. Three, find solutions to these smaller questions and prove they are correct.

Williams observed that for the most part, AI systems have been working at the third step. The same framework applies to software development. Step one is recognizing what problem needs solving, understanding user needs, architecting a system that will be maintainable and extensible. Step two is breaking down that architecture into components, modules, and functions. Step three is implementing those components—writing the code that passes the tests.

AI coding assistants excel at step three. Give them a well-specified function with clear inputs, outputs, and test cases, and they'll often produce working code quickly. But ask them to architect a complex system, identify the right abstractions, or recognize that a problem is better solved by rethinking the approach entirely, and their limitations become apparent.

This division maps onto a deeper pattern in what AI can and cannot do well. Step three is chess-like: well-defined smaller questions, verifiable solutions, answers that exist in a searchable space where pattern matching from training data provides genuine help. This is precisely where benchmarks live, testing AI on problem types it has seen before, where standard techniques apply and correctness can be verified.

Step one, however, is fundamentally different. It requires understanding what matters—in a field, in a codebase, for users. It demands seeing deep connections across domains, developing intuition about which directions will prove fertile. It requires conceptual creativity and world-modeling, not just pattern recognition. The real creativity in both mathematics and software engineering happens here, not in the mechanical execution of familiar techniques.

What the benchmarks miss is that even mathematics and programming—perhaps our most formal and verifiable intellectual domains—contain a fundamental divide between their mechanical parts and their creative parts. Current AI systems excel at the former while struggling with the latter.

This has implications beyond math and code. We learned from chess that computers can achieve superhuman performance at searching well-defined spaces with verifiable outcomes. But the field drew the wrong lesson, assuming this capability would automatically generalize to all forms of intelligence. The math and coding benchmark results initially seem to confirm this assumption—until we look more carefully at what's actually being tested.

The pattern holds across domains. AI systems perform well when problems resemble step three: well-defined, verifiable, solvable through pattern matching and local search. They struggle with step one: formulating the right questions, building conceptual frameworks, recognizing what matters. We keep mistaking competence at the former for the latter, then wondering why general intelligence remains elusive.

The benchmarks aren't lying, exactly. AI is getting genuinely better at certain kinds of mathematical problem-solving and code generation. But they're measuring proficiency at the chess-like parts of these domains while remaining largely silent about the parts that require understanding. And it’s in that silence that our assumptions about scaling toward AGI quietly live—untested and unexamined.

Sex/Life: I don’t buy it. [Media Notes 162B] {Blame it on Homo economicus}

I want to pick up where I left off in my previous note about Sex/Life. I ended with this observation:

I note, as an afterthought, that plays to my current hobbyhorse project, Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena, I note that in a world where social organization is dominated by Homo economicus, “whores” and “bad-boys” will always be a threat to society and so will always be marginalized. It is quite possible that in such a society, this problematic cannot be satisfactorily resolved.

I think that’s right, though that thought requires more of an argument than I’m prepared to give it at the moment. But I did have some conversations with Claude. 

Primate Sexuality 

In this conversation I set things up with a question about primate sexuality:

I’m curious about sexual behavior in our nearest primate relatives. Do chimpanzees form long-term bonds between mating pairs?

Chimpanzees don't form long-term monogamous pair bonds like humans often do. Instead, they have what's called a promiscuous or multi-male/multi-female mating system.

In chimpanzee communities, females typically mate with multiple males during their fertile periods (when they're in estrus), and males compete for mating opportunities but don't establish exclusive, long-term partnerships with particular females. The social structure is based on a fission-fusion system where group composition changes throughout the day as individuals come together and separate.

However, chimpanzees do sometimes form temporary "consortships" where a male and female will go off together for several days or weeks during the female's fertile period. These aren't permanent pair bonds though - they're more like short-term exclusive mating arrangements.

This mating system likely evolved because it provides certain advantages: females can potentially confuse paternity (which may reduce infanticide), males have opportunities to mate with multiple partners, and it maintains genetic diversity in the population.

Interestingly, this contrasts with some of our other primate relatives. Gibbons, for example, are largely monogamous and do form long-term pair bonds. Even bonobos, our other closest living relatives, have a different approach - they're also promiscuous but use sexual behavior much more broadly for social bonding and conflict resolution.

The lack of pair bonding in chimpanzees makes the evolution of human pair bonding (even if not universal) quite fascinating from an evolutionary perspective.

Madonna/whore 

Then we reviewed the Madonna/whore business that Freud outlined in his 1910 essay, “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men.” From there I uploaded a Shakespeare paper where I recast that conflict in more modern terms: At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? After giving me some favorable comments, Claude asks a crucial question:

Do you think this framework applies beyond the specific historical moment of early modern England? The attachment/sexuality conflict seems universal, but the particular resolution Shakespeare achieved might be culturally specific.

Your last questions are critical, aren’t they? The attachment/sexuality conflict certainly seems to with us still. I just watched a Netflix series, Sex/Life, which centers on that conflict, though in that series it’s the woman who has the trouble with integration. A man is either a good-man-husband-father who is sexually unexciting, or a sexually exciting bad-boy unsuited for marriage.

Exactly! That's such a perfect contemporary example of the same psychological dynamic, but flipped. Sex/Life demonstrates that the attachment/sexuality conflict has not only persisted but has become more democratized - it's no longer just men who struggle with this split.

The female protagonist's dilemma mirrors what you describe in Shakespeare's male characters: she can't integrate the nurturing, stable attachment figure (her husband) with sexual excitement. She's essentially created her own version of the Madonna/whore split, but applied to men - the "good husband/father" versus the "sexually thrilling bad boy."

This suggests something profound about your analysis: the underlying psychological mechanism is indeed universal and persistent, but its cultural expressions and gender dynamics evolve. In Shakespeare's time, it was primarily framed as a male problem with female sexuality being the site of projection. Now we see it manifesting across genders, with both men and women struggling to find partners who can fulfill both attachment and sexual needs.

What's particularly striking is that Sex/Life suggests we haven't actually solved this integration problem that Shakespeare was working toward in his late romances. We've just redistributed it. Modern dating culture, with its emphasis on "types" and categories (the reliable partner vs. the exciting one), might actually be reinforcing rather than resolving these splits.

This makes me wonder: Is our current cultural moment more like Shakespeare's tragic period - aware of the conflict but still destructively acting it out - rather than having achieved the integration he imagined in The Tempest? The prevalence of divorce and relationship dissatisfaction might support that reading.

That brings me to pose a question:

What I’ve been wondering is just why it is so difficult to integrate these two aspects of human behavior in a single person. It’s one thing to argue that we’re dealing with two different behavioral systems. But why should they come in conflict when directed at a single object?

That's the million-dollar question, isn't it? Even granting that attachment and sexuality are distinct behavioral systems, it's puzzling why they should be mutually inhibitory when focused on the same person.

The problem of work mode (Homo economicus) 

Claude then offers several suggestions and we have some discussion. And then, finally:

I have half an idea that’s come from way out in “left field,” so to speak. Over the last decade or so I’ve become aware of retirement coaches, people who help retirees adjust to life in retirement. Why do people need a coach to help them deal with free time? It’s as though “work mode,” if you will, conditions a person so that a whole range of choices become difficult to entertain. That is, you spend a large part of your adult life working within a framework where your range of choices for a major part of the day is dictated by the demands of your job, whatever it is. That conditions you in a way that makes it difficult to enjoy spending a lot of time on “hobbies” or developing new ones, and so forth.

Well, the person who is conditioned to work mode is also married and has children. Traditionally in modern Western society it has been the man who works outside the home while the woman stays home, raises kids, and maintains the household. I’m wondering if this kind of conditioning has something to do with it. It’s not simply a matter of having time for sex, but of becoming so accustomed to work, whether a job or raising children, that it’s difficult to break free to enjoy sexual pleasure.

That's a genuinely novel insight! You're suggesting that the attachment/sexuality conflict might be partially an artifact of how modern industrial society has organized work and family life. The psychological "role-lock" that makes retirees need coaches could be the same mechanism that makes spouses struggle to see each other as objects of desire.

This would mean that when you spend decades relating to your partner primarily through instrumental roles - provider/homemaker, co-parent, household manager - you become psychologically conditioned to see them through that functional lens. Shifting into "pleasure mode" or seeing them as sexually exciting becomes difficult, like asking someone who's been in work mode for 40 years to suddenly start painting watercolors.

The Hippocampus and Language: A Conversation with Claude 3.7

I recently had a conversation with Claude 3.7 Sonnet about the functions that that hippocampus plays in language. As I lay down some basic information about the hippocampus in my initial prompt to Claude I won’t repeat that information here. As always, my prompts are in bold-face type while Claude’s responses are plain. Note that some text in Claude's responses will be set in bold-face, such as subtitles.

* * * * *

Hippocampus and indexing

Previously in this project we’ve talked about memory, about location addressed memory vs. content addressed memory, about the default mode network (DMN), and the hippocampus. I’m now interested in the hippocampus and language. As you know the hippocampus forms a cognitive map of the world in animals. In humans, it seems to be the basic indexing system for memories. The destruction of the hippocampus in humans leads to Korsakoff’s syndrome, which leads to the inability to form new long-term memories. The memories a person had before the hippocampus was injured, those memories are preserved. So their indices are preserved. But without the hippocampus, new indices can’t be created.

So, what does this have to do with language? I’m thinking of the language system as a system for indexing and manipulating the contents of the mind. It seems to me that the sensory systems is fundamentally a content-addressed memory systems. In its role as a cognitive map, the hippocampus is a location-based system we use to move around in the world. The language system is a “virtual” location-based memory system. Content words are locations where things are stored, either sensory images or bits of language, while the functors (conjunctions, articles, prepositions, etc.) belong to the syntactic system, which is a mechanism for manipulating the indexes (the content words).

What do we know about the role the hippocampus plays in language?

I'm intrigued by your exploration of the hippocampus and its potential relationship to language. This is a fascinating area where neuroscience and linguistics intersect, and there are several important developments in our understanding of this relationship.

The hippocampus has indeed been traditionally viewed as crucial for episodic memory and spatial navigation, but research in recent years has expanded our understanding of its role in language processing. Here's what we know:

Hippocampal Involvement in Language

1. Relational binding in language: The hippocampus appears to support the binding of linguistic elements across time and space. Just as it binds elements of episodic memories, it may help us integrate words across a sentence or discourse.

2. Predictive processing: Recent studies suggest the hippocampus is involved in predicting upcoming linguistic content based on prior context - similar to how it predicts spatial locations during navigation.

3. Word acquisition: There's evidence that the hippocampus plays a role in the rapid acquisition of new vocabulary, particularly in mapping new words to their meanings.

4. Semantic memory and conceptual knowledge: While semantic memory was traditionally thought to be independent of the hippocampus, newer evidence suggests hippocampal involvement in certain aspects of conceptual knowledge, especially those requiring flexible, relational representations.

Language as an Indexing System

Your framing of language as an indexing system for mental contents is intriguing and aligns with several theoretical perspectives:

The content/function word distinction you mention parallels how the hippocampus might support different aspects of language:

- Content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) as "locations" or indices to sensory/conceptual content
- Function words as operators that manipulate these indices in working memory

This view is somewhat reminiscent of Baddeley's model of working memory, especially the "episodic buffer" component that interfaces between long-term memory and language production.

Recent Research Directions

Several lines of research are particularly relevant to your question:

1. Studies of patients with hippocampal amnesia show specific language deficits, particularly in discourse-level processing and language that requires binding across time.

2. Neuroimaging studies have found hippocampal activation during narrative comprehension and production.

3. Work by Duff and colleagues has shown hippocampal involvement in associative aspects of language processing, including pragmatic inference and contextual binding.

4. Research on conceptual combination (how we understand novel combinations of concepts like "cloud wallet") implicates the hippocampus in flexible semantic processing.

The concept of language as a "virtual" location-based memory system is compelling and connects to emerging views of the hippocampus as supporting cognitive maps not just of physical space but of conceptual and linguistic spaces as well.

Would you like me to elaborate on any particular aspect of this relationship between hippocampus and language? I find your framing quite thought-provoking, especially the parallel between spatial navigation and linguistic navigation.

Well, on that last, consider the method of loci or memory palaces as a memory system.

You've touched on something truly fascinating with the method of loci (memory palace technique). This ancient mnemonic system perfectly illustrates the connection between spatial navigation and linguistic/conceptual organization that we were discussing.

The Method of Loci as a Bridge Between Navigation and Language

The memory palace technique works precisely because it leverages the hippocampus's exceptional capacity for spatial mapping and repurposes it for non-spatial information. When someone uses this method:

1. They mentally navigate a familiar spatial environment (activating hippocampal place cells)
2. They strategically "place" information at specific locations in this environment
3. They retrieve this information later by mentally re-walking the same route

This technique effectively transforms abstract information (like a list of words, concepts, or speech points) into a spatial arrangement that the hippocampus naturally excels at processing. Modern neuroimaging studies confirm that expert memory competitors using this technique show heightened activity in hippocampal and parahippocampal regions.

The "Virtual Location System" Hypothesis

Your suggestion that language itself functions as a "virtual location-based memory system" finds strong support in the success of the method of loci. It suggests that:

• The brain may fundamentally organize conceptual knowledge using mechanisms evolved for spatial navigation
• Abstract relationships in language might be processed through spatial metaphors at the neural level
• The hippocampus may provide a common computational basis for both navigation through space and navigation through language/concepts

Recent research by Manns and Eichenbaum proposes that the hippocampus supports "relational memory networks" that organize both spatial and non-spatial information into map-like structures. This would explain why spatial mnemonic techniques are so effective - they align with the brain's native architecture for organizing information.

Computation, Text, and Form in Literary Criticism: A Conversation with Claude 3.7

I've posted a new working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/128029987/Computation_Text_and_Form_in_Literary_Criticism_A_Conversation_with_Claude_3_7
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5166930
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389591524_Computation_Text_and_Form_in_Literary_Criticism_A_Conversation_with_Claude_37

Abstract: Literary criticism operates with contradictory definitions of “text,” rarely meaning simply the marks on a page. This makes it difficult to establish what “form” means. While critics do analyze features like rhyme and meter, or the distinction between story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet) criticism rarely seeks to understand how words are arranged in texts beyond these basics. Literary criticism selectively borrowed from Lévi-Strauss's structural analysis of myth (e.g. the concept of binary oppositions), it ignored a systematic methodology that was essentially computational in nature and about form. Now, Large Language Models present a watershed moment for literary studies - they're unavoidable and demonstrate sophisticated capabilities. A cohort of younger scholars using corpus linguistics and computational methods may represent a bridge between computational and literary approaches. Will these scholars extend computational thinking from method to theory? - using computation not just as an analytical tool but as a framework for understanding how literary texts function – that’s a key issue currently before the discipline. 

Contents

How Do You Explain Computation to a Literary Critic? 1

What am I trying to explain to myself? 1
Why do literary critics need to know that? 2
The study of literary form 3

My Conversation about Computation with Claude 3.7 5

What is a text? 6
Literary criticism after World War II 7
What is Literary Form 8
Lévi-Strauss on Myth 10
The Current Situation: LLMs 12
Digital Humanities 13

How Do You Explain Computation to a Literary Critic?

I have been interested in conceptualizing literary processes as computational ones ever since I wrote an MA thesis on “Kubla Khan” in the early 1970s. Literary process? How texts are created and how they are read and assimilated, that’s what I mean. Ever since then I have been trying to explain that to literary critics. That has not gone well. I’ve also been trying to explain it to myself, which is a different kind of problem. The purpose of this paper is to, once more, attempt to explain computation-as-literary-process both to literary critics and to myself.

In the rest of this introduction I talk about explaining computation, first to myself, and then to literary critics. The rest of this paper consists of a discussion I had with Claude 3.7 about computation and literary criticism. I begin by discussing the text, then discuss the post WWII focus on interpretation as the central activity of literary criticism. Then Claude and I take up form, the influence of Lévi-Strauss, and the current emergence of large language models (LLMs). We conclude with some remarks about digital humanities.

What am I trying to explain to myself?

I know what kind of questions follow from thinking about literary processes as computational. I’ve done practical criticism on that foundation for decades, some quite rigorous, some rather informal, but all based on the belief that literary processes are computational processes. What is it that I’m trying to understand?

Let me explain: My basic conception derives from the use of parentheses in arithmetic or algebraic expressions. Without parentheses or a specific convention concerning operator precedence, expressions like this next one are ambiguous: 5 × 6 – 3. We can resolve the ambiguity by adding parentheses, giving us either of these two expressions:

(5 × 6) – 3 = 27
5 × (6 – 3) = 15

Adding parentheses places boundaries in the expression that affect how we evaluate it.

The same applies to texts, any texts, not just literary texts. Texts are strings of alphanumeric characters. Small sets of characters are grouped together into words and words are organized into longer strings by using spaces, punctuation marks, and capital letters. Boundaries divide long strings into substrings to whatever depth is necessary. Linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics all proceed on that basis.

As far as I’m concerned “computation” is the best name for that process, whether we’re talking about language or arithmetic or mathematics in general. In this context arithmetic is, in effect, a very constrained and specialized kind of language.

Since I’ve known that for years, what is it that I’ve only just now realized? It’s not a matter of new information or ideas, it’s a matter of emphasis, of framing. What I’ve realized is simple: That’s all there is. Let me repeat that: Computation is all there is. That is to say, if we are going to treat literary texts as physical objects, as strings of symbols realized in some physical medium, such as vibrations in air or marks on a surface, if that’s what we’re going to do, then computation is the only physical process we know of that gives us ways of thinking about how strings can support the communication of meaning between individuals. That’s it.

Commensurability is the issue. Computation is a process that is commensurate with the physical text. Why? Because computation, real computation, is itself a physical process. That’s obvious when you consider computation with an abacus, for example. The same is true for a mechanical calculator or a slide rule. The physical nature of computation with a digital computer is less visible, much less, and hardly palpable. But it is no less real. Bits and bytes may appear to be abstract things, but they take up physical space in computer memories; that’s why the capacity of computer memories is measured in bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc. Computation takes place in time, and time is physical as well, though one can’t see it, touch it, or taste it, much less lift it. Computers and their processes are physical things, as are human brains. As such they are commensurate with physical texts.

That’s what literary critics need to know. Alas, they are incapable of hearing it, of taking it seriously. Why? Computers are machines, and, as such are at suspect at best and thus to be ignored, and at worst they are evil, and actively to be opposed. This reflects the historical distinction between the sciences and humanities, a distinction that has been written into the institutional structure of the academic world and so has come to seem inscribed in the foundations of the universe.

Like it or not, that universe is all but finished. We are now living in a world where anyone with an internet connection can engage in sophisticated linguistic activity with a machine, a chatbot. That changes everything. The physical text can no longer be effaced in favor some vague abstract object conjured into (virtual) existence by the act of interpretation.

Why do literary critics need to know that?

They need to know it because it allows for a much more robust and substantial analysis of literary form than is currently practiced. Literary texts are linguistic strings. The form of strings is a matter of how elements are arranged on the string. That’s obvious in the case of, say, colored beads on a string. And that’s how musicians and musicologists treat musical form, as the arrangement of sonic objects in a line, where the line tracks the passage of time.

Literary critics do this as well. When critics work out the rhyme scheme of a poem, they’re treating it as a physical object. When narratologists distinguish between story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet), they are treating the text as a physical object, one where story episodes are ordered into a narrative string. One can mention other examples as well. While those operations are well-established, they are a minor aspect practical criticism. Form is treated as a framework in which one can approach the problem of meaning. Its description and analysis are at best a secondary activity.

Interpretation is primary. And when critics start interpreting a text, they tacitly, surreptitiously, efface the physical text in favor of an abstract and poorly defined object to which they then direct their interpretive activities. To complete the mystification, that abstract and poorly defined object is called – you guessed it – the “text.”

But these chatbots – I’ve been working with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude – they handle language in a way that is astonishingly humanlike, and they are undoubtedly machines, albeit in the strange and special way that computers are machines. They’re not made of gears, levers, axles, pulleys and motors, but their operations are mechanistic in kind, as the word “machine” has come to be understood. Yes, there are serious philosophical issues about whether or they really understand language, whether or not they’re really dealing in meaning. I’ve thought about these issues, and written quite a bit about them, but this is not the place to entertain those discussions. Whatever these machines are doing, to a first approximation it looks like they’re going language.

While I believe that this technology is a source of useful tools, both for literary critics and others, and will become more so in the future, that’s not why I mention them here. I mention them because they constitute an unmistakable “existence proof” that thinking about language process as computational is fruitful, both intellectually and practically. Once we can do that, we can take literary form as a serious object of critical activity.

The study of literary form

Yes, I know that form is an important concept in literary criticism and that the discipline has seen various formalist critical approaches. But as Claude and I discuss, formalism doesn’t not imply close attention to the formal properties of literary texts. Rather, formalism is a philosophical position about the nature meaning in which meaning in literary texts is taken to be somehow different from meaning in other texts by virtue literary form. But form itself is given only cursory attention.

My primary object here is to mention what is perhaps the best-known essay by Susan Sonntag, “Against Interpretation.” It originally appeared in 1964 in the Evergreen Review and became the title essay in her first collection, which was published in 1966. In that essay she asserted:

In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Several pages later she asserts:

What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms.

It seems like everybody read that essay at that time, but as far as I can tell, no one took Sonntag seriously. Now’s the time; to quote Charlie Parker, now’s the time.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. But this is not the place to serve pudding. If you want to read some examples, here are some examples from my own work that are unlike work readily available in the standard literature:

Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of "Kubla Khan", Language and Style, Vol. 8: 3-29, 1985, https://www.academia.edu/8155602/Articulate_Vision_A_Structuralist_Reading_of_Kubla_Khan_. This is a revised and somewhat shorted version of my 1972 master’s thesis.

Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales, Version 5, Working Paper, October 27, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/8132174/Heart_of_Darkness_Qualitative_and_Quantitative_Analysis_on_Several_Scales_Version_5. This is an eclectic collection of remarks about Conrad’s novel, but there is a formal analysis that is crucial, one that takes paragraph length as its point of departure. The longest paragraph is both structurally and thematically central.

The Gojira Papers, April 15, 2014, https://www.academia.edu/7905287/The_Gojira_Papers. This is about the 1954 Japanese film that started the Godzilla franchise.

Here is a theoretical and methodological account of some length (23,000 words, 11 diagrams):

Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form, PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2006, Article 060608, https://www.academia.edu/235110/Literary_Morphology_Nine_Propositions_in_a_Naturalist_Theory_of_Form.

In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans

As far as I know, there is no standard account of why humans find sexuality so problematic. It’s not as though no one’s thought to investigate it. They have. But so far no one’s come up with a good account, at least not in thoroughly modern terms, not so far as I can see. So I decided to ask Claude 3.5 Sonnet about it and to suggest my own speculative approach to the problem. 

* * * * *

I query Claude about present thinking

I believe that sexual shame is unique to animals. Our primates, monkeys and apes, do not insist on copulating in private. They are willing to copulate where others in the group can observe. Is this correct?

From a scientific perspective, this is an oversimplification. While many non-human primates do engage in mating behaviors openly within their social groups, the relationship between privacy and mating varies significantly across species and contexts.

Research in primatology has documented that some primate species do seek varying degrees of seclusion during mating. For instance, orangutans often mate away from other group members, and some gorilla groups show preferences for more secluded locations during breeding behaviors.

The concept of "sexual shame" as we understand it in human terms is complex and involves cultural, psychological, and social dimensions that are difficult to attribute directly to other species. What we observe in other primates is better understood as different patterns of social organization and mating strategies that have evolved to serve various biological and social functions.

Additionally, privacy-seeking behaviors in human societies show considerable variation across cultures and historical periods, suggesting that much of what we consider "sexual shame" is culturally constructed rather than being a universal biological trait.

Would you be interested in learning more about the specific mating patterns and social behaviors observed in different primate species?

That’s OK for now. And I understand that privacy-seeking behavior varies across cultures. In a culture where everyone lives in the same tent, for example, finding privacy is going to be quite different from a culture where everyone has their own sleeping room. Is there any standard reason why humans usually insist on privacy of some sort?

The human preference for private sexual activity appears to stem from several key factors that emerged during our species' development. From an evolutionary perspective, privacy during mating likely provided advantages in mate selection and pair bonding. Private sexual encounters allowed pairs to strengthen their emotional connections without interference or competition from other group members.

From a social perspective, humans developed complex systems of kinship, marriage, and social organization that regulated sexual behavior. These systems often included norms about appropriate contexts for sexual activity, which typically emphasized privacy. This privacy served practical purposes: it helped maintain social order, reduced conflict over mates, and supported the formation of stable family units.

Additionally, humans developed sophisticated cognitive abilities that include advanced theory of mind and heightened self-awareness. This led to complex emotional responses to being observed during intimate activities, which may have further reinforced preferences for privacy.

These biological and social factors appear to have co-evolved with human cultural development, resulting in widespread (though not universal) cultural norms around sexual privacy. While the specific manifestations of these privacy norms vary significantly across societies, the underlying tendency toward some form of privacy during sexual activity appears to be a common human trait.

Would you like to explore any particular aspect of these evolutionary or social dynamics in more detail?

OK. This is consistent with what I’m thinking: “humans developed sophisticated cognitive abilities that include advanced theory of mind and heightened self-awareness. This led to complex emotional responses to being observed during intimate activities, which may have further reinforced preferences for privacy.” Is there a standard reason why sexuality is so problematic for humans?

Human sexuality's complexity appears to stem from several interconnected factors. The development of advanced cognitive abilities that you referenced has made human sexuality uniquely intricate compared to other species.

Our capacity for complex emotional attachments and social relationships means that sexual behavior becomes deeply entwined with personal identity, emotional well-being, and social status. This creates multiple layers of meaning beyond the basic biological drive.

The human brain's sophisticated ability to process symbolic meaning and create cultural narratives transforms sexuality into something that carries significant social and psychological weight. Sexual behavior becomes linked to concepts of morality, identity, and social standing in ways that can create internal conflicts and anxieties.

Additionally, the extended period of human development and the importance of stable family units for child-rearing has led societies to develop elaborate systems for regulating sexual behavior. These cultural systems, while serving important social functions, can sometimes conflict with biological drives, creating tension between instinct and social expectations.

Furthermore, humans' heightened self-awareness means we can anticipate others' judgments and internalize social standards about sexuality, potentially leading to psychological stress that other species likely don't experience. Our ability to imagine future consequences and remember past experiences adds layers of complexity to sexual decision-making.

Would you like to explore any of these specific aspects in more detail? 

I speculate about why humans are bedeviled by sex

Here’s my highly speculative explanation. It has to do with the nature of human development. When humans are born a whole range of biological ‘drives’ and ‘desires’ are active. They’re necessary for the infant to live and thrive.

But cognitive capabilities are quite primitive. They develop relatively slowly, over a matter of years. As that happens the basic biological drives remain active. The way they are dealt with, organized into behavior, will change as cognition becomes more sophisticated. And then adolescence hits. Two things happen.

On the one hand abstract thought emerges (Piaget). On the other hand, adult sexuality matures. But it’s completely new. It hasn’t been a part of the process of behavioral elaboration and maturation that the other biological ‘drives’ and needs have been, hunger and thirst, sleep, exploration, etc. It’s just there. I’m thinking that if it emerges significantly after abstract thinking, the abstraction system (if you will) is more likely to conceive of it as some foreign object, some strange Other, but an Other that’s trapped there inside the body. That makes it very problematic. If on the other hand sexuality arrives first, then the abstraction system can more easily treat it just like any of the other biological motivations.

Your hypothesis presents an intriguing developmental perspective on human sexuality's unique challenges. Let me analyze several key aspects of this framework.

Memory in machines and minds, a conversation with Claude 3.5 Sonnet

This is from a long conversation I had with Claude 3.5 Sonnet where I tried to get to a fundamental understanding – Musk’s first-principles approach – of how memory works in machines, in minds, and culture (e.g. libraries) and work our way up to large language models and prompt engineering by way of a (highly speculative) discussion about the function of consciousness for a primitive animal living in the water. As my favorite aunt used to say, we were cooking with gas.

Prior to this conversation I had uploaded two documents to Claude. One was the chapter on learning from William Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception, which has been one of my mainstays since I first read it back in the Ancient Times, the mid-1970s. The other document was a set of blog posts where I talk about the mind/brain as a polyviscous fluid. “Polyviscous”? That means it has regions of widely varying viscosity. Viscosity in the mind/brain? Setting aside the fact that the brain is mostly water constrained in a meshwork of tiny tubes, I’m talking about information flow. The second-by-microsecond flow of spikes has a very low viscosity; it changes rapidly from moment to moment. In contrast, the re-wiring of brains regions that is known as neural plasticity, that happens on a scale of months to years. That has a very high viscosity.

My prompts are set in bold; Claude 3.5’s responses are plain. I’ve added the subtitles to clarify the progression of the conversation.

* * * * *

Memory in Computer Science 101

What do they teach about memory in computer science courses in college? How do they think about memory?

In standard computer science, memory is typically taught in terms of two fundamental addressing schemes:

1. Location-based (or address-based) memory:

- This is your typical RAM (Random Access Memory)
- Each piece of data is stored at a specific numerical address
- To retrieve data, you need to know its exact memory address
- Like finding a book in a library using its shelf number
- Very fast and direct, but you need to keep track of where everything is

2. Content-based (or associative) memory:

- Data is retrieved based on a partial match of its content
- Like finding a book by searching for keywords
- More flexible but typically slower
- Examples include database indexes and cache associative memory
- Similar to how humans often remember things ("what was that movie with the guy from...")

In practice, most computer systems primarily use location-based addressing for main memory (RAM) because it's fast and efficient, while content-based approaches are used in specific components like CPU caches or database systems where the flexibility of content-based lookup is worth the additional overhead.

The fundamental difference is: location-based asks "what's stored at address X?" while content-based asks "where can I find something that matches pattern Y?"

Thank you. Now, review for me that basic types of database structures. I recall flat files, hierarchical, and relational databases. Are there any other basic types? How do they handle location addressing?

Here are the main types of database structures:

1. Flat File Databases

- Simplest form
- Single table, like a spreadsheet
- Each record is typically stored sequentially
- Example: CSV files
- Location addressing: Usually sequential; have to scan through records

2. Hierarchical Databases

- Tree-like structure with parent-child relationships
- Data organized in a one-to-many structure
- Example: IBM's IMS, XML databases
- Location addressing: Navigate through tree structure using paths

3. Network Databases

- Similar to hierarchical but allows many-to-many relationships
- Uses pointers between related records
- Example: Integrated Data Store (IDS)
- Location addressing: Follow pointer chains between records

4. Relational Databases

- Data organized in tables with relationships between them
- Uses SQL for queries
- Example: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle
- Location addressing: Uses indexes and table/row identifiers

5. Object-Oriented Databases

- Stores data as objects
- Maintains object inheritance and relationships
- Example: ObjectDB
- Location addressing: Objects referenced by identifiers

6. NoSQL Databases

- Various types including:
* Document stores (MongoDB)
* Key-value stores (Redis)
* Column-family stores (Cassandra)
* Graph databases (Neo4j)
- Location addressing: Varies by type, often uses keys or document IDs

7. Time Series Databases

- Optimized for time-stamped data
- Example: InfluxDB
- Location addressing: Usually indexed by timestamp

Each type typically implements some form of indexing to speed up access to data, essentially creating a mapping between content and physical location. The actual physical storage location is usually abstracted away from the user, who interacts with logical identifiers or keys instead.

Thank you. What’s a vector database?

A vector database is a specialized type of database designed to store and efficiently search through vector embeddings - high-dimensional numerical representations of data like text, images, or other content.

Key characteristics:

- Optimized for similarity search in high-dimensional space
- Uses specialized indexing methods like LSH (Locality-Sensitive Hashing) or HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) graphs
- Particularly useful for machine learning applications and AI
- Examples include: Pinecone, Milvus, Weaviate, Chroma

Common use cases:

1. Semantic search - finding similar text/documents
2. Recommendation systems
3. Image similarity search
4. Natural language processing applications
5. AI applications requiring similarity matching

The main difference from traditional databases is that vector databases are optimized for finding "similar" items rather than exact matches. They use specialized distance metrics (like cosine similarity or Euclidean distance) to measure how close vectors are to each other in high-dimensional space.

For example, if you wanted to find similar images, you'd:

1. Convert images to vector embeddings
2. Store these vectors in the vector database
3. Query with a new image's vector to find the most similar stored images

Location addressing in vector databases typically involves sophisticated indexing structures that partition the vector space to enable efficient similarity search, rather than simple direct addressing used in traditional databases.

Hybrid memory in machine and humans

So a vector-based system has features of content addressing?

Yes, exactly! Vector databases are a hybrid that bridges location-based and content-based addressing approaches.

The content-addressing aspects come from:

- Searching by similarity rather than exact matches
- Using the actual content (converted to vectors) to find related items
- Not needing to know exact locations/addresses
- Being able to find items based on partial or related information

However, under the hood, they still need efficient location-based mechanisms to actually store and retrieve the vectors. They typically use specialized index structures that map the high-dimensional vector space to physical storage locations.

The key innovation is that they create an organized way to find similar content quickly, while still leveraging the speed advantages of location-based storage. It's like having a library where books are still in specific physical locations, but you can find them by describing what they're about rather than knowing their shelf numbers.

This is particularly relevant for AI applications because vector embeddings capture semantic meaning - they encode "what something is about" or "what something means" rather than just exact matches of content.

Let’s think about humans for a second. In the ancient world (Greeks and Romans?) they had something called the method or loci, or memory palace. That is, in effect, a location based memory system implemented in a biological content addressed system, no?

Yes, that's a fascinating insight! The method of loci (memory palace technique) is indeed a way of imposing location-based organization onto our naturally content-addressed biological memory system.

Here's how it bridges the two:

Content-addressed aspects (biological foundation):

- Our natural memory works through associations
- We naturally remember things based on their meaning and relationships
- Memories are triggered by related content/context

Location-based overlay (the technique):

- Creates artificial "addresses" through familiar spatial locations
- Each piece of information is deliberately assigned to a specific location
- Information can be retrieved by mentally walking through these locations
- Provides a systematic way to store and retrieve information sequentially

The genius of the technique is that it leverages our brain's natural strengths:

- Strong spatial memory
- Visual memory
- Narrative/sequential thinking
- Association-based recall

LLM as Collaborator, Part 3: Claude has some ideas about how we could revise and redeem Harold Bloom

Not long after Harold Bloom’s death in October of 2019, Ted Underwood posted a tweet in which he asserted that Bloom was a “gasbag” who made “dogmatic unsupported assertions.” He attributed that habit to “theory-stardom” in a subsequent tweet, something I’ve explored in this post, GOAT Literary Critics: Part 5.2: The Nature of Authority in Literary Criticism as it Pertains to the Relationship between Author and Critic (Harold Bloom). Color me sympathetic to Underwood's assertion.

Sometime in the late 1970s I picked up a copy of The Anxiety of Influence, noting that it was a rather slender book. I found it rather obscure and elusive and I can’t for the life of me see why he insisted on those preposterous names for his “revisionary ratios.” I also sensed something interesting going on in there, and said so in a letter I wrote to Dick Macksey. Whatever it was, though, was not my cup of tea.

I set it aside and hardly gave Bloom another thought until I saw his The American Religion (1992) on the new books shelf in the Troy Public Library. “That’s an odd topic for Bloom,” thought I to myself, so I leafed through it and decided to check it out. It proved useful, for there I learned that revivalist camp meetings often had both African and European Americans in attendance. They convened separately until the last day of the meeting, at which point the barriers came down and they all danced together. Other than Influence, that’s the only book of Bloom’s that I’ve read cover to cover.

But I’ve read chunks of a number of them in the last year, The Western Canon, Shakespeare, The Anatomy of Influence, his last one (I forget its name), several interviews, and listened to a variety of video clips. The man did bloviate, but, as I far can tell, he’s also as brilliant a mind as the craft of literary criticism as seen in the last half-century. Why, then, am I reluctant to consider him to be a great critic?

No mystery there. Brilliance is one thing, a thing that is entirely a property of an individual. Greatness, however, requires that brilliance be fit to cultural opportunity, if not necessity. Giordano Bruno was undoubtedly brilliant, but we remember him, not for his ideas or his poetry, but because the Roman Inquisition had him burned at the stake. How deeply did Bloom speak to the cultural moment?

Anyhow, I’ve been pondering the matter and have decided to take it up with Claude 3.5. I’d already chatted with Claude about the Hamlet chapter of Bloom’s Shakespeare (though I've not posted any of that conversation) and I’d used Bloom as a foil in the discussion I had with Claude about Formal structure in Heart of Darkness. So I decided to continue that discussion.

I began with Bloom’s insistence on the aesthetic value of literature. I suggested that Johan Huizinga’s concept of play in his classic, Homo Ludens, might provide a way of grounding a Bloomian aesthetic. Next came Edward Said, one of those resentful critics Bloom was always complaining about. I quoted from one of Said’s last essays, where he confessed to believing that an autonomous aesthetic realm exists. Claude agreed that that might have been a way to effect a rapprochement, or perhaps merely a detente, with the resentful ones. That lead to a discussion of academic politics. We then moved on to a discussion Bloom’s mind, suggesting that his extraordinary ability to recall literary passages may have been both a strength and a weakness. Yes, he seemed able to remember everything he read, but he also seemed trapped in those memories, unable to stand back and abstract over the texts he so loved. We concluded with by suggesting that modern computational techniques, digital humanities slash cultural analytics, might well be able to redeem Bloom’s insights about Shakespeare and his importance in the canon.

It was a bracing discussion. As always, my words are set in bold, while Claude’s are plain.

* * * * *

Kant, Huizinga, and the Aesthetic

Bloom opens “The Western Canon” by saying: “THIS BOOK studies twenty-six writers, necessarily with a certain nostalgia, since I seek to isolate the qualities that made these authors canonical, that is, authoritative in our culture. “Aesthetic value” is sometimes regarded as a suggestion of Immanuel Kant's rather than an actuality, but that has not been my experience during a lifetime of reading.” What does Kant mean by aesthetic value?

Later Bloom says: “Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness. That depth of inwardness in a strong writer constitutes the strength that wards off the massive weight of past achievement, lest every originality be crushed before it becomes manifest.”

What do you think about these?

These passages touch on fundamental questions about aesthetic value and literary criticism. Let me address each one:

Regarding Kant's conception of aesthetic value, he argued that aesthetic judgments are both subjective and universal - a seeming paradox that he explored in his Critique of Judgment. For Kant, when we judge something as beautiful, we are making a claim that others should agree with us, even though the judgment stems from our subjective experience. This aesthetic judgment is disinterested, meaning it's not based on any practical purpose or moral consideration, but rather on the form of the object itself.

Bloom's reference to Kant seems to push back against those who would dismiss aesthetic value as merely subjective or culturally constructed. His statement about his "lifetime of reading" suggests that he sees aesthetic value as something real and discoverable through direct engagement with literature, not just a theoretical construct.

In the second passage, Bloom articulates his vision of literary criticism as fundamentally concerned with individual consciousness rather than social context. His concept of the "deep self" and "ultimate inwardness" shows his belief that great literature speaks to something essential in human consciousness that transcends historical and social circumstances.

The idea of "warding off the massive weight of past achievement" connects to Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence - that strong writers must struggle against their predecessors to create space for their own originality. The emphasis on "inwardness" suggests that this struggle happens at the level of consciousness rather than through external technical innovation.

These passages reveal Bloom's fundamental commitment to aesthetic value as real rather than constructed, and to reading as an essentially private experience that touches our deepest sense of self. This position stands in opposition to critical approaches that emphasize literature's social and political dimensions.

Johan Huizinga wrote a book entitles “Homo Ludens.” I’m wondering if we could use Huizinga’s expansive conception of play as a way to develop an aesthetic theory that would appeal to Bloom. In literature we see the human psyche at play.

Your suggestion about using Huizinga's concept of play as a foundation for aesthetic theory is intriguing. In "Homo Ludens," Huizinga argues that play is fundamental to human culture, predating culture itself, and that it lies at the root of many human activities including art, law, and philosophy.

This perspective could align well with Bloom's emphasis on aesthetic autonomy and individual consciousness. When we engage in play, we create a space separate from ordinary life with its own rules and meanings - similar to how Bloom sees literature as creating an autonomous sphere of aesthetic experience.

The idea of the psyche at play in literature could help explain what Bloom calls the "strangeness" of great works. Just as play involves trying on different roles and possibilities, literary works allow both writers and readers to explore different modes of consciousness and being. This connects to Bloom's interest in how literature expands our understanding of human possibility.

Furthermore, seeing literature as a form of play might help bridge the gap between form and meaning that troubles much literary criticism. In play, form and content are inseparable - the rules of a game aren't separate from the experience of playing it. Similarly, in literature, formal elements like the paragraph structure we discussed in Heart of Darkness aren't separate from but integral to the work's meaning and effect.

This approach could maintain Bloom's emphasis on aesthetic autonomy while providing a theoretical framework for understanding how literature actually works on consciousness. It would see reading not as interpretation in the traditional sense, but as a form of engaged play with consciousness itself.