They will know what is inside them. The builders could become the creatures’ strongest advocates. That moment is probably fifty years down the road.”
(But who isn’t blinded by fear? And you who knew what was inside me, did that knowledge make you any less blind to what I am? After all this time I don’t even know whether to say who or what I am. If I could see inside my body, into my own cells, would my mind be any less mysterious to me? The mind deeply private, largely hidden even from oneself. So how could you begin to know me?)
Q. “What makes these robots so advanced?”
A. “They are embodied. Intelligence can’t be abstracted from the body. In previous attempts abstract human features were programmed into a machine: chess playing, language processing, mathematical-theorem proving. But we feel that the body—the way it moves, grows, digests, gets older—is inseparable from how a person thinks. These robots have body feelings similar to ours. They experience balance problems, sensations of friction, gravity, and weight.”
(This heavy body I carry with me always, these awkward, baffled limbs.)
Q. “Is this robot a she?”
A. “Robots are its. But I think of it as she. Only when you treat the machines as if they possess our social characteristics will they ever get them. In this laboratory this is what we believe. You need to create that circle.”
(I can see no circles in the ice—)
Notes on Time
(The more I think of it the more it perplexes me—)
Aristotle asked, “What is time?” And answered, “It is the measure of change … but time is not change itself, for change may be faster or slower, but not time.”
To Epicurus it was an “accident of accidents.”
To Democritus, “an appearance presenting itself under the aspect of day and night.”
And, of course, Heraclitus wrote, “You can’t step into the same river twice.”
“Everything will eventually return in the self-same numerical order, and I shall converse with you staff in hand, and you will sit as you are sitting now, and so it will be in everything else, and it is reasonable to assume that time too will be the same.”—this from Eudemus of Rhodes
(Eudemus speaks in a comforting voice. He sits beside me on a bench, staff in hand. There’s no past or present or future on my skin, but something else I have no words for. What does it mean to be a living thing? The garden flares, shivering its fragrant blooms. Is this where I’ve been all along? Each mind a curious, uncertain space, able to grasp so little of what is.)
Aristotle said, “Whether if mind did not exist, time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted …”
(How limited I am, even with this large and lumbering body. A speck, an ignorance, a something made of matter, wondering, unwise. So how can I grasp time?)
When I think of Bernardino Telesio’s view, time seems almost lonely: it exists by itself, and can exist unaccompanied by motion.
To Giordano Bruno, change is a necessary condition for the perception of time, but not for its existence.
Einstein said, “For us physicists the separation between past, present and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.”
(Last night I dreamed I sat at a wooden table on which there was a bowl of fruit, a writing pen, a notebook. On the notebook’s cover was the letter C. I wanted to open it and read it. When I looked down I had no hands. My arms were the silvery rose-white of fish underwater, stumps that ended in healed, imperfect seams. There’s so little I can know or touch or even think, and yet it’s there. And what if you hadn’t believed you thought me into being? What if you had sensed that maybe I existed all along, that nothing you could do could make or unmake me? That Time is stranger than we thought. That Time itself, not you, had made me.)
Descartes believed God by his continual action re-creates the body at each successive instant. Time, therefore, is a divine process of re-creation.
(But if there’s constant re-creation isn’t there also constant crumbling, de-creation, and I myself a relentless conflagration, though I can’t see myself this way. Inside of me, a crumbling and a burning always—)
What of this idea called space-time? In 1908 Hermann Minkowski proclaimed, “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, have vanished into the merest