what i remember

My mind goes to strange places sometimes, for reasons I usually don't understand.

I don't mean strange in that the places are strange. I mean, I don't know why I am there. They repeat, like these little memory attractors, but there's nothing to find there. I get the feeling that there was something incomplete that happened, some kind of expectation that whatever was there might recur or continue, and it never did, and that expectation was like a door left open, that it's now too late to be closed, and once in a while I just happen to wander by, and in I go.

I'll quickly note what brought me here, just now. Rearranging some computer code to plot some data. Wondering, how do I best approach this little model selection problem in python? I am not a great python programmer. I know how I'd do it in MATLAB, that's for sure. I only need to vary one parameter, the slope, since by design the means of the different conditions should be the same. Right? I should print them out just to be sure.

As this process is working through my head, I feel myself wandering with my friend Ian along the wooden boardwalks at Montgomery Bell State Park (I had to look it up just now to recall the name), near my hometown. We were 11 or 12. Ian's mother had brought us there, she was perusing an art fair set up on the boardwalks, Ian and I are just roaming, exploring the place. I remember the green-brown park service paint on the boards. It feels like it was autumn, maybe there were pine needles everywhere.

Why? Why am I there? I have found myself back there over and over, just this brief recollection for no reason, no obvious connection to the current moment. Maybe because I've thought of Ian recently? A song stuck in my head that he suggested. I told the story, again, to some friend at Taekwondo of how I started as a kid - with Ian, who quit soon after I started, but I kept it up for many years, and still do, from decade to decade.

Why is that Saturday - I know it must have been a Saturday - at the park still lingering there, more than thirty years later? Why was that door left open?

Hecatompylos

 I did write a post in 2023, but never published it. It will become something later, I promise, and then maybe I will retroactively publish that post. For all of you who were so starved of content last year.

Now, here is something. A story about memory.

I woke on Thursday morning, about 7am, thinking: "Hecatompylos".

This word was repeating in my head. My wife had woken me up, sent me, as on most weekend mornings, to go sleep with the 3 year old while she gets the almost-8-year-old ready to catch the bus. I kept thinking, "Hecatompylos - what is Hecatompylos? Somebody? Some place? Hecatompylos.. Hecatompylos.."

This word repeated in my mind until I slept, and then, I think, it kept repeating. I think I dreamed of wondering what "Hecatompylos" could be. "Hecatompylos, Hecatompylos"..

When I woke up for good, about 8am, it was repeating, repeating, a one-word earworm. I'm not sure I've had this experience before - I'm sure I've awoken with a tune in my head, but a word?

As I ate my breakfast, I looked up the word on wikipedia, which told me that Hecatompylos was an ancient greek name for the Persian city of Qumis, in northern Iran. What? The wikipedia article mentioned that Alexander the Great had visited there.. I did skim the Alexander the Great page a couple of weeks ago. I had come across his name - mentioned not as "the Great", but as "Alexander III" - in an encyclopedia of ancient science I had been reading, and I had thought, who were Alexanders I and II? So I knew I had perused his wikipedia entry. I rechecked it, to see if maybe I had come across his significant visit to Hecatompylos in Persia, but.. no mention of it.

It was still repeating! Like a word-beacon, repeating, "Hecatompylos, Hecatompylos". I think I spoke Hecatompylos under my breath a hundred times. I can still feel it in my tongue, I have to resist mouthing the word now. It's so strange.

I went to the lab and did some things, but pretty soon I was googling "Hecatompylos". I came back to the wikipedia page, and now I saw that 'Hecatompylos" could also direct to Thebes, the famous temple city of Egypt. This felt more right than Persia. And, I realized, just last night, before bed, I had read with the 5-year-old a chapter of the Buildings Book on the monumental temple and pyramid of the Pharoah Djoser. Was it in Thebes? I couldn't remember.

Now I read about Djoser, but found that no, Djoser lived hundreds of miles north, close to Egyptian Memphis (as a Tennesseean I have to distinguish Memphises), and that during his time Thebes was a mere fishing village, no Hecatompylos - no city of a "Hundred Gates". I gave up again and tried to work.

A little while later, I tried once again: "Hecatompylos", into Google - but this time, I felt, I should try "He*k*atompylos". This time, a web page comes up, a page from an online Encyclopedia of Borges - Hekatompylos was mentioned in Borges' "The Immortal".

That was it! I had indeed read The Immortal a few nights earlier, Sunday or Monday night. Maybe I had read two pages on Sunday, then the rest on Monday (I have to squeeze in Borges between bedtime reading for the little ones, who alas do not enjoy my reading The Immortal or The Library of Babel aloud). I don't recall lingering on "Thebes Hekatompylos". Maybe I did? But I've read the story dozens of times before. The last time must have refreshed some habitual circuits familiar with the words and phrases of the story, and then again, as dozens of times before, they were dormant.

Then, on Thursday morning, dreaming, one of those circuits was randomly touched - maybe it was the previous night's reading about Djoser and other Egyptian temples and tombs - and the word "Hecatompylos" popped into a dream, without any context or explanation. So free of context that it followed me from one dream into another, into waking, back into dreams, and back into waking life, until I reconnected it with its origin. Once I understood why the word was there, it dissolved back into unconscious memory and the compulsion to repeat it was ended.

***

After an introduction, Borges story begins: 

"As far as I can recall, my labors began in a garden in Thebes Hekatompylos, when Diocletian was emperor."

https://www.borges.pitt.edu/i/tebas-hekatompylos

Thoughts about truth

Something that's been on my mind for - coincidentally, I'm sure - early 2021, or the very tail end of 2020. This is about human society generally, and that was certainly a time for thinking hard about society.

Joe Biden is elected president, but Trump and his party refuse to accept it, and it becomes clear that something's being true is not what it seems. Something clearly seems true to me, why is it so powerfully opposed or contradicted by others? Of course this is a routine situation in human life, we are always disagreeing about some things - usually matters of belief or opinion or culture or whatever, but we generally should agree on apparently objective things like what happened or what is happening.

Another thing happened earlier in 2020. I read the new book of stories by Ted Chiang, "Exhalation". Many very good stories in there, just like his first book. The title story is the best - especially if you're a neuroscientist or psychologist of any sort - but it was "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" that really stuck with me. The themes of the story are there in the title, having to do with what we think or feel is true, and what actually is true in some objective sense, and how these different kinds of truth matter to us in different ways, and how they can conflict.

During this year we have the pandemic, the conspiracy theories, the George Floyd riots, everything. And then the election happens. I'm glad Biden won, still am, but soon after the victory I and many others had a sinking feeling: this didn't fix anything, really. The problems are deep and not going to go away. Those problems could be listed and discussed somewhere else, but what I kept thinking about was truth.

I know that, from the beginning, I was taught to value truth and honesty. You're supposed to tell the truth, you're not supposed to lie. I know that most others are also taught the same thing. It's basic moral education, our parents teach us, we learn it at school, we learn it in life lessons - we tell a lie and are caught, and we suffer the consequences, and we don't do it again. We learn to be honest.

We learn all that, but few of us ever really think about it. I never did. We simply assume that truth is a basic good, some kind of fundamental virtue that we should all value and protect. And if there are disagreements about what is true, that can be difficult, but those are disagreements over fundamental things and so they are fundamental disagreements, and they really matter in that way. Debates about what is true are core, essential debates for a society. Et cetera et cetera. It sounds good, right?

What I realized in the winter of 2020-2021 is that none of that is really true. It's a myth. I mean, of course I do believe that truth matters. And I do value it, and I do want to be an honest person, and all that. But it's not fundamental. It's not a basic good that we all strive to protect or advance or expand. No, it's a luxury, it's a relatively highly-developed value that might be socially inevitable, but it is not fundamental. 

I keep talking about 'values'. By this I mean the parts of life, personal or social, that motivate our actions, especially in that we want to protect or advance them. If you value something, you want to defend it, keep it from harm; you may also want to expand it, to multiply it, to increase its share of the world. Obviously different people have different values, but it's reasonable to suppose, too, that there are some values that are common to all of us, or to the vast majority. We all value safety and security, and health. We all value our family and our friends, and our homes. We value our own sense of self and however we are significant to the world.

I had never really thought about the world in this way before, in terms of values - it's certainly not a new way of thinking, it's the kind of thing you hear about in passing, but I'd never given it much time. I probably had a naive idea of values in the sense of "universal values", the idea that there are things that we should all value even if we don't. And if you'd asked me, I would have said, "yeah, sure - truth or honesty are universal values, everyone should agree to that".

What I realize now is how naive this way of thinking is. There are certainly practical truths that no sane person will deny. The general: we need water and air to live. The incidental: the sun is shining on the courtyard outside. Those kinds of truths are obvious because we experience them firsthand. But most of the world is beyond our immediate experience, and the truth of it is therefore always provisional. We have to take someone's word for it. We can believe what we read or hear in the news, we have to believe the readings on our instruments. We can believe our own memories of what happened earlier, yesterday, last year. We can believe those things, but we don't have to - or, we can believe different things than others. Unless there are immediate facts to resolve a difference, the vast portion of what we might believe in is simply that: provisional.

So, we might grow up believing that "the truth" about happenings in the world is something fundamental, but it's not. At almost all times, it's just something we choose to believe. Of course there is generally a state of affairs out there that, if we experienced it immediately, would tend to resolve disagreements - but we almost never actually are directly exposed to it.

And we might grow up believing that the truth is something we should all value, that what is true matters in a fundamental way - but it can't be, because - apart from our immediate experiences - it's not something we ever have access to. What we actually have are choices about what to believe. And that gets to the problem: the real values, having to do with life, family, self identity, are always fundamental, and they are what drive our choices. So while we can all give lip service to valuing "the truth", because we were all taught that it is good and right and moral to believe in and to tell the truth, that's not an accurate picture of the world.

What we believe is true, aside from that tiny slice of the world that we immediately experience, is a choice that is driven by our more fundamental values. What, if true, seems to protect and strengthen my identity, my family, my home, my health? Then I will believe that.

That's my picture now of our social situation. The problems with Trump, the election stuff, the conspiracy theories, etc etc, aren't a problem of truth and lies. The problem isn't with convincing people of the truth. The problem is in those fundamental values. Those have diverged in ways that are barely even touched on by public conversations. The divergence is probably growing larger all the time. It's probably a constant process in social evolution, but in current times I wonder if the internet, social media etc, is accelerating it, so that the divergences outrace our ability to spin stories to account for the contents of society. Those contents being all the elements of culture - things that we spend our time on, circulating inside and between our minds, this constant fascination that humans are constantly engaging in. They obscure the driving forces beneath our behaviors, at the same time they slowly, gradually change those forces, or modulate or recalibrate them. But how do you get down to those bottom levels, how do you begin to fix things? I have no ideas!

Beyond Biden and Trump, and the Chiang story, one more cultural fragment stuck in my mind for years seems very relevant. Nietzsche critiqued self-righteousness, especially those who were so focused on enforcing and dictating moral rectitude, in terms that had long confounded me but I would think about it over and over, trying to understand his meaning. I did long ago, and probably it primed me for the realizations I've just written out. I'll paraphrase him here, the critical phrase (from Beyond Good and Evil):

"... no one lies so boldly as the indignant man."

Once I realized his meaning in this passage, I've never forgotten it. You read it and think he's talking about someone else, and maybe he is - without enough self-awareness, which wouldn't be surprising. But really he's talking about all of us. Imagine that you're in an intense argument, and your personal integrity has been challenged - you must respond! You must protect yourself! Isn't this exactly the time that you might... inflate the truth? Stretch it, to prove your point? Invent some detail, to exaggerate, to hammer home your point? Doesn't the truth become soft when you are at stake?