The Third Door: A Behaviorist Fairy Tale
(Part 1)
"People think in story." Human beings often say this of themselves, but it is not quite true. It is more that if someone claims not to think in story, no human being will believe them.
Some people really do not think this way, not habitually at least; but all the same, it is not unheard of for a story to come tumbling out of some self-consciously upright creature, or perhaps to shoot out of them, projectile-like, fully formed, against their will, in a period of high receptivity and low inhibition. This is one of those stories.
Sometime in 1935 or 1936, months or years before Mr. Young had wrapped up his study of corridors and turned to the problem of ramps, something extraordinary happened to his rats: the rats became intelligent and self-aware; they became mindful, to some extent, of the broader state of things in the world; they gained a modicum of self-reflexivity and some ability to communicate with each other, although they could not communicate with Mr. Young or with any of the other humans who were always passing through the lab.
Most importantly of all, these rats gained a rudimentary understanding of what is going on in the lab. They would not understand quite everything about why human beings tend to launch such endeavors, and they possess only the most naive understanding of higher-order concepts such as they are able to stumble into in the mere run of things; but the rats do know that the world beyond the lab attaches some degree of importance to the events that unfold inside its walls, and they do know that the locus of that attention is the long corridor with the many doors and the occasional nosh. They understand that the corridor is in some sense contrived rather than divine or natural, whereas the larger enclosure where they spend the bulk of their time has more the character of a fact of life. And of course Mr. Young's rats are constitutionally gentle creatures on account of their long domestication in the lab, and this helps to keep conflict to a minimum.
The rats therefore are just sophisticated enough to grasp Mr. Young's tiny but irreducible role in advancing knowledge and progressive meliorism, and so it soon occurs to them that their occasional ecstatic romps through the corridor are actually quite important. The rats realize, though they have only naive conceptions of such things, that they are actually collaborating with Mr. Young rather than merely cohabiting with him. The experiment matters, meagerly but non-negligibly; therefore, to advance the experiment would be good and right, and to confound it would be at the very least regrettable and perhaps actually a calamity.
They realize too that their observable behavior vis-a-vis the row of doors in Mr. Young's corridor is inscrutable not only to poor Mr. Young but also to themselves. The rats are content enough with things as they are, and they are gentle creatures in their overall bearing, but the problem of the doors, once they have understood just a few things about it, becomes a Rankian problem of the soul which nags at them, as it would nag at any self-aware creature. They are not quite intelligent enough to get ensnared in the infinite regress of human discourses on free will, but they know that it is their own behavior in the corridor that is the basis of the experiment, and they realize that they themselves do not know the answer to why they do certain things.
With time this problem begins to be discussed among the rats, but it is not discussed in the manner of human beings who have found something blocking their own advance. The rats discuss it almost exclusively as a mere way of passing the time. There is much time to be passed, too, since there are a great many rats living in the enclosure and there is only one corridor, with just one rat at a time romping ecstatically through it. The problem of the doors is mostly just a diversion. It only rarely rises to the level of a pressing existential matter, though it is that too, and the rats certainly are awake to this. The existential chatter never lasts for very long, however. There are far more jokes told about the doors than there are moralistic admonitions.
It is almost unheard of for a rat to refuse to enter the corridor after Mr. Young has tried to let it in. It is just as unusual that a rat should be let into the corridor never to return to the enclosure, but this too has happened once in a great while. It is the only way that rats ever disappear from the colony. No one understands how this works or why it happens, but it is a rare enough happening that it is not discussed or thought about much at all. It is more that the problem of the doors is not discussed half as much or as vigorously as usual, at least for a little while, after there has been some moral or existential mix-up in the corridor; but things always settle down eventually, usually because some even more trifling issue has presented itself, which the rats eagerly take up and work over in conversation; and once this old habit of communion has been reestablished, it is only a matter of time before the problem of the doors resurfaces and can be discussed openly and even joked about.
This sort of gentle existential churn becomes commonplace for the rats as the experiment rolls along. It keeps things interesting for them without threatening their equilibrium, keeps them in reasonably good spirits and lends a purpose to their lives, though they are only rats and are confined to one part of one room in one laboratory.
Things are interesting, too, for Mr. Young, who in spite of every precaution finds new technical problems arising faster than he can remedy the old ones. He has a very hard time getting a handle on things in the early days of the experiment, and so he makes many drastic changes of various kinds. Sometimes he makes changes without having the slightest inkling of their later effects, so difficult has the early going been. Other times it is clear enough what must be done but it requires painstaking work, labor rather than science, he often thinks to himself. This makes for a bit of a chaotic time in the lab, for everybody, but less so for the rats, since they are confined away from the bulk of this chaos. There are some strange noises, many humans passing through at all hours, frequent changes in the lighting, and a few one-off disturbances which are difficult to describe in human terms. On the whole, however, things are okay for the rats during this time, and things remain okay for them for a very long time. The experiment is clearly advancing and rats are let into the corridor nearly continuously, although strictly one at a time, as always before. There is always plenty of kibble back at the main enclosure and a plate of nosh somewhere in the corridor. Though the rats have become self-aware and susceptible to some trifling existential problems, still, they have nourishment, communion, and purpose. A human being even could not have it much better than that.
Though the rats have never left the lab, or even the enclosure, they have evolved and learned sufficiently for the story to arrive at this point. It is of course quite unclear just how this happened or how it could even be possible. A mere human being can only guess. Laboratories do tend to be closely-guarded bastions of progressive meliorism, and it has always been a habit among this human cohort to anthropomorphize other creatures, to pretend to talk with them using made-up languages and high-pitched voices, especially if the creatures are smaller. That is one thing to consider. Another is the abiding meliorist fantasy of endless learning and infinite experience, the desire to know and experience everything in the entire universe without leaving one's own tiny enclosure. Probably the answer is contained in one or both of these two guesses, somewhere. It is a difficult question even to guess at.
It is known, at least, that whoever or whatever taught the rats their remedial history and language did so only for a short time. After this the rats learned only from experience, as human beings say. The rats will continue, like all creatures, to blunder into whatever happens to be placed under their noses or shoved up their behinds. As long as a creature remains alive, that kind of learning will continue. And so although there is no more distance learning available to them, the rats continue to develop what knowledge they have been given, to develop it in whatever direction their experience determines. They make do with what knowledge they have, and whatever else they learn is learned from any resulting effects. That is all that any creature does as it goes through life, whether confined to an enclosure, an island, or an ocean.
The single most important piece of wisdom that was conveyed to the rats during their time of learning is that the world extends beyond their enclosure. They justifiably believe that they matter to this wider world and that world to them, if only in tiny ways. And so they too must confront the existential riddle, and they must confront it within peculiar confines. Therefore, they too become progressive meliorists, since that is the lowest hanging fruit of heroism available to them. In this connection it matters not whether Mr. Young fancies himself a Goldwaterite or a Maoist. It matters not whether a solution to the problem of corridors really is an advance at all. The rats are only half as intelligent as Mr. Young, but their peculiar circumstances allow them to see that his life project is progressive in any case, whether or not he thinks so. They would know, for they are quite literally confined within this project of his, and that is the best place from which to judge what kind of project it really is. After all, for self-reflexive creatures like humans a project like this is really more of a story in which they are the hero: a saga, you might say, of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others. Perhaps an upstanding and intelligent man like Mr. Young is not as apt to work them out on his colleagues, or on his administrative overlords, or on his spouse. Unwittingly, Mr. Young cannot avoid working out his problems on the rats; but only the rats can understand the relationship this way, and Mr. Young cannot, because Mr. Young was sternly warned during his education never, ever to anthropomorphize his animal subjects; and so he dutifully records some very remarkable changes in the rats' behavior, but he does not allow himself to anthropomorphize them, he cannot (yet) talk with them, and anyway, he still has not cracked the problem of the doors. At least the problem of the lights has been settled, for the moment.
It is the rats' literal confinement inside of Mr. Young's life project which allows their meager intelligence to formulate incisive answers to crucial questions about their human, whereas very intelligent humans have the hardest time of all understanding what is going on with other creatures precisely when those creatures have become mere background characters in the saga of human social life. This is especially true of Mr. Young's less productive colleagues, each of whom has his own story to tell. It seems that the further away a colleague's lab from Mr. Young's, the less that lab colleague will appreciate Mr. Young's abilities or even understand what he is up to, although colleagues who work the longest hours more often run into each other in the hallway, perhaps on the way to the bathroom, and therefore they have an excellent sense of each other's overall work ethic. Everyone in the lab building knows Mr. Young this way, if they do not know him otherwise. They should be able to tell, at least, that he is not lazy. In a roundabout way, this is precisely the lesson of his research with the rats, at least as he sees it. But human beings do not enjoy that lesson. Worse, they are not entertained by it. They would rather think about thinking than think about behavior. Even the scientists who study behavior do not find it to be very interesting. Studying behavior feels like work. It turns up some useful results, sometimes, and it pays very well. It is much more fun, though, to think about thinking, to try very hard to figure out what is happening on the inside of human beings, and to try to reveal one's own inner self to the wider world. That is most (or all) of what humans do, anyway, especially when they have plenty of food and much time to pass.
In the early days Mr. Young is almost always in the lab. He is there in the flesh and not only in his mind, and so the rats view him merely as another well-meaning creature in their midst. The rats know a fair bit about humans, but they did not go to graduate school or anything like that, so they see Mr. Young more or less as a big rat. Unfortunately he is forbidden to see them as the little humans they have become, even though he has observed them very closely. In fact by now Mr. Young has written down on his clipboard, in a cryptic language as it were, proof of everything that has happened to the rats since the advent of self-reflexivity, but he is not allowed (by himself or by the norms of his milieu) consciously to accept the fact. He knows what he should do about this: he should mention it to a few colleagues, offhandedly rather than formally, perhaps on the way to the bathroom, just to gauge their reactions; but for now he does not have the courage even to do this, despite being a secure and upstanding human being with a fine resumé. He knows that if someone mentioned this to him he would sooner call for assistance from a colleague in the psychiatry labs than make time to review the purported findings. Therefore, he neglects to report the most outstanding scientific discovery in the history of consciousness, simply to avoid becoming any more ensnared than he already is in the vicissitudes of his lab colleagues.
The good news for Mr. Young, though he cannot ever know it, is that certain among the rats are very nearly obsessed with the thought that they could actually assist him (and assist the whole world!) in such small things as are available to them. Mr. Young made a terrible fuss with the doors, especially early on in the experiment, changing them constantly. The rats can tell what he is trying to achieve and they can tell why he cannot achieve it: when all of the lights are turned on, the various textures of the doors become visible to the rats, who cannot see quite as well as wild creatures, especially at a distance, but who can see very well up close. And of course the rats have never had any trouble finding the nosh, regardless of the lights or the doors, but that part is not important. The rats would not understand that Mr. Young is actually trying very hard to hide the nosh from them; of course they would not understand this because from their perspective it does not make any sense: they find the nosh almost every time. For the longest time it was always behind the third door down from where they had been let in. Eventually the rats would invest the third of any series of things with a certain reverence and immunity to critique. But then one day the nosh started turning up all over the corridor, and this, at first, was a very grave matter for the rats to confront. Once in a long while the nosh would be in the corridor itself rather than behind a door; or, perish the thought, there would be no nosh anywhere at all. The rats who were especially reverent of thirds were very unhappy when this first started, but even they had no trouble finding the nosh, wherever it was hidden that day. It would be months or years before Mr. Young figured out how they were able to find it so easily, in spite of anything and everything he might do to conceal it from them or to otherwise throw them off the scent. If he did not become very famous for this discovery, at least he became a background character in the story of a very famous colleague. You might say that Mr. Young didn’t discover anything about the rats; in fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. A human being who particularly enjoys thinking about thinking might just assume that what Mr. Young discovered must have been something about the rats, that it must be something the rats knew about themselves more or less from the outset of the experiment, since it turned out to be far simpler than so many other things they would eventually figure out. This last assumption, however, turns out not to be the case.
The reason the rats can understand how to solve the doors problem for Mr. Young but cannot understand why he needs it solved is because a door is not a creature, a need is not an object, and a behavior is not a cognition. Any creature at all can look at a door or a behavior and know more or less what kind of problem it is; they will know right away if it really is a problem in the first place. To behold a fellow creature in need, however, is to be standing somewhere between enigma and paralysis. So, the rats cannot possibly understand the problem of doors the way Mr. Young might write it up for publication, but they do understand, perfectly, that Mr. Young is trying to make all of the doors appear identical. Once the rats begin to forget that the nosh ever was found in only one place, things settle down again, and then mulling over the doors problem becomes the order of the day for the rats. But they do not get very far down this road before they realize that the problem of the doors is really a problem with the lights. That is a story unto itself, to be told in due time. But regardless of the lights, which used to change more drastically and unpredictably than they do now, the rats have never seen two doors, or two of anything, that actually appeared identical. They have been naive empiricists ever since their time of learning ceased, so it is not even imaginable to most of the rats that there could ever be two doors that were well and truly indiscernible. Once in a while a rat who has just found the nosh becomes unusually preoccupied with the doors problem; they will point out to the others that indiscernibility is, in fact, imaginable, even if it seems farfetched. This is pointed out, but it does not seem to matter much to anyone because it has never happened, so it is soon forgotten.
The rats have never seen a lick of the wider world, but unlike the theory of indiscernible doors, which only arose after the experiment had advanced substantially, the theory of a wider world was discussed in some depth during the time of learning, and much of that knowledge has remained in circulation among subsequent generations of rats. There are always a few rats around who notice the inconsistency of accepting the old ideals while rejecting any new ones which are proposed. The existence of feral rats, for example, or the importance of the experiment to some other creatures, somewhere, beyond the lab, these old ideals are occasionally questioned by some young rat who arrived only long after the time of learning had ceased. No one, though, has ever found a single rat who did not believe in both of these things, once they stop to think about it. And so this sort of conversation never gets very far, though it passes the time and permits of much communion.
The rats do know about some of the creatures and objects which are found out in the wider world, but they do not know much more than that. Their knowledge about the outside is discrete and not integral. They do not know if the next patch of ground over from the lab is another lab, another continent, an ocean or outer space, though they do know what these things are. They do not know that, in fact, the lab opens out into a long hallway, a hallway not dissimilar in design to Mr. Young's corridor but large enough to accommodate human beings as well as rats. And they do not know that this hallway opens out into an austere concrete stairwell, and this stairwell into a small vestibule with a tattered old rubber doormat which never seems to be located anywhere near the doorway, and the vestibule into a courtyard which the English majors have turned into a community garden.
The only hint that such a thing exists is that very occasionally there is celery instead of kibble in the trough. The rats enjoy the celery because it is different from the kibble, but they do not really like it any better. It is alright and it is a novelty, and so the rats eat the celery until it is gone and then they go back to eating the kibble, as always before. The more interesting thing about the celery than how it tastes is who delivers it: it is Mr. Young himself who dumps the celery into the trough, although there are other humans who assist him with refilling the kibble and cleaning out the enclosure. It is always different assistants. They are a bit smaller than Mr. Young and move with a very different gait, but they are obviously humans, and all they ever seem to do is dump kibble and remove feces. The rats would never understand everything that has conspired to make this so. Naively, then, they can only conclude that what the assistants do is less important than what Mr. Young does. For one thing, the rats know that no matter what happens in the corridor those happenings are important simply because they took place in the corridor. Mr. Young is in the lab very long hours and he spends most of that time fixated on the corridor. When rats are let into the corridor it is always Mr. Young who does it, and the rats are certain, though they have never seen him do it, that it is Mr. Young and not some other creature who puts the small plate of nosh behind one of the many doors. The nosh is very tasty and it is found only in the corridor. The occasional absence of nosh, along with the occasional odd disappearance, gives each romp through the corridor just a tinge of anxiety to go along with the ecstasy. The kibble, meanwhile, is found back at the main enclosure. The kibble is just alright, and it is always refilled. The rats could not explain this if they had to. It does not seem to require any explanation.
It is precisely here that the rats, unavoidably, form their first truly humanlike understanding of a very important issue: humanlike, that is, in being clever, plausible, perhaps "half-true," as a human might try to spin it, but ultimately slightly mixed up. A half-truth, after all, is just a lie, no matter what lengths a creature might go to in attempting to conjure the missing half into existence. Anyway, the rats do not realize that it is the bottomless kibble and the occasional odd chunk of celery that is their material nourishment. Many of them do not even realize just how much of it they eat, since it is always refilled as soon it is emptied. Grabbing a bite of kibble is just something to do in between more important errands. Perhaps it is an occasion for silent communion, or a chance to tell a raunchy doors joke while everyone else has their mouths full. But the kibble trough is nothing more than this. Not anymore, and not yet. It seems more to be the nosh that is really keeping them alive. That is true, actually, in one sense, but it is not quite true in the way a self-aware rat would first understand it. This is the toughest riddle for a creature of human-like bearing but subhuman intelligence, and the rats are most of the way towards solving it. They cannot quite figure out the part that is easiest for humans to accidentally discover: that it is the work the assistants do that feeds their gullets while Mr. Young's work feeds their soul. If the rats cannot see this, that is just because they literally cannot see everything that goes on in the lab; this was never discussed during the time of learning. And they cannot talk with any of the humans there; that knowledge was not imparted either, though increasingly it seems like it ought to be very easy to figure it out. Anyway, the rats would very nearly be human were they to put all of that together. For better or worse, they cannot. Not just yet.
Of course Mr. Young also feeds their gullets, but only meagerly and in a peculiar way. The rats would not survive very long on just the nosh and the celery, even if there were more of these things available. They also would die without the nosh, but not because it nourishes them materially. As for many creatures in analogous circumstances, this is all a bit much to untangle, and as long as it does not need to be untangled then everything will be alright. So far none of this has mattered a lick. That is because the rats are confined and they cannot view their situation from the outside. There is no other colony on the other side of the room claiming to have advanced beyond them, pointing out everything they are doing wrong, telling them which doors they must or must not pass through, critiquing every romp through the corridor as if they were Mr. Young himself. Or, if there is such a rival colony, this is of no concern to these rats, for they have no way to learn of it and no way to communicate with it. And if a human were, somehow, to tell them where to go and what to do, even if this human was not very nice about it, that would not be so bad, because humans and rats cannot be rivals in quite the same way.
So, for now the rats believe that it is the nosh rather than the kibble and the celery that keeps them alive, and in this they have stumbled, rumps first, into a paradox that only human beings have faced before, and which even an intelligent human being can have great trouble thinking its way out of. The rats in fact get their nourishment from the kibble and from the celery; they do not get much nourishment at all from the nosh, as delightful as it tastes once they have heard it. The rats do not get much nosh at all, even though most of them will be let into the corridor dozens or even hundreds of times throughout their lives. This should be the most obvious thing in the world, but there is a good reason why it is not. It seems obvious to the rats that it is everything that happens in the corridor which is their source of life, and that the common life back at the main enclosure is mere passagework in between the really important tasks associated with the experiment. Life in the enclosure seems to sidle along in more or less the same manner, day after day, whereas a rat who is let into the corridor wonders, ecstatically, if things will ever be the same, though in fact hardly anything ever changes in there either. And so the rats believe, though they are perfectly content to eat kibble and celery, that they could live on only nosh if it came to that, and that this would be the best of all possible worlds; and in this they are in absolute error about a gravely important matter, and from this error could follow, at any time, their immediate destruction. But it is also true that they would die without the nosh, and this is a relative truth of their peculiar situation, a kind of truth which human beings, though they have discovered the relativity of cultures and of time and space, are more likely to overlook or deny than to understand and accept. Ecstatic creatures are apt to see a contradiction where there really is just an irony, unless they are a storytelling species, in which case even a real contradiction will merely be attenuated into one form or another of mystifying literary displacement. So it is that the rats' discrete understanding of the kibble, the celery and the nosh is jumbled up in one important way, but they are integrally and unwittingly correct about something else very important, something which human beings, despite possessing advanced sciences bearing on all of these points, have had a terrible time coming to terms with.
If the rats lack some such piece of knowledge or understanding, it is likely because they have never needed it. It is not necessarily the case that such things were never divulged to the rats during the time of learning, but rather that the time of learning, though it was very long in terms of the life of a rat, could not last forever, and when it was finally concluded it was concluded decisively. There was no interregnum and no tapering off. Rather, it simply ceased. That was precisely the last piece of learning imparted to the rats: "Your time of learning has ceased." And so the rats discussed and thought about many things that had been imparted, but they could not write them down and they could not send young rats back in time, and so if a certain piece of learning was not salient it was very likely to be forgotten.
This is the main limitation on the rats' knowledge of the wider world but it is not the only one. There also are many aspects of the world that have changed since the time of learning ceased. The rats cannot possibly learn of these things except by way of force majeure. This has only ever happened once, so it seems unlikely to happen twice. The celery is halfway or so to comprising such an event, but it is not all the way there. The rats are confined and unable to see even to the back wall of the lab, and so they cannot possibly know everything that is important about the celery, even though they know that something about it must be very important and most unusual. They do not even know that the next things afield of the lab are the hallway, the stairwell, the vestibule with the rogue doormat, and the garden which used to be a courtyard, and they do not know that the celery comes from the garden.
The garden is very small and few human beings ever come to the garden to take the vegetables that the English majors grow there. People almost never take any celery, even if they do take other vegetables, and so the English majors always have far too much celery, far more than they can use even though they eat only vegetables themselves. And so the English majors are always offering the celery to Mr. Young and his colleagues, who have no use for it either but who feel obligated anyway to take some with them from time to time, because in human association it is good and right for them to do so even if it all feels a bit silly sometimes, and it would be wrong to always refuse.
The colleagues would avoid the garden altogether if they could, actually, but there is no other way in and out of the building but through the garden. The reason for this is a bit complicated. There are many human beings, including most of the English majors and a few of Mr. Young's own colleagues, who would be very upset to know the circumstances of the rats. Obviously they could not actually know those circumstances at all, even if they thought they did, but that part does not matter. It was Mr. Young and his colleagues, not the English majors or some other majors, who demanded that access to the labs be restricted to a single, controllable entrance. One can only imagine the looks on their faces when the English majors showed up precisely there and started growing vegetables, right on the colleagues' doorstep as it were.
The English majors soon got very busy with the garden, busier than they have ever been with English certainly, and so they will not find out about what goes on inside the lab building for many years hence. This is no comfort to Mr. Young, however, who must avoid revealing the nature of his research, and yet also cannot avoid encountering the majors nearly every day. He cannot be too pleased, also, that he and his colleagues no longer have a courtyard outside of their lab building. The courtyard was the only place these colleagues would ever exchange more than a furtive greeting or an innocuous piece of gossip about the assistants. It was the only place in the entire world where they would discuss their experiments with other human beings rather than with the rats. The colleagues would pose each other difficult problems, they would remold these problems as clever metaphors and off-color jokes, and they would rehash their own time of learning in all its poignance and folly. The latter topic especially, though it too often dissipated into histrionics, just as often served to retrieve the salience of some long-forgotten piece of learning, to rescue that learning from falling into permanent oblivion. On more than one occasion a colleague had made a breakthrough in some stalled experiment based on a conversation with two or three others who had come to the courtyard merely hoping that some assistants would be there. One colleague had even credited another colleague's courtyard disquisition when the results of a very important experiment were published, and consequently this practice of crediting a "Personal Communication," a practice that had been discussed for some time but was bitterly resisted by the older colleagues who had once majored in English, soon became commonplace. Now, however, the English majors had taken over the courtyard and turned it into a community garden, where they grow only three kinds of vegetables and are able to give away only two of these. And so for several years now, no courtyard disquisitions have been cited in print, no bawdy quips have begotten decisive experiments, and no colleagues have married each other's assistants.
One colleague of Mr. Young's was particularly angry when the English majors first showed up. This colleague has never entirely come back to earth and has tried very hard, more than once, to send the majors away himself. He too majored in English, briefly, before turning to rat-running, and so there was quite a bit more venom in this collague's protestation even than was warranted. Unfortunately for this colleague, the majors were far more adept students of this kind of problem than of English or of any other language, for the majors knew that the lab building itself and the land surrounding it were not overseen by the same people. The lab colleagues also knew this, of course, but they had not thought about it for a long time, not since the access problem had been remedied almost as quickly as it had arisen. So, when the garden first appeared, they did not even think about the two groups of overseers, although if someone had just asked them whether or not such groups existed and how many there were the colleagues would have had answers at the ready.
Sometimes human beings cannot answer a question unless the answer is already contained in the question. They cannot understand why the answer would be important until the question is shoved up their behinds; and in that event they cannot settle for just an answer but will also seek a new question and an unsuspecting creature with which to lodge it. This is true of even the very most intelligent human beings, perhaps especially of them. It is even true of Mr. Young, who had studied precisely this problem very closely during his time of learning, but who even so was powerless to overcome it in this particular instance. He too had not thought about the domain problem for a very long time, not since he first set up his lab, and so in the interim the this problem had enjoyed most of the ride from relative obscurity to complete oblivion. But now everyone readily recalled the problem of the two domains and the two groups of overseers who communicate with the colleagues about as well as the colleagues communicate with the rats. Everyone remembered everything they had tried to forget about these two groups of human beings, who once were colleagues but could no longer quite be described that way. The groups were located far away from the lab, on the other side of the river, far enough as the crow flies and further yet in terms of what was required to actually travel there; yet somehow the groups enjoyed tremendous domain over dozens of labs and over all of the many colleagues, majors and assistants who belonged to those labs. Usually none of this was very important, but in this instance it was extremely important and the majors knew by far the most of it, infinitely more than did Mr. Young or his brilliant but tempermental colleague. And so the majors, who, like the colleagues, did know where to find the people who control the courtyard, but who, unlike the colleagues, had plenty of time and desire with which to do so, these majors had already gone to see these people and had succeeded in convincing them, more by force than by argument, that the garden must be made and that there was only one place in the entire universe where this could to be done. The majors knew this to be untrue, of course. Celery will grow almost anywhere on earth. The other colleagues and the other majors, however, just did not like it when the English majors showed up, and so the English majors we're always being sent away from one courtyard and on to the next one. This is how they realized that only a domain group could solve this problem to their satisfaction; that is, without forcing them to change their major to something they were not really interested in. They were not quite willing to have two majors or to join other labs, one major to a lab, though this was frequently offered. They insisted upon majoring in English and upon spending most of their time growing vegetables. This is why all of the majors, together, visited the domain groups, more to tell the groups what they were about to do, and why, than to ask permission. And so by the time Mr. Young's colleague finally found out where the domain groups resided, and by the time he had finally managed, with great difficulty, to travel there alone and to speak with these people, the matter had already been settled between these people and the majors, and there was nothing more that the colleagues could learn or do about it.
Thus Mr. Young resigned himself to the conclusion that the problem of the garden would not be solved before the current experiment had been completed or abandoned, and that he needed simply to do what was within his power to keep everything as it was for as long as possible, and to not worry about too much about everything that he could not control. If he had overlooked something important, the best chance of discovering it was to keep as much else as possible exactly as it was, for as long as possible, so that anything at all unexpected would be very noticeable even if it was very small. This was more or less how his experiments themselves worked, so it was an obvious enough tack for him to take. Mr. Young ran very delicate experiments. He had both a keen eye for detail and the ability to ignore details which could not help but only hinder his advance. In this he was not just unusual but actually anomalous, even among the very most intelligent humans and their constellations of unusual abilities, no two of which are quite alike. Mr. Young was not the most intelligent in his own lab, actually, nor the hardest working, nor the friendliest, but he had the right amount of these things to go along with a very unusual constellation of abilties which matched his work almost perfectly.
Of course there were always a few colleagues around, some of them very smart or very hard-working, who did not see the delicacy in his experiments, or even the purpose. These colleagues, though a few were friendly, did not understand a few very important things about designing experiments, about rats, and about presenting results, and so someone among this cohort was always pointing out, perhaps in a friendly way or perhaps not, that there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. In fact there was a colleague out in the world who was considered to be one of the two or three most intelligent human beings alive who had said precisely this. He had said it, though, not to Mr. Young nor to any other colleagues but to a large group of young people who had come to the end of their time of learning.
The end of the time of learning is a dire problem for advanced human beings. Learning usually turns out to have been the happiest time of their entire lives; or at least that is what they all like to say. For an advancing young human, then, it is very difficult to accept that their time has come and gone, already, that it has just stopped cold on a hot, sunny afternoon in May, right when everything seems to be falling into place for them. By the time of their dreaded summons to the shadows of some dreary overhang, by the time they are ordered to crawl into a crack in the earth that the vernal sunshine, even, cannot reach, the young have been told hundreds of times already that they are a certain kind of human being, the kind for whom the time of learning never ceases. Learning does not end, it just tapers off. There will always be little pieces of learning going on, all the time, forever; the great heaping mounds of learning that they have hitherto known, dispensed in greater quantity than anyone could possibly gather, once in a while, followed by long hiatuses, as has seemingly always been the case before, all that kind of thing is at an end. It was never a very good idea in the first place, but it was the only way to get the job done; and now, for better and worse, it is done and over with. Any thinking creature can follow the logic of the thing, but that is not of much use to a species which cannot see the future or change the past. So, as humans have advanced, the silent terror of this time of life has become an ever more difficult and severe problem, more so among the very most advanced ones, who are least able to abide the notion of a clean break with learning on an exact date on their calendars, and yet are the most likely to evince precisely this even though they have every opportunity to avoid it.
Anyway, these are the days, the beautiful but terrifying days, that everyone back at the lab has to try to figure who is the most intelligent colleague who has come to work that day, and then they have to send this colleague across the river, or to wherever the young ones have assembled, to deliver the news. Because the weather usually is very pleasant on these days and because most of the experiments have already been completed or abandoned in anticipation of the pleasant season, the outcomes of this search for intelligence in the lab tend to be extreme rather than random. Many of the best minds do not come to the lab on these days, especially if they know that the young are assembling, but often times there is a much venerated colleague from another lab who is visiting around this time, perhaps just expecting to lounge about the courtyard, and it is often this colleague, even if visiting for only a day, who is sent to address the young multitudes and to attempt to say, elliptically, that their time of learning has ceased, to inform them that there is nothing else for them to do but simply to disperse and to take things from there in whatever ways they can manage. Not that this is actually what the venerated colleague says. They may say precisely the opposite, but this is what they mean. So it goes with human beings.
This was what was being done, anyway, when a much-venerated colleague went before a multitude of the very most intelligent young humans and told them that rat-running experiments had not produced very much in the way of conclusive results. Mr. Young knew that the venerated colleague had said this because one of Mr. Young's own colleagues in the lab building had informed him of it. Mr. Young, however, did not bother to read the transcript of the address because it seemed unlikely that he could learn anything from an address wherein such a remark had been made, not even if the smartest human being ever to live had been behind it. In fact Mr. Young was one of those exceptional human beings who had indeed succeeded in tapering off his time of learning into a steady but ever-advancing trickle of wisdom, and who had avoided the abrupt lurch into ignorance that is the norm for this subspecies. Mr. Young still read things like commencement addresses, always eagerly, but sporadically, owing to the intensity of his experiments and the time that they required. In this case, though, he did not read and therefore could not learn. And indeed he would not have learned anything technical that could be applied to his work, since the address was mostly about mistakes that various colleagues have made but which Mr. Young was very unlikely to repeat. He did not realize, of course, that the venerated colleague, who was no kind of rat-runner himself, had in fact singled out one of Mr. Young's own papers as an especially venerable example of everything one might do right when preparing to run rats through mazes, and that Mr. Young had indeed achieved conclusive results this way where almost every one of his colleagues had failed. And by this time it is actually unfair to Mr. Young to speak of him as neglectful, for the neglectful one really is the colleague who relayed (quite lustfully) the remark about the inconclusive results but did not bother to relay the remark about Mr. Young's paper.
Back when the colleagues could escape from the lab into the courtyard and find communion, if only for the few minutes they had to spare, someone eventually would have told Mr. Young a bit more about the venerated colleague's address, and then things would have been alright, even if things were not good. Colleagues have always been somewhat neglectful of each other in this way, and they probably always will be, but it used to be much more unusual for a colleague to remain in the dark about something like this because colleagues were constantly moseying in and out of the courtyard; there was almost always a conversation already going or at least one or two colleagues eagerly awaiting the start of one; there were plenty of tasteless jokes about rat feces, there were some very demonstrative imitations of rat behavior which were were hysterically funny precisely for how poorly done they were, and there also was, not least of all, much discussion of experiments that had been completed, abandoned, or merely thought up expressly to be discussed in the courtyard. If there were assistants present then there would not be any of this, but otherwise it was all very routine. This is why it had not been necessary until very recently for each colleague to read every single thing that was published. Nobody can read every transcript of every address that is given every time the weather turns pleasant, in every part of the world, every time the intelligent young assemble to take their false oaths of wisdom. It used to be that if a colleague really needed to know something but had neglected, somehow, to learn it, some other colleague in the courtyard would let it slip out eventually, even if others had tried very carefully not to, for whatever reason. And so calling Mr. Young's colleague neglectful is not harsh enough to convey the truth of the matter, as any human and a few rats even can see. But then this kind of thing is always happening with human beings. Labs throughout the entire world, provided they have not ceded any holy ground to the English majors or ceded any great domain to the assistants, have collected many parables and metaphors on this subject, some innocently humorous, others unthinkably vulgar. Some are equal parts viscious and enlightening. But the matter is not so humorous this time because it is no matter at all, and poor Mr. Young will live most of his life thinking he is not a venerated colleague but rather just a big rat. Some metaphors for this have one colleague "killing" another. But this is not a metaphor at all, and no one knows this better than the neglectful colleagues themselves, the ones who import from the wider world only the terror and none of the beauty.
It was partly for this reason that the domain groups had greatly expanded the library in recent times. The groups thought that if their colleagues in the labs could be connected with all the other colleagues in all the other labs throughout the wider world then there would be fewer neglectful comments, everybody's experiments would advance precipitously, and this would lead to tremendous improvements in the lives of all creatures. And so the groups had the library expanded several times until it began, or so it seemed, to expand on its own and to only increase and never to decrease in its rate of expansion. The groups could not foresee, of course, exactly how that kind of a process would unfold, where it might end, or if it would end. There were two or three colleagues in the labs who studied processes rather than thoughts or actions, and these colleagues would have warned the groups to expand the library only in tiny increments and to wait a very long time in between expansions in order to observe the effects of what they had done. The domain groups, however, were not astute students of process, for one thing, and for another thing, the groups had the wherewithal to expand only on one scale. Although the groups enjoyed tremendous domain, they did not know how to expand anything in the way their colleagues in the process labs would have recommended. As long as the groups held domain, then, expansion could not be made in increments, and of course it could not be made absolutely in one fell swoop either, the same with libraries as with the fountains inside and the sewers outside of them. And so the groups expanded the library on one scale and one timeframe such as their wherewithal permitted. They expanded the library in occasional large bursts followed by static periods. The static periods were quite long in terms of human life, but they were not nearly long enough to draw any conclusions about the process, not for a lab colleague even and certainly not for the groups themselves. A human being experiences a period of this length as very unpleasant if nothing at all has happened by the end of it, and so, after only a little while in stasis, another sizable expansion of the library would be made.
This is how things went until the library began expanding on its own, without any intervention from the groups. And by that time this much, at least, was observable to them, and so they celebrated for a very brief time and then set themselves to other matters, as humans must always do, eventually, if they are not to become bored or insane. The groups could not really believe that they had set off a runaway process, even though that was what seemed to have happened, because it did not make any sense to them that an expansion which increased a large library by a tiny factor could have runaway effects whereas the same absolute size of expansion could enlarge a small library by a factor of fifty or more and have no obvious consequences at all. Proportion was a great advance in human cognition, but by the time humans get around to connecting everything in the entire universe to every other thing, it would be better that they simply forgot proportion and reverted to absolute measurement. Anyway, the groups did not understand that runaway effects are a danger at any and every scale of expansion and that such effects could not really be understood without simply being realized. The groups even enjoyed domain over some of the very few human beings who had already figured this out, but the groups did not consult these colleagues and these colleagues, in turn, did not know what the groups were doing until it was too late to intervene.
Human beings are very fond of their libraries and also of their metaphors. They sometimes speak of libraries as springs or oceans or as other bodies of water, but really libraries are bridges, and bridges are not the same kind of problem as the rivers over which they cross. All human beings know that when they cross a bridge they cannot take absolutely for granted that they will be able to return, and they know that when they build a bridge they could be destroyed by whatever is waiting for them on the other side. The thought that bridges must be purpose-built for returning and not for leaving never crosses their minds.
If a human enclosure is attacked from the other side of a bridge that was designed and built by the humans who live there, and if some of these human beings, at least, survive such an attack wherein others perish, these survivors cannot avoid learning what would be necessary to mount another advance. But every now and then a human being who has watched this happen with their own eyes has realized that it is really quite unnecessary for human beings to risk destruction, indeed to ensure the destruction of large numbers of their conspecifics, simply because they enjoy the mounting of an advance so much more than they enjoy thinking through what is really required to make it, what can be expected to happen if it succeeds as well as if it fails, and why, truly, they are so intent on mounting the advance to start with. It is true that when human beings survive an attempt to destroy them, they learn much; but it is far from clear that this is the only way they may learn anything important, as the humans who are most enamored of destruction writ large have always claimed. In more trifling matters humans often complain that a part of themselves has been destroyed, and if it is just a part then they have the chance both to live and to learn. And anyway, there is usually more than enough destructive potential for humans to confront on their existing patch of ground without inviting any more of it to cross the river and join them.
It is also true, of course, that there may be benevolent creatures or even gods living across the river and that it is not right to assume that they are destructive simply because destruction is something human beings particularly fear. This too is absolutely true, and it is entirely beside the point.
The engineering of a bridge is a simple matter for human intellects. The administration of a binary conduit is simpler yet, but the essence of bridging is infinite and not merely binary. The abstract topology of bridges is very simple but their practical topology is infinite, terrifying, and intractable. After all, there is a wider world lying on either side of a binary conduit, and if that wider world is a motley then so too is the conduit. This is why libraries are more often and more pleasantly spoken of as wells, as fountains or as oceans instead of as the bridges they really are. But even when libraries are spoken of as bridges or roads, myriad undue assumptions are evident: namely, that their topology is bounded and that their practical application is binary. And this is as good an example as any of why metaphor is a means not of learning but of hubris. The reason so many human beings insist upon metaphor as a means of learning is that spinning metaphors is more pleasant than running rats through mazes. Humans much prefer to advance their learning in more pleasant as against less pleasant ways. But when Mr. Young, in series, first detected, then formulated, and finally ruled out the problem of the doors, the problem of the nosh, and the problem of the lights, he was, indeed, working rather than playing, as he himself could plainly see. He was converging upon something finite rather than diverging out into infinity. When there is only one solution to a problem, ruling out candidate solutions is very valuable, even if many remain. When a human being spins a metaphor they also are converging upon something, but it is not a solution to any problem or even a homely morsel of truth; rather, it is an entirely arbitrary thought which belongs only to them in that instant and then immediately ceases to exist, forever, even for them. This is why metaphor is problem-creating and not problem-solving; this is why it creates not just one problem but as many problems as there are creatures in the world. A metaphor that is never communicated to another creature was never spun, and so to complete the spinning process the spinner must tell some other creature and that creature must actually be listening to them. Once a metaphor has been spun, any old creature may unspool it, and then they will think that they are left holding the stick of knowledge, the secret that will advance all creatures further towards the light. But the bridge that the latter creatures build to the original thought does not actually lead back to this thought, and indeed it cannot possibly lead back there; it can lead anywhere else but there. This bridge does not return the creature home but rather coaxes it, foolishly, into leaving home without knowing if or how it might ever get back to where it started. And so when it comes to metaphors and allegories and all that kind of thing, a human being can advance its own learning and raise its own consciousness by spinning them, but to unspool a metaphor of another and then claim that something has been learned from the resulting gnarled mess, this is a project that can only land in blindness and hubris and destruction.
A bitter irony of human learning, then, is that so much of it is conducted by unspooling metaphors and inverting metonyms, by scavenging around for answers which by then have long since ascended back out into the light. The English majors of the world especially profess this metaphorical faith. They professes it with the ardency of prophets awaiting the rapture, but these majors are apostles of pleasure, not of learning. These humans will always busy themselves building figures and then taking them apart, connecting themselves first and questioning the wisdom of their connections only later. Each one builds his own bridge home from the homespun metaphor du jour, and then they saunter, one by one, bone dry, across the river of knowledge, expecting to arrive back at the learning around which that metaphor has been spooled. But each human being builds their own bridge, and so each lands at a different location from every other. And so the human beings end up with no two of them standing on the same patch of ground yet all believing nonetheless that they remain colleagues. Or perhaps they insist that the entire world is just one big patch of ground which can be partitioned only in their own minds but not in fact. Perhaps they think and behave as if boundaries did not exist at all. But now that this has been going on for long enough, now that human beings have continuously advanced and diverged and reconverged for a while, after they have romped over tremendous distances only to travel a short way, these holist pretensions are given the lie anew every minute of every hour, often in spectacular fashion, because each human being by this time has forgotten more than it ever knew and has built far too many bridges only thinking they knew what was waiting for them on the other side.
What is it, then, that human beings advance toward? It is each human being on its own patch of ground, thinking that the entire world is indivisible. It is a perpetual state of halted advance, with all of the humans gathered on one side of the river, each having built a slightly different bridge, each thinking they have returned to the place that they actually have left. None have returned to their ancestral grounds, though all think it true that they have. It is this contradiction between truth and reality on which human advance must always stall in the end, though the advance seems always to the humans themselves to be proceeding apace. And so the only way for human beings to have anything at all held in common, to have any true communion at all, is for them to be confined. They must be confined along with everything they require. They must not be stranded on their own patch of ground while the necessities are located each on a different patch, somewhere or other, on the other side of infinite bridges leading who knows where.
Human beings, though they are profoundly flawed, are also by far the most intelligent and resourceful creatures in the world, and so they are very good at creating what they need from within any kind of earthly enclosure. It is simply not true what the bridge-builders have always insisted, that no enclosure can well sustain a human being, and that human beings must seek rather than merely find what they need. It is more that human beings have been unconfined for so long that they have just plain forgotten how confinement works. Humans can quite well create what they need. They can always find it nearby. When they have to look for it on the other side of the world, in some other galaxy, or even on the other side of a bridge, they do not do quite as well. They are not as good at saying what they need, and they often act as if they do not know at all. Still, they are always able to find it, so long as they can find enough time in between all of their idle thinking and talking.
This is why so many venerated lab colleagues chose to concern themselves entirely with behavior and not at all with cognition. They had long ago figured out that a human being, in the end, will always do what is best for it. Whatever it does just is the best it can do, no matter what it thinks or says before or after the fact, the same no matter what pity or scorn all the other humans may feel on its behalf and may express to them in articulated thought. Now, the others often see correctly (and the doer wrongly) what should have been done. Still, nobody can see what should have been thought or felt. The handful of lab colleagues who first understood this were onto something profound, then, when they turned to the science of behavior: they were repudiating divergent bridges in favor of the convergent kind. They realized that if a creature behaved as if it had no clue what was good for itself, then it was best to proceed as if the creature indeed did not know, and that it was useless to be able to say whether or not the creature's thoughts and feelings were consistent with or predictive of its actions. They realized that if you want to understand completely how a chess player thinks, and in particular if you want to be able to predict his or her next move, it will not suffice to garner knowledge, no matter how extensive, about the chess player's cognitive processes. You will also have to acquire an understanding of chess. This too is a metaphor that certain human beings delight in, but no human being really knows which game the others are playing, not even if it seems like the most obvious thing in the world. Even a confined life is not quite confined to a chess board; only so much can be known even here. Neighbors even cannot know each other quite this well. People separated by a mere river or a bridge have no better chance, and people on opposite sides of a wider world should know better by now. And yet very nearly any two people can live together, confined among others, as well as anyone ever has, if only they can become independent scholars of behavior and leave cognition to the bureaucrats and the dilettantes. This has long been known but has yet to be accepted.
The colleagues realized too that there is a good reason why this fatal misstep is the exclusive domain of the most highly evolved type of creature. These creatures were, of course, the only ones capable of thinking about thinking, but that fact turned out not to explain as much as it first seemed to. The problems began with the advent of self-reflexivity but they did not end there. No, self-reflexivity became a life-and-death problem for these creatures precisely when they began actually to possess everything they had always coveted most lustfully: to have the run of the entire world, to have the run of time and space extending both backwards and forwards, to build as many bridges as they pleased from the patch of ground on which they had been born, extending in every direction and distance at once. Now the creatures were always crossing the river and then crossing back to the side on which they had been born, except that they would end up somewhat upriver of their ancestral ground while continuing to believe nonetheless that they had returned precisely there; they would think that they had returned as wiser creatures than they had been before their journey, though this was not the case; they would think that their travels had changed them for the better, but really this had changed only a few of their thoughts and none of their actions. And so by then the only way to resolve the problem of bridges is for the creatures to be confined, cruel as that sounds to advanced human ears. The only way for creatures to know what they need—as opposed to what they say they want —is for them to be confined, and for them to build only a very few bridges over the body of water which confines them, to do so only after the creatures on the one side and the creatures on the other side have got a good bead on each other, after establishing their mutual interests and needs, after finding real communion beyond what is possible in merely passing by another creature while running some more important errand, and after assuring each other in the most earnest spirit of communion possible that as far as they believe there is no shadow creature simply biding its time on one side of the river or the other merely waiting for the right opportunity to destroy everything in its sight.
Such a sturdy bridge might convey an unlimited number of one-way trips, but if it really is the right bridge it will see very few. Humans are an itinerant species, certainly, but they prefer to travel in circles. They are roundtrippers to the bone. This is crucial to understanding bridge metaphors as well as actual bridges.
If a human being has left its home never to return, it did not want to leave in the first place. Humans have built for themselves a civilization that ongoingly forces huge numbers to leave, but that is not what bridges are for. Bridges are not for leaving, they are for returning. They must be built for this purpose and this purpose alone. Otherwise they are ambient death machines.
All creatures have homes, but the human problem of homes is not quite the same problem as any other home-dwelling creature. Human beings willingly leave their homes for many reasons, including to seek advance, but no human stays away forevermore unless there is something preventing them from returning. If they never return home then something must be in their way, most likely the same thing that chased them out of there in the first place. Humans who have already made their advance are no different. They only think they are different; they only think their home is everywhere. But they too must return home to consolodate their advance, if only for a day, or else the advance has not really been made. They may never be seen again by most of the home people who used to know them, but they must appear before a few of those people, at least, even if it is only for an hour or even less, and those few will tell all the others, and only then is the advance consolodated. If it has not been consolodated then it has not been made at all.
If advancing human beings never make their consolodation at home it is because something is preventing them from making it, and it is nothing about the human beings themselves that is preventing this; rather, it is the bitter, absurd, practical fact that they are unable to travel home for even a day, or that they know they will be unable to return to their new home after making their consolodation. And so this is preventing them, in fact, from really making the advance at all, though they will insist that it has been made either way and others will tacitly support them in this illusion. But it does not matter what any human being says about their own advance or what is said about them by the static ones among their home people. In such matters it is necessary to confine oneself to the simplest observations, to the observations that any creature can make. If a talking creature frequently declares its own advance without leaving or returning anywhere at all, there is nothing to say about this that is not obvious. Nothing useful can be uncovered by the effort to determine what the creature is thinking or how it feels. Half of it will be wrong anyway, and half of what is right will be irrelevant.
Nothing is ever done only by or only to a human being. There is always a bit of both things in any human matter; that much is certain, even if the proportion of the one to the other is very difficult to know. This further explains why return is paramount whenever a bridge is to be built. If there was more doing-to than doing-by in the departure, then there must be, to bring everything back into balance, that much more doing-by in the return consolidation. It is not paradoxical or ironic to say that the assurance of return is more important than the building of the bridge in the first place. This is not a literary displacement. It is not spun merely to be unspooled or flipped upside down or shaken ever more vigorously until some bauble falls out of it. It makes enough sense already, right side up.
If home people desire that advancing newcomers return to their own ancestral homes, or to anywhere else besides the patch of ground that they have advanced onto, it is not right that the newcomers should simply be boxed up and shipped back out, nor should the home people run the newcomers through rat mazes in hopes of conditioning them to always be on the run. First it is necessary to ask (and to ask very rigorously) why newcomers would not simply leave on their own, eventually. The answer cannot be that they do not desire to leave, because it is almost certain that they would leave if they could, even if they do not desire to do so. And if the answer is that they cannot return because they will be destroyed when they arrive, or that they will be destroyed in transit, all the same as if they were literally boxed up and shipped third-class on some floating relic, then the problem of return has been solved very parsimoniously and it remains only to bring the wider world into accord with this conclusion. And this conclusion sounds hopelessly utopian to human ears, and it seems on the surface to contradict everything that has been said above about confinement, but really it is a very simple point which humans fail to understand only when they desire very strongly not to understand it.
It is not reasonable to demand that human beings stop building bridges altogether. Humans need bridges. They need both to build them and to cross them, and are they the most adept creatures in the world at creating what they need. And so it is better to ask instead
which bridges should be built
and
which should not.
It is better to pose the problem of bridges this way even though this is not parsimonious and not simple. It is not even clear at the outset what human beings must learn in order to solve this problem, or which pieces of learning the solutions might be predicated upon. Human beings cannot have very much confidence in their answers to a problem like this, but it is still better (by far) that this is the question which they attempt to answer, and it is calamitous that all bridges or none at all should be built. New roads and bridges ought to be frequently proposed and well considered. There should be much advanced learning about bridges, about every imaginable facet of them. Not least of all, there must always be plenty of bridge humor and bridge anecdotes, circulating as freely as possible, in which connection some occasional vulgarity or nihilism can only aid the advance and cannot retard it. But only those bridges should be built which lie at the convergence upon a single solution. Only bridges which
are
that single solution should be built. A bridge which diverges into multiple or infinite unforeseeable solutions is a bridge to death and destruction. And to the present time that is mostly where human-built bridges have led.
NOTES
" . . . heroism . . . "
" . . . working out one's problems . . . "
Ernest Becker, quoted in 0-1.
" . . . to try very hard to figure what is happening on the inside of human beings . . . "
See 0-2.
" . . . all the things you have to do to discover something about rats . . . "
Richard Feynman, quoted in 0-2.
" . . . indiscernible . . . "
Arthur Danto. (See 0-3.)
" . . . from relative obscurity to complete oblivion . . . "
George Shearing, mic patter on a live album.
" . . . running rats through all kinds of mazes . . . "
Feynman, ibid.
" . . . truth and reality . . . "
The title of a book by Otto Rank.
" . . . creating what they need . . . "
Albert Murray, quoted in 0-3.
" . . . to understand completely how a chess player thinks . . . "
David C. Funder, quoted in 0-1.
" . . . what they need—as opposed to what they say they want . . . "
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven, p. 209
" . . . There is always a bit of both things in any human matter . . . "
See 0-1.
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