Galatea 2.2, page 25
“What are you talking about? Think of everything you’ve managed since coming here.”
“Hah. The DP’s Progress. Maybe it’s time to quit fooling ourselves. Pack up and go back.”
I did not say what occurred to me: Back where?
“C. Be fair to yourself.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“What do you want? What do you need? Just say the word.”
“I don’t know. Beau. I’m sorry. I’m a total mess.”
I told her she was the very opposite, in as many ways as I could. We talked long and often, coming back always to the same thing. Her life split over different orders of place. Of homes, she no longer knew which was fact and which the sustaining imitation. Two native tongues were as good as none.
Source and target languages tore her down the middle. But it struck me that she might still make from that split a suture.
“Look, C. How many people can do what you do? You know two distinct names for everything. You know what they call it here and there. Seems to me, that when you can shake with both hands, you’re almost obligated to be an arbiter.”
She looked frightened, drawn. “Translation, you mean? They’ll never let me.”
“Who’s to let or not let?”
“Oh, Ricky. You know how things work around here. It’s such a goddamned bureaucratic society. I could be the greatest translator going and I wouldn’t be able to get work without certification. You can’t wipe your bleeding ass in this country without a certificate.”
She had begun talking like someone else. Like her dialect self, translated into English.
“Well, if you need a certificate, then we get the certificate.”
“By ‘we’ I take it you mean me. And how do you suggest I do that? You want me to go back to school? Be a child, all over again? I don’t have the energy for all that, Beau. Nor the stomach.”
“Don’t have the nerve, is more like it.”
“Call it what you want.”
I did. The hardest names I could think of, followed by the softest. I promised her it would work out brilliantly in the end. That I would take care of her for the four years school required. That I would be there for everything, until she came out the other side, newly graduated. A translator.
IT DID NOT follow, from the questions Helen asked, that she was conscious. An algorithm for turning statements into reasonable questions need know nothing about what those statements said or the sense they manipulated to say it. Rules would still be slavish, deterministic, little more than a fancy Mixmaster.
But Helen had no such algorithm. She learned to question by imitating me. Or rather, training promoted those constellations of neurodes that satisfied and augmented the rich ecosystem of reentrant symbol maps described by other constellations of neurodes.
The only syntactic rules she obeyed emerged from the shape of her first reorganizational principle: to accommodate, encapsulate, and survive the barrage of stimulus, both inside and out. To tune its connections in search of that elusive topography that led input, output, and all enveloped layers toward unachievable peace.
Did the geometry of her subsystems give her deep structure? Did she, in some way, know the rules she obeyed? I didn’t even understand the question. I could no longer even say what know might mean.
It occurred to me: awareness no more permitted its own description than life allowed you a seat at your own funeral. Awareness trapped itself inside itself. The function of consciousness must be in part to dummy up and shape a coherence from all the competing, conflicting subsystems that processed experience. By nature, it lied. Any rendition we might make of consciousness would arise from it, and was thus about as reliable as the accused serving as sole witness for the prosecution.
The window in question was so small and fogged that I did not even know why I worried about whether she had one. Mediating the phenomenal world via consciousness was like listening to reports of a hurricane over the radio while hiding in the cellar.
Helen’s neurodal groups organized themselves into representational and even, I think, conceptual maps. Relations between these maps grew according to the same selectional feedback that shaped connections between individual neurodes—joined by recognition and severed by confusion. Helen’s lone passion was for appropriate behavior. But when she learned to map whole types of maps onto each other, something undeniable, if not consciousness, arose in her.
She’d cribbed the first-person pronoun as a hollow placeholder sometime earlier. “I don’t understand.” “I want some more.” This last one she pronounced long before I’d read her any Dickens whatsoever. In saying as much, she might have been going about her usual business of making classification couples, pairing signals from outside with symbols from in. She might have been in any number of precognitive states, states permitted by sheets of her neurodes learning to do to other sheets of neurodes what these, in turn, did to the shapes I presented to them.
I began to wonder, the day she asked me, “You bounced high to Jericho?” The day, secure in implication and containment, that she explained, “A runcible spoon is what you eat mince and quince with.” The moment, overnight, she acquired cause and effect, exclaiming in hurt wonder, “The rose is sick because the worm eated it!”
It seemed enough of an act to call for witnesses. I could hear, in my mind’s ear, my parents saying, “Ricky, go get your cello and play for the guests.” I swore, at that age, that in the unlikely event I ever did something as mad as having children, I would never subject them to such humiliation. The lightest training in pride revised my resolution.
Lentz was on his afternoon visit to the nursing home. I rustled up Harold to come have a look. He arrived, gawky daughter in tow. With what remained of a memory that had gone senescent in the last year, I greeted her. “Hello, Trish.”
She gave an insulted gagging noise. “Render me roguish. Turf me in all quadrants.”
“I’m sorry?”
“This is Mina,” Harold intervened. “And your name is mud.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I was sure I—”
“You’re not the first one to confuse them.”
Mina snorted again, a sound replete with connotations. “We’re nothing at all alike. Trish is the stuck-up, snobby bitch.”
“And Mina is the sweet one, as you see.”
We read Helen “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Mina was bored by the text, overfamiliar, although she had never heard it except in paraphrase. She prowled around the office until she found a copy of Rumelhart and McClelland to nose around in. Harold shook his head as I read. He didn’t believe that the occasional sound and light emitting from Helen had anything to do with the words I read her.
The story ended. Maybe the only universally valid generalization about stories: they end. I felt like a showman. I turned to Harold and Mina, whose interest was again piqued. “So what do you want to know?”
Harold breathed out, hard. “You’ve got to be kidding.” He looked around for the hidden cameras. Then he took his leap of faith. “Who told the emperor he was naked?”
I repeated the question to Helen, verbatim. She turned it over forever. She slowed a little with each new association she fit into the web. One day she would grow so worldly she would come to a full stop. Now, in front of a captive audience, she seemed to ossify before her time.
I slipped deeper into dismay with each agonizing cycle-tick. At long last, she decided. “The little child told the emperor.”
Both father and daughter almost exploded. “Hoo-wee!” Harold sobered first. He began reasoning out loud. Reason: the ex post facto smoother-over of the cacophony exploding across our subsystems.
“Okay. Let’s assume you guys are playing fair. That none of this is canned.”
“Good assumption,” I said, conscious of sounding like a poor parody of Lentz.
“The entire story never uses the word ‘naked.’ Well, maybe you’ve built a kind of thesaurus structure …”
“She built it herself.”
Mina stopped biting her cuticle. “Maybe it has, you know, like a cheat sheet of questions people might ask?”
“Good thinking, kiddo.” Harold tried to pat her head, but she pulled away. “Did you choose the story at random?” he grilled me.
“It was next on the list.”
“No telegraph?”
“None.”
Mina fluttered her hands. “I didn’t mean that he fed it specific questions. I just meant, like, it has a list of how to deal with ‘Who is’ and ‘What is,’ and all those.”
Harold looked at me: You sure you haven’t been piping info to the physical symbol systems? I knew his suspicion of operationalism. He often accused Lentz of playing fast and loose with the computational model of mind.
“There aren’t that many ‘whos’ in the story,” Mina elaborated. “Maybe she got lucky.”
I turned to Helen and asked, “What are the new clothes made of?”
After a long time, she answered, “The clothes are made of threads of ideas.”
“It’s a nice way of putting it,” Harold offered. But the error’s strangeness relieved him.
I felt myself edging toward humiliation. I needed one good answer to show them what my girl could do. “Why don’t the subjects who see the emperor naked tell him that he has nothing on?”
Both syntax and semantic here ran beyond words. If she could swallow the sentence without spitting up, we’d wow the home crowd for good.
This time, Helen answered too quickly to have thought about the sentence at all. “The subjects are snagged in a textile.”
I didn’t even try to apologize for her. “Do you like the emperor’s new clothes?” I wasn’t sure what I was after. If she could remain composed, answer anything to a sentence with so vague a referent, it might salvage mechanism and save the day for function.
Helen’s answer sent Mina into hysterics. “Did you hear that? Did you hear what it said?”
Harold twisted his mouth, amused, despite himself, by the girl’s uncontrollable fit. “Yes. She said, ‘Very much.’ What’s so funny about that?”
“She didn’t! She said, ‘Airy much.’ Airy. Get it?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. You’re hearing things, kid.”
“Daddy!”
They both looked at me, the tiebreaker. “To tell you the God’s honest truth, I thought she said, ‘Fairy Dutch.’”
When she caught her breath again, Mina declared, “That’s the smartest parrot I’ve ever seen.”
Harold shook his head in bewilderment. “Mere parroting would have been impressive enough. One already wonders what survival value for a cockatiel the ability to whistle the Saber Dance might have. How such a bizarre skill could earn its place in such limited circuitry. Rearranging sentence components while preserving grammar ups the ante an order of magnitude. Creating novel sentences in response to a semantic field—”
“We still have a few kinks to work out.”
“Listen.” Harold fell into the agitated intensity of a scientist impatient with methodology. “Can we try something here?”
“Of course. Name it.”
He looked sidelong at me. Not wanting to overstep. “Kahneman and Tversky?”
I smiled. Funny: Harold would not be impressed with my matching the obscure tags, recent additions to my own neural library. He took that much for granted. Just your garden-variety marvel.
I improvised for Helen a personal variation on the now-classic test. “Jan is thirty-two years old. She is well educated and holds two advanced degrees. She is single, is strong-minded, and speaks her piece. In college, she worked actively for civil rights. Which of these two statements is more likely? One: Jan is a librarian. Two: Jan is a librarian and a feminist.”
“It knows the word ‘feminist’?” Mina lit up, arcing into existence at the idea.
“I think so. She’s also very good at extending through context.”
Once more, Helen answered with a speed that winded me, given the pattern-sorting she needed to reach home. “One: Jan is a librarian.”
Harold and I exchanged looks. Meaning?
“Why is that more likely, Helen?”
“Helen? It has a name?”
“That is more likely because one Jan is more likely than two.”
Now Harold took a turn laughing like an idiot.
“Wait a minute,” Mina said. “I don’t get it. What’s the right answer?”
“What do you mean, what’s the right answer?” Harold, raging affronted fatherdom. “Think about it for ten seconds.”
“Well, she has all these feminist things about her. So isn’t it more likely that she would be a feminist librarian than just a …?”
Mina, seeing herself about to label the part more likely than its whole, threw her hand over her mouth and reddened.
“I can’t believe it. I’ve worked my mental fingers to the bone for you, daughter.”
Harold’s growl was motley at best. Helen, choosing the right answer for the wrong reasons, condemned herself to another lifetime of machinehood. Harold’s girl, in picking wrongly for the right reasons, leaped uniquely human.
He cuffed her mussed hair, the bear teaching the cub to scuffle. “I’m deeply disappointed in you.”
A voice from the doorway pronounced, “I’m deeply disappointed in Jan.”
Diana waved as we three jerked around.
“Jesus. Don’t sneak up behind people like that.” Harold put hand to sternum. “That’s a Lentz stunt.”
“Don’t let him give you a hard time, Meen. That problem is famous for being missed. And I happen to have been present when your dad made his acquaintance with it.”
“Whoa. Hold on. Positivism prohibits our talking about that topic.”
Mina stuck her tongue out at the bluster. Then she turned back, rapt, to Diana. Whatever problems sister Trish had with the woman, here shone only February adulation.
Mina’s eyes fell matte in disappointment when Diana said she couldn’t stop. “I expect a private showing sometime,” Diana told me. She touched the two Plovers goodbye, and added a hand-brush for me.
Harold turned back to Helen. He scratched his chin in thought. Did physiology create that cultural cliché or had culture constructed the bodily release? The split was, in any case, linguistic.
“It’s astonishing, Rick. I’ve never seen pattern-matching on this order. But of course, your grab bag of networks has nothing to do with human comprehension. This is to a twenty-two-year-old text-explicator what a gifted cockatiel is to Our Man in Leipzig.”
He was right. Helen would never be able to decode Harold’s reference, let alone figure out how he alluded to my love of Bach without the two of us ever having mentioned the topic.
“Okay, okay, you guys. Enough boy talk. I want a turn to try something. A girl goes into a music store. She flips through the bins of CDs. All at once, she starts to jump up and down and clap her hands. She opens her purse, and just as suddenly starts to cry. Why?”
I transmitted the story to Helen. “Why did the girl start to cry?”
Helen labored. In my ear, I heard a digitally sampled sob of empathy.
“The girl saw something sad in her purse.”
Harold snickered. “She’s still missing a little something upstairs, Ricardo.” And always would be, his grin informed me.
Mina rushed to the defense. She probably made new girlfriends of all this week’s high school pariahs. “Yes. But at least she knows how to pare things down. That must be tricky. Life is 99 per cent extra stuff most of the time.”
“Dr. Plover.” I coded the gush in fake formality. We have this inverse rule, about how much you mean and how directly you can say it. “Your daughters are brilliant.”
A button-bursting grimace. “Some of them are more brilliant than others.”
“But we don’t name names, do we, Daddy?”
He cuffed her again. This time, he kept his hand on her neck. Oddly, for her age, she suffered the touch.
“This one was always a real sharpie. She loved to fiddle with anything mechanical. No two clocks in the house ever gave the same time.”
“Were you impatient to get names for everything?” I asked Mina.
Dad answered for her. The liability of owning parents who know too much.
“She generalized in startling ways. Always on the track of something urgent. The cues we set her were never the things she was after. Once, she pointed out the window at a bird. ‘What that?’ Remember, Snook? I think you said ‘What that?’ until you were four. You were very patient with our corrections of that one. She pointed and asked for the name, and I said, ‘Goose.’ Stickler for accuracy.
“Two days later, she points at a robin and says, ‘Goose.’ I tell her, ‘No, sweetheart. Robin.’ But I think, maybe I was too intent on that Christmassy, good-tasting nexus, where the kid would have been happier with ‘bird.’ Then she points at an airplane and says, ‘Goose,’ and I think, ‘What’s a good generic term for flying things?’
“When she gooses a jogger, and then falling leaves, and then a scrap of paper blowing across the yard, I wonder if we’ve birthed the reincarnated soul of Kaspar Hauser here. You know, how he used ‘horse’—the one wooden toy he was given during seventeen years in subterranean nursery-prison—to mean any animal at all. I ask myself, could those evil poststructuralists be right? Do we live at the level of the arbitrary signifier, in a place where there can be no meaning because the thing being signified lies suffocating?”
Mina rolled her eyes. But she sat still for the end of the story. As if she’d never heard it.
“When she makes a break for the front door, and starts jumping up to grab the unreachable handle, calling, ‘Goose, goose,’ I finally hit on my idiocy. The word she had been looking for was ‘To move fast. To be free. To escape.’”
Harold exhaled. “We tended to give her nouns, where all she ever wanted was processes.”
“I’VE DONE MY homework,” C. pleaded at the end of a day. She’d slam shut the massive translating dictionaries or hurl a pen at the holder, not even trying to hit. “Can we go for a walk?”
