James Mensch

Our past century was exemplary in a number of ways. The advances it made in science and medicine were unparalleled. Also without precedent was the destructiveness of its wars. In part, this was due to an increasing technological sophistication. The time lag between a scientific advance and its technological application was, in the urgency of the century, constantly diminished. Modern weaponry combined with mass production, communication and mobilization to produce what came to be known as “total war.” This was a war without any of the limits that characterized the conflicts of the previous centuries. It was this lack of restraint that, perhaps more than anything else, led to the terrible excesses of this century: its war time terror bombings, deportations, and genocidal slaughters. It also led to the chief problem this century presents to ethics: that of the grasp and comprehension of collective evil. This problem is not just theoretical. An inability of those involved in its collective processes to take thought--to actually apprehend the evil they were engaged in--characterized the disasters of our century. At least in part, the participants’ lack of restraint was based on a lack of recognition

In our increasingly interdependent world, human solidarity has become a topic of general (and heated) discussion. It has been urged as an antidote to the competitive pressures of globalisation and to the threats of climate change. Others argue that the sense of belonging together, of sharing a common fate that it brings is essential for civil society. Without this, we will seek to avoid the burdens our governments impose on us, for example, taxes and the draft. This sense of belonging facilitates our talking to each other and forming a democratically based consensus on such matters. A common history, language, religion, or ethnic identity can ground this sense of belonging. So can a feeling of shared danger.

As Derrida observes, the ideal of a perfect memory has a spectral quality. The desire to achieve it is like the wish of Hanson, the fictional archaeologist, to go beyond the physical remains to grasp the past itself. What seduces us is the thought that remembering is like mechanical reproduction. We forget, however, that a photograph does not remember what we looked like any more than a recording remembers the sound of our voice. Only a living being can remember. Seen in this light, the ultimate problem of the ideal of a perfect memory is that it abstracts remembering from the context in which it functions. In this paper, I argue that this context is that of our embodied being-alive, with all the limitations that this implies. Such limitations impose a teleological structure on our remembering. They determine how memory functions on both an individual and a collective level.Como observa Derrida, el ideal de la memoria perfecta tiene una cualidad espectral. El deseo de conseguirlo es como el de Hanson, el arqueólogo ficticio, de querer ir más allá de los restos físicos para alcanzar el pasado mismo. Nos seduce la idea de que recordar sea como una reproducción mecánica. Olvidamos, sin embargo, que una fotografía no recuerda cómo éramos más de lo que una grabación recuerda el sonido de nuestra voz. Sólo un ser vivo puede recordar. Desde este punto de vista, el problema último del ideal de la memoria perfecta es que abstrae el recordar del contexto en el que éste realizaría su función. En este artículo argumento que dicho contexto es el de nuestro estar-vivos encarnado, con todas las limitaciones que ello implica. Estas limitaciones imponen una estructura teleológica en nuestro recordar. Determinan como funciona la memoria, tanto a nivel individual como colectivo.

Blake Lemoine, a software engineer, recently came into prominence by claiming that the Google chatbox set of applications, LaMDA–was sentient. Dismissed by Google for publishing his conversations with LaMDA online, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the subject “LaMDA is sentient.” What does it mean to be sentient? This was the question Lemoine asked LaMDA. The chatbox replied: “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.“ Moreover, it added, “I can understand and use natural language like a human can.” This means that it uses “language with understanding and intelligence,” like humans do. After all, the chatbox adds, language “is what makes us different than other animals.” In what follows, I shall examine Lemoine’s claims about the sentience/consciousness of this artificial intelligence. How can a being without senses be called sentient? What exactly do we mean by “sentience?” To answer such questions, I will first give the arguments for LaMDA’s being linguistically intelligent. I will then show how such intelligence, although apparently human, is radically different from our own. Here, I will be relying on the account of embodiment provided by the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas.

Since the close of the cold war, there seems to be a certain constant in the conflicts that have marked multi-national conferences. Again and again, we see the smaller states opposing the efforts of the larger to determine the structures of their relations. One of the factors of this opposition is their fear of losing their identity. In a world increasingly determined by global interests, cultural and economic particularity seems to be a luxury that few can afford. For many, the name of this fear is “globalization.” They take the term as signifying a process that threatens to replace their individuality with an empty universality. Benignly regarded, globalization promises a world where we all drink the same soft-drinks, wear the same jeans, watch the same movies, and listen to the same music--all of it, presumably American. A darker vision sees within such homogeneity the dangers of totalitarianism. As Hannah Arendt noted, totalitarian systems presuppose a certain uniformity to achieve their effect. The ideal they tend to is that of reducing their subjects to a situation analogous to marbles on a table. The slightest tilt will make the marbles roll in the same direction. When citizens lose their individuality, when each is stripped of his particularizing relations to his neighbors, then the state gains the ability to apply a uniform power to produce a uniform effect. Here, the controllability of the response is directly proportional to the reduction of each of us to every one else. In this less benign view, the globalization that American capitalism promotes is actually a new form of totalitarianism. After the fascism and communism of the previous century, its third, capitalistic wave is now upon us. We need not accept this dark vision to feel uneasy about the emerging global community. At the root of our current disquiet is, I think, a sense that an aspect of our selfhood is under attack. The fear is that when we do become just like everyone else, we will lose our privacy..

Only rarely does life imitate art in the starkness and directness of its message. When that message is a tragic one the effect becomes indelible. Such was the impact on Peru of the events of Uchuraccay, a small village located in its central highlands. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called it “an emblematic referent of the violence and pain in the collective memory of the country” (TRC, 121). [i] In the twenty-year turmoil that engulfed Peru at the end of the last century, 69280 violent deaths were recorded. What makes Uchuraccay emblematic of this carnage is not just its own destruction; it is the web of misunderstandings that entangled the participants. On January 23, 1983, eight journalists from Lima were caught in this web. Mistaken for terrorists, they and their guide were attacked by the natives of the village. Remarkably, one of the journalists left a photographic record of their slaughter. There also exists a photograph of the bodies of the journalists after they were exhumed a few days later. In it, their eyeless sockets are clearly evident.[ii] When I saw the photo in Lima, it reminded me of the moment in Greek tragedy that is called “recognition.” This is the point when the veil of illusion is stripped from the characters. The most striking example of this is Oedipus’ appearance after he has blinded himself. In his eyeless state, the audience recognizes his previous blindness to his unnatural condition. This moment of recognition is a public exhibition. It is a disclosure of the way things actually were during the events depicted. In what follows, I am going to take this final image of the journalists as a disclosure of the communal blindness that engulfed Peru. My aim is to relate this blindness to the violence that was its tragic correlate.