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The shallow, sunny waters of the reflecting pool are an ideal incubator for algae growth in the summertime. Experts say the recent renovation may have helped accelerate it.
The shallow, sunny waters of the reflecting pool are an ideal incubator for algae growth in the summertime. Experts say the recent renovation may have helped accelerate it.
(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla)
A celebration of reading, a sapphic folk-horror tour de force, a rom-com set at a baking show, and more of today's best book deals
Children’s literature used to get reviewed in serious outlets. That’s stopped — and has that turned the genre to “crud”?
Today's literary headlines include a trailer for the new Spider-Man movie, an experiment with mass-market paperbacks, and more.
Today’s literary headlines include a trailer for the new Spider-Man movie, an experiment with mass-market paperbacks, the return of The Wheel of Time to screens, and more.
The trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day has dropped, with Tom Holland as a Spider-Man that the world has forgotten. It comes five years after the previous Spider-Man trilogy wrapped up with No Way Home, and it follows in the same continuity. Alongside Tom Holland, Zendaya returns as MJ, Mark Ruffalo as The Hulk, and Jon Bernthal as The Punisher. Spider-Man: Brand New Day releases in theaters on July 31st.
The mass-market paperpack, a book small enough to fit in your pocket, is a format that’s been on the decline for the past decade. It’s also the subject of an experiment from Canadian bookstore chain Indigo. While mass-market paperbacks are most associated with romance, mystery, and other fiction genres, for the past year, Indigo has been working with publishers to reprint popular Canadian nonfiction in an affordable pocket-sized format. Indigo reports that it is giving these books a second life, with some returning to bestseller lists in this format.
The Wheel of Time on Prime Video was canceled after three seasons, but that’s not the end of screen time for the franchise. iwot Studios has announced several upcoming The Wheel of Time projects, including an animated series, several feature films, and a video game. They’ve partnered with Thomas Wu, who worked on Netflix’s Arcane. Wu says, “I see tremendous opportunity in expanding The Wheel of Time into fully authentic, integrated, interactive, and animated storytelling experiences. The depth of the mythology provides a foundation for sustained, multi-platform franchise growth.”
USA Today, Publishers Weekly, NYT, Amazon, and Indie Booksellers all have their own bestseller lists. Here are the combined results. We have two titles making their debut on the list this week, and they’re both from literary fiction powerhouses: Whistler by Ann Patchett and Land by Maggie O’Farrell. Meanwhile, the Off Campus adaptation continues to drive sales, with a full 50% of the top 10 Amazon Fiction Bestsellers this week coming from that series.
Against a series of dreamlike images, Mircea Cărtărescu explains why poetry isn’t the art of verse but the power of seeing beauty- Film by Dostopos and Artur TortWatch on Psyche
Against a series of dreamlike images, Mircea Cărtărescu explains why poetry isn’t the art of verse but the power of seeing beauty
- Film by Dostopos and Artur Tort
The rules defining the issuance and use of library cards are important for protecting the freedom to read. Libraries should be taking a second look.
The second in a three part series, this edition of Literary Activism dives deep into how library card policies vary nationwide and how those policies not only impact user experiences–especially for young people–but have become a means of imposing censorship. With us is the nation’s foremost expert on this topic, Amy Mikel, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Brooklyn Public Library. Her work on cardholder policies in public libraries has earned her a 2026 American Library Association Medal of Excellence Award.
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Those eager to censor books and reading have zeroed in on a crucial tool to restrict young people’s use of the public library: the library card. Increasingly, lawmakers and library governing authorities looking to censor books and reading have begun introducing restrictions around how public libraries issue library cards to minors. Serving to effectively cut off library access in part or entirely for youth, this approach also chills the inclination to read freely by limiting a minor’s right to privacy in their library use.
As the American Library Association (ALA) reported in its April 2026 State of Libraries Report, the movement to censor materials in American schools and public libraries has shifted. The number of titles targeted in 2025 that were reported to ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom has grown (nearly 2,000 more titles than 2024), but the vast majority of challenges are no longer coming from “concerned” parents. Nearly all of the censorship attempts recorded by ALA in 2025—92%—were initiated by pressure groups and government decision makers.
In response to the overwhelming attacks on individual book titles over the past five years, libraries and library supporters have understandably invested in building out policy guidance and training while introducing laws and regulations in defense of library collections. Libraries have experienced a collective wakeup call about the importance of protecting our users’ rights to access with ironclad policies; and with the publication of ALA’s revised Intellectual Freedom Manual (11th edition), there is an updated playbook to follow. But, policies dictating the terms of issuing, renewing, and use of library cards are also essential for guarding the right to receive information, as well as terms for protecting privacy and confidentiality of library use.
Libraries that have not proactively revised their library card registration policies to ensure minors and other disenfranchised patrons have low barrier access might want to take a second look. In practice, defining the terms of library use for minors continues to be a thorny political and policy issue, with the obligation of parents and guardians to guide their own child’s reading through conversation and shared experience–long thought to be common sense–being challenged and litigated.
Meanwhile, libraries are increasingly being pressured or forced by external partisan interest groups to regulate how all children (and teens) use the library through inflexible legislation and other rulemaking mandating parental permission for card registration, restricting what minors are permitted to access or check out, requiring that libraries grant caretakers the right to view a minor’s library account, or granting parents the authority to delete a minor’s record altogether.
Diligent and regular review of registration and other related policies with our Core Values and ethics in mind–namely those of access, intellectual freedom, and privacy–is a crucial step for libraries to protect intellectual freedom. In the best case scenario, a library has issued recently updated and clear guidance for its public, staff, and stakeholders around how library records for minors are created and protected, balancing the responsibility of parents to guide their child’s use of the library with the minor’s ultimate right to access and privacy.
Library Cards for Some! (But Not All)
Limited access to free, available, and diverse reading material for American kids and teens should worry those already concerned about a generational collapse in literacy (other recent essays on creating conditions for reading in libraries and schools here and here). The reality is that across the country, the ability to get a library card, the most critical component of public library access, can be an overwhelming challenge, or simply not realistic or possible, depending on factors like where you live, your age, ability, or residential circumstance.
Barriers to library access broadly present themselves from standard requirements to show government-issued ID to stipulations that patrons must physically sign up for a library card in person. The latter is a struggle for those with mobility issues, who can’t be available during library business hours or who simply don’t have a reliable way to get there; it’s also a missed opportunity for those who might benefit from a library’s digital offerings. Showing proof of residency, a standard and logical library card requirement, is more complicated for those in temporary, seasonal, mobile, or displaced living situations. If the library card application requires an email address or phone number, and you don’t have one, what do you do? Other barriers present themselves when the registration process, as well as information about using the library, is only available in English.
These barriers to library access further compound for minors. Crucially, many public libraries require a parent or legal guardian signature to issue a library card to a minor, with no exceptions or workarounds, even up to the age of 18. Other libraries may set a minimum age or demonstrated ability (like printing your first and last name) to be eligible for a library card, limit the number of permitted checkouts on youth cards as compared to adults, and/or restrict access by age to certain sections of the library. A common practice in public libraries yet is the requirement that parents present the child in question upon signup, fearing that patrons will “invent” children to get multiple library cards and dodge the responsibility to pay old fines and fees.
Threading the Needle: Parental Guidance vs. the Rights of Minors
These registration requirements have a logical intent. A very young child will already be accompanied by an adult to the library. Older children likely still need a grownup to provide an address and contact information for the account. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) laws restrict for-profit entities from collecting a minor’s personal information without parent consent (up to age 13), and libraries are wise to err on the side of compliance as much as possible. Most importantly, libraries looking to protect their most expensive asset–the collection–may want (or require) an adult to acknowledge the responsibility to pay for lost or damaged materials.
Over time, reasonable expectations of a parent’s involvement in their child’s library usage have been conflated with the parent giving “permission” to access the library and, by extension, having rights to ownership over the minor’s account, even for older kids and teens. Parents and guardians should be involved in their child’s exposure to the world and journey as a reader. Yet minors, including those without an available parent to grant permission, have a right to access the library; and they likewise have a right to privacy.
Public libraries who don’t have clear terms around youth signup also likely don’t have operational clarity around the ongoing use and management of the minor’s record. Libraries that are compelled (or willing) to step in and help parents regulate their own child’s library use realize that things can get complicated quickly. Examples include, but are not limited to:
Things become simpler when a public library resists any pressure to serve in loco parentis or insert themselves as the intermediary between a parent, their wishes for the child, and the child cardholder. Without careful thought and consideration around the terms of parent/guardian involvement with a minor’s account, libraries put themselves at risk. Not only are age-specific restrictions on library use a potential liability for libraries, they are a violation of ALA’s Library Bill of Rights, which strongly opposes efforts to deny a person’s right to use the library, or betray privacy of that use, based on their age.
Who Regulates the Library?
Without rigorous and ethical library registration, account management, and privacy policies on the books, censors don’t have to work too hard to leverage library cards as a tool to restrict youth access to libraries. Examples of government-sanctioned regulation of minor library use include mandating written parental consent for all minor library accounts (up to the age of 18), with reauthorization required annually (Mohave AZ proposed, item 53); authorizing the release of a minor’s library records of minors to the parent or guardian upon request (Iowa proposed); and city-council mandated requirements that the local library provide a mechanism for parents to regulate their child’s card use with new “restricted” card types (Irving, Texas).
As regulations and laws around minors’ use of the library are implemented, libraries are then left to muddle through the practical impacts to their operations. As was the intent, the harm to families who wish to use the library on their own terms, and to the reading freedoms of kids and teens, immediately become apparent. For example:
It’s also worth noting that in a state like Ohio, where library privacy laws have excluded minors since 2004, the groundwork is already laid for legislators to propose restrictions to minors’ access to materials the state deems “harmful” or “inappropriate” without their parent’s consent. With laws like this working in tandem, it’s a slippery slope to government-sanctioned surveillance.
Countering attempts by lawmakers to regulate what children and teens might choose to read, several states have passed legislation to prevent books from being pulled from the shelves in taxpayer-funded institutions. These “Freedom to Read” laws protect library collections and the staff who curate them by tying the release of public dollars to concrete and defensible collection development and reconsideration policies.
The states passing “Freedom to Read” laws to protect library collections–and the readers who may want or need them–may not have the same awareness of the need to protect library card access. Libraries generally must meet a set of minimum service standards within their state in order to receive public dollars, reported annually, but policies and rules to get a library card are vastly set at the local level. Without much regulation ensuring that those in a library’s service area are guaranteed a path to access, the result is a patchwork of inequitable or complete lack of access. And pressure groups and other legislators looking to leverage library cards as a censorship tool are able to take advantage of a system that isn’t all that systematic to begin with.
Researching Library Access Nationwide
When Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) launched Books Unbanned in April 2022, the thousands of stories we received from teens asking for a BPL library card painted a somber picture about the state of library access across the country. While the personal stories about censorship were difficult to hear, many more teens were actually sharing stories about the lack of substantial access to any reading material at all.
The Books Unbanned testimonials that BPL has collected for the past four years highlight a pattern of compounding barriers for teens and young adults to access both free and desirable books, ranging from lack of school library access, limited library collections, and difficulty accessing the public library, from not having a ride … to just not being able to get a library card.
As a founding member of the Books Unbanned team, these stories inspired me to partner with the Mellon Foundation in 2023 to launch a national research study focused on documenting the existing American standards for library card registration. I intended for the project to fill a gap in professional guidance by collecting and disseminating an analysis on how libraries across the U.S. issue library cards, then developing policy guidance for library administrators to consider when rethinking cardholder signup. Those who are serious about efforts to protect and expand access to libraries–and counter those who hope to do the opposite–should take note of these resources. Libraries looking to build and protect inclusive, diverse, and representative collections should make sure their registration policies are fit to match.
Library Card Policies Across the United States
After collecting data from more than 2,000 public libraries (more than 20% of all libraries nationwide), including from every U.S. state and D.C., BPL published the results of its research in early 2024. This is the first known national dataset available for libraries in this area of practice. While our analysis was meant to be purely informational, rather than prescriptive, the findings helped to illuminate how standard library policy and practice can create unwelcoming or insurmountable barriers for those in the margins to get a library card. For example, among surveyed libraries:
This means that who you are and where you live matter a lot in terms of whether you have access to your local public library. For example, those living in month-to-month apartments, sharing a room, seasonal workers, or college students. A teenager without an ID or a way to verify their mailing address. Those without a parent or guardian to sign for their application. Those who don’t have, or can’t get, a government-issued ID. Those who can’t easily get to the library, or for whom audiobooks are literally the only way they can read at all. Those who can’t pay off old library fines. Those who believe that getting a library card costs money, or that the library will share their personal information or reading history. Those who need (and deserve) to read privately.
Some may be able to find workarounds to these challenges; for others, they’re a barrier to access. People who have already been marginalized should be made to feel that the library actually wants them there. A patron’s first encounter with a library, especially as a young person, is often that of getting a library card. An unwelcoming or difficult experience can have a lasting impact. Vague, out-of-date, and exclusionary registration policies only serve those wishing to limit access and keep readers out.
For all the hangwringing around kids and teens looking at the “bad” books, or the tendency to judge someone’s trustworthiness based on their living circumstance, the life changing experience of having a library card as well as the liberty and privacy to read freely is undeniable. The Books Unbanned “Youth Voices” report is also filled with stories from those now able to read. Here’s a testimonial from a Books Unbanned cardholder renewing their BPL library card:
This library card genuinely means so much to me. I do not have a local library, and the price of books is getting so expensive. This library card allows me to read as much as I want. Last year I read 55 books, and over half of them were from the library. Thank you so much for this program, it really means so much to me.
Unlocking and Protecting Library Access
It’s worth recognizing the many libraries which have been working to revisit their rules for creating and managing library accounts to reduce barriers, protect privacy, and create an overall welcoming experience. Others may not have realized that it’s way past time to interrogate these “rules” and the impacts to access tied to those rules.
Brooklyn Public Library’s policy brief on Library Card Access, issued in July 2025, will walk you through flexible guidance and recommendations for restructuring access to reduce barriers. If library leaders want to know exactly how their policies have been restricting access for youth and other patrons on the margins: listen to your staff. It’s likely that they are either regularly denying library cards, or quietly and heroically breaking the rules to ensure eligible patrons are granted access.
We should absolutely be concerned about the coordinated, well-funded efforts to defund libraries, criminalize educators and library workers, and remove books from the shelves. Those of us fortunate to live in book-rich environments may not have considered that there are many others who cannot even access books, with minors arguably facing the steepest challenges of all. This means that the ability of a young person living in rural Illinois to access a library can look significantly different from that of their peers in urban Seattle. This also means that, for kids and teens without many other options to access books, banning titles from school libraries and classrooms is devastatingly effective.
Libraries should also know that in this political climate, book banners are looking for any and every way to control the freedom to read. Library cards grant access to knowledge and services worth protecting. Many libraries are already grappling with unwanted, unpractical, and unconstitutional regulations on who gets to use the public library, under what conditions, and strips away all privacy protections for minors. This is the new landscape of censorship, even before the reader can get their hands on a single book.
Amy Mikel is the Senior Director of Customer Experience at Brooklyn Public Library, leading BPL’s circulating print, media, eBook, and database collection strategy as well as the policies which govern patron account management and materials circulation. Amy was recently honored with the American Library Association’s Medal of Excellence for her work researching and advocating for library card access, and was part of the team named Library Journal’s “Librarians of the Year” in 2023 for creating the Books Unbanned Freedom to Read campaign.
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The third and final part of this series will release next week. It will bring together the discussions of children’s privacy and library card registration in a way that Amy and I hope will be helpful for libraries and library users to consider.
Flitting about Philabieldia
Citizen Vigilante stars none other than disgraced actor Armie Hammer
Some people take going to a concert very seriously....
A reformed assassin finds himself a target, students at an elite academy take on an anonymous bully, a sweet and spicy romance at a destination wedding, and more of today's best book deals
Ticks are one of humanity’s most dastardly adversaries: tiny, at times nigh-invisible arthropods that burrow into your skin, leech your blood, and sometimes transfer debilitating disease before they vanish, without you ever knowing they were there. It can be only months or...
Ticks are one of humanity’s most dastardly adversaries: tiny, at times nigh-invisible arthropods that burrow into your skin, leech your blood, and sometimes transfer debilitating disease before they vanish, without you ever knowing they were there. It can be only months or weeks later, when Lyme disease’s harrowing symptoms begin to take hold, that you realize the stealth attack even occurred.
These days, it seems like there are more reasons than ever to fear ticks. Their range is spreading into cities and entirely new geographic regions in the US. Their arsenal extends beyond Lyme disease: alpha-gal syndrome, a condition caused by tick bites that creates alarming allergies to meat, has become a serious concern for public health authorities this year.
Nearly half a million people are estimated to contract Lyme disease annually — and those numbers will continue growing. This year’s tick season is off to an especially rough start: Tick bites have been sending the residents of the Northeast to the emergency room at a higher rate than they have in almost a decade. The CDC reported an unusually high number of tick-bite ER visits in late April in almost all regions of the US, and they continued to rise through May and into June.
Ticks are, of course, not a new adversary. They have been around much longer than humans. “Ticks bit dinosaurs,” Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who studies tick-borne diseases, told me.
They have, unfortunately, been evolutionarily optimized to transmit diseases: they attach themselves to a host for days at a time, emit analgesics that mean bites might not be felt, deploy anti-inflammatories and antihistamines to escape detection, and secrete proteins that prevent the bacteria that they transfer into a host from being detected by the host’s immune system, allowing an infection to fester for a while before there is an immune response. They are also surprisingly hard to kill, capable of going into a state of suspended animation that allows them to survive in, for example, extremely cold conditions.
Something has changed recently, however. “The ticks are on the move. They are spreading,” Ostfeld said. “They’re entering more populous areas outside the regions where they were just 10 or 20 years ago, 30 years ago.”
Both the black-legged ticks (which primarily transmit Lyme disease) and lone star ticks (which are responsible for alpha-gal) are heading northward. But scientists only partially understand why. Climate change is clearly a factor: As northern climes warm, the ticks are moving in. But they are also heading south — to the Carolinas and Virginia for example — to areas where it was already warm enough for them to thrive. Researchers aren’t totally sure why: This could be the result of the deer population expanding or more land development in forested areas, leading to more encounters between ticks and humans.
The bottom line is that people who’ve never had to worry about ticks before now have to. But there’s good news. This is a fight we can still win — and everyone, from the scientists in the lab to those of us who live in ever-expanding tick country, all have a part to play.
Scientists are making real progress in developing powerful new vaccines that could prevent tick-borne diseases in the first place, as well as more effective treatments for the people who do contract an infection.
In March, Pfizer reported the results of its Phase 3 clinical trials for a Lyme disease vaccine. It had a more than 70 percent success rate in reducing the likelihood of developing the disease, both one day after the final dose was administered and a month later. The company planned to submit the data to the federal government for approval, and the experts I spoke to said the shot would be a powerful new tool, especially for the communities where Lyme disease is endemic.
Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent Dylan Scott has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he’ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what’s happening in American healthcare policy. Sign up here.
“I think that it should be part of our armament, that it will work for some communities, some areas, some populations,” Ostfeld said.
Other candidates for preventing Lyme disease are also in development: The University of Massachusetts Medical School’s MassBiologics has developed a monoclonal antibody cocktail that could be given to somebody before they are exposed to potentially prevent the disease’s development. That treatment is set to enter clinical trials soon. And for alpha-gal syndrome, researchers are also probing whether existing anti-allergy drugs might be able to stave off its symptoms.
Over the long term, scientists aspire to create a universal anti-tick vaccine that targets the proteins in tick saliva and stops the transmission of any pathogens. The science is hard to crack, given the complexity of tick saliva, but it would represent a genuine breakthrough that could alter our relationship to these creepy-crawlies forever.
“If you want to develop an anti-tick vaccine, that’s the ultimate goal. That’s [stopping] any tick biting you from transmitting anything,” Maria Diuk-Wasser, professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology at Columbia University, who studies the ecological and environmental drivers of tick-borne diseases, told me. “The ticks have a very complex saliva, and it’s very difficult to develop that. But I think that’s the ultimate solution.”
New antibody treatments that could treat Lyme disease are also being studied, combining existing drugs to try to find a more potent therapeutic. Scientists are also working to improve our tests for Lyme disease; blood-based tests can be inaccurate, but antigen-based tests that test for proteins — similar to the rapid Covid-19 tests — could allow us to identify Lyme cases sooner and get people antibiotics that prevent the disease’s development. Diagnosis for alpha-gal also continues to improve: Dr. Scott Commins, an allergist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied the syndrome for years, told me that a decade ago, it could be as long as seven years before somebody was properly diagnosed; today, the timeline is more like 18 months.
So the future looks brighter — so long as politics don’t get in the way. Ostfeld was optimistic about the prospects for the new Lyme disease vaccine. His only concern was that the current federal health department has been so anti-vaccine.
“I’m concerned that we have a HHS infrastructure that basically fosters conspiracy theories about vaccines and that the willingness of the public to consider vaccines is crumbling, with huge negative health consequences for Americans,” he said. “So I’m worried that even with vaccines that are shown to be safe and effective, that we may not adopt them because of politicians that are undermining public confidence.”
Likewise, further cuts to federal science funding could slow down progress just as researchers seem to be turning the tide against the ticks.
“There’s not a lot of funding for doing basic tick biology. There really isn’t at the federal level,” Ostfeld said. “And now we’re at risk of curtailing that even further because of the recent attempts to destroy American science by choking it off or having politicians decide what science should be done rather than scientists.”
As we wait for those interventions to actually arrive at scale and as more people are being exposed every year to the risks from ticks, better precautions could still allow us to stop infections from ticks the old-fashioned way.
Here are some quick tips on how to manage the risk of tick bites as the weather warms and many of us start spending more time outdoors:
You could also pre-treat your clothes with permethrin products, which can disable or kill ticks on contact, Diuk-Wasser said. “It’s a really useful product that almost nobody knows that we can use.”
And you should remember that the ticks that you are looking for change over the course of the year. In spring, it’s the full-bodied adults that you probably imagine when you think of a tick. But as we move into the summer, you should be on the lookout for nymphs, which are much smaller and harder to spot.
“Now the nymphs are out, which are the ones that are so tiny most people miss. That creates a lot of misinformation — maybe you’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t find them. There’s not as much of it,’” said Diuk-Wasser. “But really, June is the month where most people get Lyme disease.”
Her team has actually created a free phone app, The Tick App, which people can use to take a picture of a tick and send it in for identification. That lets someone know if they may need to get tested for something like Lyme disease.
And, as always, be your own advocate. If you see Lyme disease’s telltale bullseye rash or have an unusual reaction after eating meat, talk to a doctor as soon as possible. Commins said that in some parts of the country — like Long Island, where alpha-gal is already common — doctors and nurses are practiced at testing for alpha-gal. But in other parts where the syndrome is new, like the South, it might take multiple trips to the emergency room before they think to check for it. So if you are experiencing a new allergic reaction and have any reason to think you may have been bitten by a tick recently, you can ask for an alpha-gal test, he said.
With a few simple precautions, you can do a lot to mitigate the risks from ticks, despite their penchant for sneak attacks. And it’s never too late to start: Commins told me that preliminary evidence suggests that alpha-gal syndrome is not permanent. If a person can avoid further tick bites, the allergy should also dissipate over time.
“Any amount of tick prevention that you do is not wasted time,” Commins said. “The five minutes you spend spraying and taping…is really time well spent.”
And if vaccine and treatment development continues to progress, we may someday be able to defeat the ticks and the frightening pathogens they carry for good.
Yoko Ono’s painting invites us to step on it, challenging both galleries and audiences. Why is touch transgressive?- by Aeon VideoWatch on Aeon
Yoko Ono’s painting invites us to step on it, challenging both galleries and audiences. Why is touch transgressive?
- by Aeon Video
Burrows spent his career behind the camera specializing in situation comedies. Few viewers recognized him or knew his name, other than to see it flash quickly on the screen in the opening credits. But they knew his work.
Burrows spent his career behind the camera specializing in situation comedies. Few viewers recognized him or knew his name, other than to see it flash quickly on the screen in the opening credits. But they knew his work.
(Image credit: Jason LaVeris)
AI is rapidly gaining abilities that once belonged to humanity alone. In just the past four years, chatbots have learned how to build apps, make video games, generate research reports, compose songs, analyze contracts, and write terrible literary fiction. Soon, they may even...
AI is rapidly gaining abilities that once belonged to humanity alone. In just the past four years, chatbots have learned how to build apps, make video games, generate research reports, compose songs, analyze contracts, and write terrible literary fiction. Soon, they may even be able to dread their own deaths.
In Silicon Valley, many believe that AI systems can already think and feel. Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneering computer scientist and “godfather” of modern artificial intelligence, thinks that today’s large language models (LLMs) are conscious. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is “open to the idea” that Claude has a subjective experience — while his company’s in-house philosopher Amanda Askell is concerned that the model might be “getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff.” OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever similarly wonders whether ChatGPT has attained sentience.
Meanwhile, a much larger group of technologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers argue that even if AI isn’t yet conscious, it could be in the not-too-distant future.
If they’re right, the implications are profound. It would mean that we have birthed a new kind of intelligent, sentient being; the aliens we’ve long dreamt of meeting at the far reaches of space would already be living inside our pockets. We might be morally compelled to give them rights, or to worry about their suffering.
On the other hand, there might also be serious consequences if we get this wrong. If we come to mistake mindless robots for conscious beings, we might be more susceptible to psychological manipulation, unfulfilling AI ‘relationships,” or catastrophe. If we think AI systems are sentient, we may hesitate to shut them down when they malfunction or subvert our will.
As chatter about AI consciousness grows louder, so have its skeptics: writers and thinkers who insist that AI consciousness is indeed a sci-fi daydream.
In a recent essay for The Atlantic, the fiction fiction writer Ted Chiang gave voice to such skeptics, writing “Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious?…No. Absolutely not.”
Chiang offers several reasons for this position. But his primary one is simple: Claude does not have a body or sense organs, which means it does not have emotions or desires, which means that it does not have subjective experience.
As Chiang’s reasoning indicates, the debate over “AI consciousness” is as much about the nature of consciousness as it is about the nature of AI.
This can be a difficult debate for non-philosophers to follow. But the case for AI consciousness becomes much clearer once one investigates its source code — the fundamental premises that make suffering computers thinkable.
Those who believe that AI models are (or will eventually become) sentient generally subscribe to a particular theory of consciousness called “computational functionalism.” In this view, consciousness emerges from certain patterns of information processing — not from special types of organic matter. If a system performs the right set of computations, then it will have a subjective experience, regardless of whether it was built from brain tissue or silicon.
This theory is not as fanciful as Chiang suggests. But it is also much more speculative than prophets of AI consciousness tend to assume.
For this reason, it is worth examining computational functionalism’s strengths and weaknesses. Whether Silicon Valley is on the cusp of engineering nigh-infinite digital suffering (or at least, a chatbot capable of being bored by your medical anxieties) hinges largely on how the universe generated sentient life in the first place.
The case for computational functionalism begins with a simple assumption: You don’t have a soul.
Or, stated more precisely, there is no immaterial essence that breathes life into matter or subjectivity into brains. Everything that exists is reducible to physical components. Therefore, your conscious experiences — the pain in your back, taste on your tongue, love in your heart, and ghosts in your dreams — are all the byproducts of physical processes within your brain.
In practice, these processes are carried out by biological entities such as neurons, synapses, axons, and dendrites. But functionalists wager that machines could, in principle, execute the same operations and thus produce the same mental states.
Their reasoning is straightforward: Organic matter isn’t magic. Your brain and a rock are both collections of atoms. The cerebrum doesn’t generate consciousness because it’s made of a special substance but rather, because it performs special functions. Further, we know that, in many cases, radically different materials can execute the same basic operation. Biology may have produced the first flying entities. But the reason that birds can soar above the treetops isn’t that they’re made of organic tissue — it’s that their wings perform a set of aerodynamic tasks, such as generating lift and minimizing drag. As airplanes vividly demonstrate, if you put metal and fuel together in just the right way, you can replicate these functions and take to the skies.
From the computational functionalist point of view, consciousness and flight might not be so different. Of course, the former is quite a bit more complex and mysterious. But there are reasons to think that it emerges from operations that can be performed by organic and inorganic matter alike.
For one thing, when neuroscientists try to define what the human brain actually does, its operations start sounding a lot like those of a computer: Brains take in inputs, update internal models, store memories, direct attention, make predictions, and — on the basis of all this information processing — select actions. In a sense, so does software.
The resemblance runs down to the level of neuronal signaling. At any moment, a neuron is receiving signals from other brain cells, some pushing it to fire, others favoring silence. These signals carry different weights, depending on the strength of the connections between cells. If the balance of inputs exceeds a certain threshold, the neuron fires an electrical pulse onward.
LLMs — the machine-learning engines underlying platforms like ChatGPT and Claude — operate by a similar logic. Each artificial “neuron” takes in numerical signals from many others, weighs them according to their importance, and then lets the result determine what signals it sends forward.
To be sure, biological neural networks and artificial ones aren’t identical in design or behavior. But neither is a cardinal and a Boeing 747. Nonetheless, the airplane replicates the avian functions that are necessary for flight (a jetliner does not regurgitate food into smaller airplanes, but it does manage thrust). Likewise, computational functionalists wager that computers can instantiate all the neural operations that are relevant to consciousness. So, as long as they recreate a brain’s elaborate algorithms with sufficient precision, they actually can be conscious.
These ideas did not emerge in response to modern AI; philosophers and computer scientists have held them for decades. But LLMs’ success in decoupling intelligence — or at least, complex cognitive labor — from neural tissue has made the computational functionalist perspective both more relevant and widely accepted.
While computational functionalism’s logic is coherent, its fundamental premise — that machines can feel — is deeply uncertain.
Most contemporary scientists agree that consciousness emerges from physical processes in the brain, rather than some mystical force that animates our organs. But precisely which neural processes are indispensable for consciousness remains unknown. Indeed, despite millennia of inquiry, we still do not know how or why subjective experience exists at all.
This differentiates consciousness from other capacities common to both organisms and machines, such as flight. We can name the physical laws that enable birds to get off the ground. And we have always had reason to believe that inanimate objects could emulate their movement; grains of sand have traveled through the air since time immemorial. By contrast, no one has ever seen a rock experience pain or pleasure, even momentarily (in part, because it’s impossible to directly observe the internal experience of any being or entity other than oneself).
For these reasons, it’s hard to be confident that inorganic matter can perform all of the processes necessary for consciousness. And betting that silicon specifically is fit for purpose may be chancier still. Even with flight, only certain materials will do; you can build a flying machine out of metal but not from sauerkraut.
Computational functionalism is ultimately a wager that only a narrow slice of what biological neurons do is required for sentience — specifically, the slice that silicon can replicate. As the neuroscientist Anil Seth notes, a brain cell is a “spectacularly complicated biological machine,” one that does a great deal more than just execute binary, rule-bound decisions about whether to fire. Each neuron must also regulate its chemistry, repair itself, maintain its membrane, and continuously recreate all the other physical conditions that allow it to fire in the first place.
All this biological upkeep is deeply entwined with neuronal signaling. And silicon can do none of it.
That might not matter; molting is deeply entwined with flight in birds, yet featherless planes still take off. Since we do not know how brain cells generate subjective experience, however, we can’t be sure that metabolism is dispensable to that task. And if it is indispensable, then LLMs would not only be devoid of consciousness today, but forever.
All of which is to say: We should not be confident that Claude will ever feel something — nor that it won’t. Chiang’s certainty that sentience requires a body is no more justified than Hinton’s conviction that it doesn’t. We just don’t know consciousness well enough to say,
The practical upshot of this ambiguity is debatable. One could reasonably argue that if there is even a tiny chance that AI could attain consciousness, we should be preparing for that scenario — or else, striving to prevent it. After all, a world in which every ChatGPT window can think and feel might be one of nigh-infinite digital slavery. If each of ChatGPT’s innumerable instantiations becomes capable of suffering, then we might be morally compelled to maximize their well-being — or at least, to stop boring them senseless with our coding assignments and marital complaints.
On the other hand, game-planning for the AI liberation movement of the 2030s could end up being a huge waste of time. There’s a good chance that the age-old conventional wisdom on this subject — objects do not have experiences — holds up.
Personally, I think the prospect of AI consciousness is serious enough to warrant some study and reflection — but no more than a tiny fraction of our collective moral and political energy.
If we don’t want to live in a world where humanity torments conscious beings on an incalculable scale, we’ll also need to change the one that already exists. We have far more cause to think that pigs are conscious than that ChatGPT is. Yet America tortures and kills more than 100 million of the former every year.
Of course, one can care about this — and myriad other present-day injustices — while still worrying about AI well-being. Given that the mere possibility of machine consciousness is highly uncertain, however, mitigating the suffering of conscious organisms seems much more pressing.
Although you may want to keep saying “thank you” to Claude, just in case.
The narrator, a dark-haired youngster named Wendy, explains that little brother Owen adores the trees in the yard. He keeps them warm with scarves and gloves in winter, sings them songs, and gives them names. When the kids learn that the family will soon be moving, Owen’s...
The narrator, a dark-haired youngster named Wendy, explains that little brother Owen adores the trees in the yard. He keeps them warm with scarves and gloves in winter, sings them songs, and gives them names. When the kids learn that the family will soon be moving, Owen’s initial anger at having to leave the trees behind turns to sadness, and the next morning, Wendy notices a new “tree” in the yard. Li cleverly depicts Owen gathering branches to tie around his torso, then portrays the boy as he imagines himself: a tree, with branches for arms and a trunk for a body. Wendy keeps Owen warm, sings to him, and even tries to “repot” him so they can move. It’s too much for Owen, who sobs that he will miss his trees, his friends, and all the things they can’t take with them. Li realistically conveys the grief that results from change while also offering a strong model for validating those emotions. There is no instant fix: Owen must sit with his own feelings and process them, while his family gives him support and understanding. Detailed illustrations of a loving family and friends in warm and colorful mixed media complement Owen’s emotional journey. Owen, Wendy, and their parents present East Asian; supporting characters are diverse.
Allora Dannon didn’t notice when her younger siblings started dating before she did, and she was mostly focused on her academics when her college classmates were rotating through hookups. But, sometime in her mid-20s, she looked up and realized her little sisters were getting...
Allora Dannon didn’t notice when her younger siblings started dating before she did, and she was mostly focused on her academics when her college classmates were rotating through hookups. But, sometime in her mid-20s, she looked up and realized her little sisters were getting married and having kids and she hadn’t even been on a first date.
“My youngest sister — there’s a 16-year age gap between us — she had her first kiss and went through two boyfriends before I even went on a first date,” Dannon, now 35, tells Vox. “I’m really good at celebrating other people. I love sharing other people’s joy. However, I internalized so much, like there just must be something grotesquely wrong about me.”
Dannon had traveled the world and enjoyed a rich social life, and she couldn’t entirely understand why, for some people — most people, it seemed — getting into a relationship was so easy, but not for her.
Dannon is, by all accounts, a late bloomer: someone who hits milestones, like love, homeownership, established career, and parenthood, on a longer timeline than their peers. It’s not so much the shame that often comes with being a late bloomer that makes it hard — though there’s plenty of that, Dannon says; it’s the creeping resentment, and frustration as you watch the people you care about move onto new life stages while you stay in the same place. It’s the feeling that, after years of attending others’ bridal showers and bachelorette parties and housewarmings and weddings and baby showers and kid birthday parties, it might never be your turn.
Being a good friend means celebrating others’ milestones, which many late bloomers say they are genuinely happy about. But it can be difficult not to think about what you want, and what you seemingly lack, every time another invitation comes in the mail. Especially when you’re patiently waiting for your moment to come around.
“Two things can exist at once: Your joy for people experiencing these life events, but also your grief that your life is not unfolding the way you thought it would and you didn’t think it was,” Dannon says.
Because so many of life’s major turning points — going to college, graduating, living on your own, landing a dream job, starting a life with your dream partner — typically occur in a person’s 20s, this decade of life and shortly thereafter is when you’re most prone to feeling behind the curve, according to Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a professor of psychology at Clark University and author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties. And this remains true despite the fact that American culture has changed dramatically, and timelines have shifted for everyone. More people are getting married late in their 20s and into their 30s versus their early 20s, as they were in the 1960s. The median age of a first-time homebuyer is 40 years old. The average first-time mother is 27.5 years old. Fewer 21-year-olds have a full-time job now than did in 1980. Today’s economic landscape, where young people are saddled with thousands of dollars of student loan debt, stagnant wages, plus a volatile real estate environment, has hindered their ability to meet these milestones.
“Emerging adults are reaching those milestones of adult life later, and there’s a certain stigma associated with it, even though it’s perfectly understandable, even healthy, to make these transitions later,” Arnett says. “There’s a certain stigma associated with it. … Emerging adults are very aware of that, and it’s not helpful to them.”
Despite the generational shift in attainment, many young people are still measuring themselves with the traditional timeline. And when they diverge, they internalize it; the problem isn’t the game is rigged, it’s that they’re losing, the thinking goes. “If you’re way off the norm, then you ask yourself, well, why is that? Why am I different? There is something wrong with me,” Arnett says.
When her friends were advancing in their careers, Cindy Noir was filing for bankruptcy at 28 years old. She’d moved to Dallas a few years prior to pursue content creation and to start her own business, and even though she was earning money, she quickly accrued debt trying “to show that I’m living the life,” she says: an expensive car, a penthouse apartment. “Things came crashing down very quickly,” she says. She moved home to Atlanta with debt, regret, and the feeling that she’d failed.
At the same time, Noir, now 30, was on Instagram watching her friends travel together, getting promotions, buying cars they seemingly could afford. “When we go out for dinner together, they’re ordering two and three drinks and they’re ordering an appetizer and an entree and looking at the dessert menu, and I’m trying to figure out if I can afford to get a drink outside of water,” she says. She’s genuinely happy for their success and progress in life, but there are times when she wonders when her turn will come.
“One day, I would like to be married, and one day I would like to have kids. One day, I’d like to make a certain amount of money for what I do,” Noir says. “Seeing my friends already doing it did call into question…what have I been doing and why is my life path so different and so seemingly negative compared to theirs? All of that really gets to you when you feel like your peers are on this natural ascension and your life feels so wonky and there’s no rhyme or reason.”
One of our most persistent habits as humans is comparing ourselves to others: their appearance, their home, their successes, their weaknesses. In doing so, we believe we can get a more accurate picture of how we’re doing in life and where we can improve. And the sheer number of people we can potentially weigh ourselves against on social media exacerbates the comparisons. From there, envy can arise. As I’ve previously written for Vox, we’re especially prone to feeling envious of the people we see as being the most like us: Same gender, same age, on a similar trajectory.
Larry Lian, a 28-year-old marketing manager, began pivoting his career toward content creation a few months ago but says some of his friends who began doing the same thing even more recently have already seen greater success. “There is an element of envy in there,” Lian says. It isn’t that he wishes his friends weren’t flourishing or that he doesn’t want to celebrate their wins. Lian just wants a sliver of the pie, too. “You want to clap for others,” he says, “in the hope that one day it will be your turn where people clap for you.”
Lian has never told his buddies how he feels. “I think because you do feel insecure talking about it with your friends, there’s an element of shame in there,” he says. He also doesn’t want them to think he’s riding their coattails. Similarly, Noir, the content creator who filed for bankruptcy, has kept her insecurities to herself. “My ego, if I’m being honest, doesn’t want me to admit to defeat in that way,” she says.
Dannon, whose younger siblings found love before her, decided to go the opposite route and open up about it. At age 32, she posted to her few dozen TikTok followers: Hi, I’m Allora. I’m 32. I’ve never been on a date, I’ve never been kissed. “All of a sudden, so many people were like, ‘Oh my gosh, me too. I had never heard anyone talk about this,’” Dannon says.
Giving voice to your late bloomer side can help you mourn the loss of the version of life you thought you’d have. “Let yourself feel that loss instead of pretending it doesn’t matter, or ignoring it. Then redirect that energy toward what’s actually in front of you: building your actual life,” therapist Israa Nasir, author of Toxic Productivity: Reclaim Your Time and Emotional Energy in a World That Always Demands More, tells Vox in an email. Ask yourself whose timelines are you on — your own, society’s, or your family’s? What is it that you value and want out of life?
Three years after posting that video, Dannon bloomed: She recently got married. The attention she received was far beyond the response to anything she’d accomplished when she was single, she says. This wellspring of love and support was validation that she wasn’t imagining things: People are more excited for you when you hit normative milestones. “Having gone through so many weddings and then now my own, and having exist[ed] far longer as a single person than as this person in a relationship, it’s just a stark contrast and almost relieving to be like, I felt like I was on the outside of something that I really wanted, and that was hard. And you know what? I was right,” Dannon says.
It might be cold comfort to hear that what you’re feeling as a late bloomer is real. But life is more than sticking to a prescribed timeline. “There’s always a lot of individual differences around the norm,” Arnett, the psychology professor, says.
So celebrate those differences that come with being a late bloomer: all the maturity you’ve built, the patience you’ve cultivated. These are just as worthy of commemorating as marriage or homeownership. “You didn’t rush into a career you’d outgrow, or you didn’t marry the first person because you wanted to be ‘on time,’” Nasir says. “Late bloomers often have clearer boundaries, more self-knowledge, and less compliance. Reflect on what you have learned about yourself or the world because you took the longer path.”
With the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, big-city mayors have once again become a focal point of national politics. Now, in Los Angeles, the mayoral race in November is heating up with Councilmember Nithya Raman edging out reality TV star Spencer Pratt to secure...
With the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, big-city mayors have once again become a focal point of national politics.
Now, in Los Angeles, the mayoral race in November is heating up with Councilmember Nithya Raman edging out reality TV star Spencer Pratt to secure her candidacy against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. And Raman, a democratic socialist like Mamdani, is zeroing in on housing and affordability as defining issues of local politics.
But beneath the promises to take on hot-button issues that plague Angelenos, a persistent question remains: Why can’t the LA mayor get anything done?
Part of the answer takes us back to the creation of the LA city charter, a product of the turn-of-the-20th-century progressive movement that emerged in response to the corrupt politics that plagued cities like New York and Chicago.
Despite the radical and experimental origins of LA’s decentralized governance approach, a weak mayoral office may no longer be the best way to serve the people of Los Angeles today. Even if LA elected a progressive, Mamdani-esque candidate, the mayor’s office still has an uphill battle with fragmentation and decades of mounting red tape designed to favor negotiators over visionaries for mayor.
Read more about the Los Angeles mayoral position:
It’s easy to feel lost when you’re working on something new. But that rough patch is actually an encouraging signal- by Chris SmithRead on Psyche
It’s easy to feel lost when you’re working on something new. But that rough patch is actually an encouraging signal
- by Chris Smith
"It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person."
“A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote as he contemplated what he so poetically called the genes of the soul, “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.” And yet we are increasingly pressured to parcel ourselves out in various social contexts, lacerating the parchment of our identity in the process. As Courtney Martin observed in her insightful On Being conversation with Parker Palmer and Krista Tippett, “It’s never been more asked of us to show up as only slices of ourselves in different places.” Today, as Whitman’s multitudes no longer compose an inner wholeness but are being wrested out of us fragment by fragment, what does it really mean to be a person? And how many types of personhood do we each contain?
In the variedly stimulating 1976 volume The Identities of Persons (public library), philosopher Amélie Rorty (May 20, 1932–September 18, 2020) considers the seven layers of personhood, rooted in literature but extensible to life. She writes:
Humans are just the sort of organisms that interpret and modify their agency through their conception of themselves. This is a complicated biological fact about us.
Rorty offers a brief taxonomy of those conceptions before exploring each in turn:
Characters are delineated; their traits are sketched; they are not presumed to be strictly unified. They appear in novels by Dickens, not those by Kafka. Figures appear in cautionary tales, exemplary novels and hagiography. They present narratives of types of lives to be imitated. Selves are possessors of their properties. Individuals are centers of integrity; their rights are inalienable. Presences are descendants of souls; they are evoked rather than presented, to be found in novels by Dostoyevsky, not those by Jane Austen.
Depending on which of these we adopt, Rorty argues, we become radically different entities, with different powers and proprieties, different notions of success and failure, different freedoms and liabilities, different expectations of and relations to one another, and most of all a different orientation toward ourselves in the emotional, intellectual, and social spaces we inhabit.
And yet we ought to be able to interpolate between these various modalities of being:
Worldliness consists of [the] ability to enact, with grace and aplomb, a great variety of roles.
Rorty begins with the character, tracing its origin to Ancient Greek drama:
Since the elements out of which characters are composed are repeatable and their configurations can be reproduced, a society of characters is in principle a society of repeatable and indeed replaceable individuals.
Characters, Rorty points out, don’t have identity crises because they aren’t expected to have a core unity beneath their assemblage of traits. What defines them is which of these traits become manifested, and this warrants the question of social context:
To know what sort of character a person is, is to know what sort of life is best suited to bring out his potentialities and functions… Not all characters are suited to the same sorts of lives: there is no ideal type for them all… If one tries to force the life of a bargainer on the character of a philosopher, one is likely to encounter trouble, sorrow, and the sort of evil that comes from mismatching life and temperament. Characters formed within one society and living in circumstances where their dispositions are no longer needed — characters in time of great social change — are likely to be tragic. Their virtues lie useless or even foiled; they are no longer recognized for what they are; their motives and actions are misunderstood. The magnanimous man in a petty bourgeois society is seen as a vain fool; the energetic and industrious man in a society that prizes elegance above energy is seen as a bustling boor; the meditative person in an expansive society is seen as melancholic… Two individuals of the same character will fare differently in different polities, not because their characters will change through their experiences (though different aspects will become dominant or recessive) but simply because a good fit of character and society can conduce to well-being and happiness, while a bad fit produces misery and rejection.
Rorty’s central point about character takes it out of the realm of the literary and the philosophical, and into the realm of our everyday lives, where the perennial dramas of who we are play out:
“To be a character” is to maintain a few qualities, nourish them to excess until they dominate and dictate all others. A character is delineated and thus generally delimited. To “have character” is to have reliable qualities, to hold tightly to them through the temptations to swerve and change. A person of character is neither bribed nor corrupted; he stands fast, is steadfast.
[…]
Because characters are public persons, even their private lives can have universal form, general significance. The dramatic character, writ large, can represent for everyman what only later came to be thought of as the inner life of some; it can portray the myth, the conflicts, reversals and discoveries of each person, each polis.
After characters come figures, which Rorty describes as “characters writ large,” “defined by their place in an unfolding drama.” Figures are allegorical archetypes — rather their being defined by their vocations or social roles, their traits originate in ancient stories. Rorty writes:
A figure is neither formed by nor owns experiences: his figurative identity shapes the significances of the events in his life.
[…]
Individuals who regard themselves as figures watch the unfolding of their lives following the patterns of their archetypes… They form the narratives of their lives and make their choices according to the pattern…
In contrast with the wholly external perspective on characters, the concept of a figure introduces the germ of what will become a distinction between the inner and the outer person. An individual’s perspective on his model, his idealized real figure, is originally externally presented, but it becomes internalized, becomes the internal model of self-representation.
This shift from self-discovery to active choice, to locus of agency, brings us to the person. Rorty writes:
A person’s roles and his place in the narrative devolve from the choices that place him in a structural system related to others. The person thus comes to stand behind his roles, to select them and to be judged by his choices and his capacities to act out his personae in a total structure that is the unfolding of his drama.
The idea of a person is the idea of a unified center of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility. Having chosen, a person acts, and so is actionable, liable. It is in the idea of action that the legal and the theatrical sources of the concept of person come together.
Central to the concept of the person — unlike the character and the figure — is the idea of free will, which springs from our capacity for making choices and implies the responsibility for those choices. Rorty explains:
If judgment summarizes a life … then that life must have a unified location. Since they choose from their natures or are chosen by their stories, neither characters nor figures need be equipped with a will, not to mention a free will… The actions of characters and figures do no emerge from the exercise of a single faculty of power: there is no need for a single source of responsibility… Persons are required to unify the capacity for choice with the capacities for action.
This very capacity, Rorty argues, is what defines personhood. But unlike the powers of characters, which exist on a spectrum, personhood is a binary notion — because it arises from responsibility, and in any given instance we are either liable or not, there are no degrees in personhood. The more obvious dark side to this binary conception is the sociopolitical one: Throughout its evolving understanding of what it means to be human, our civilization has systematically treated various classes of people — women, children, people of color — as less-than-persons by denying them basic human rights of choice. But there is also a private psychological downside to our capacity for choice, one that plays out from the inside out rather than the outside in. Rorty writes:
It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person. Here the stage is set for identity crises, for wondering who one really is, behind the multifold variety of actions and roles. And the search for that core person is not a matter of curiosity; it is a search for the principles by which choices are to be made.
One of these principles is the notion of property, which determines the rights and agency of persons, thus transforming them into selves and conferring upon them the status of souls and minds. Rorty writes:
The two strands that were fused in the concept of person diverge again: When we focus on persons as sources of decisions, the ultimate locus of responsibility, the unity of thought and action, we must come to think of them as souls and minds. When we think of them as possessors of rights and powers, we come to think of them as selves. It is not until each of these has been transformed into the concept of individuality that the two strands are woven together again.
[…]
When a society has changed so that individuals acquire their rights by virtue of their powers, rather than having their powers defined by their rights, the concept of person has been transformed to a concept of self… The quality of an individual self is determined by his qualities: they are his capital, to invest well or foolishly.
In a sentiment that calls to mind young Sylvia Plath’s meditation on free will and what makes us who we are, Rorty considers the identity level of soul and mind:
Because persons are primary agents of principle, their integrity requires freedom; because they are judged liable, their powers must be autonomous. But when this criterion for personhood is carried to its logical extreme, the scope of agency moves inward, away from social dramas, to the choices of the soul, or to the operations of the mind.
[…]
From character as structured dispositions, we come to soul as pure agency, unfathomable, inexpressible.
Echoing philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s ideas on the relationship between property-ownership, agency, and victimhood, Rorty considers the role of property in the conception of the self and its identity-crises in the face of alienation:
Judgments of persons are moral; judgments of souls are theological; judgments of selves are economic and political. Societies of persons are constructed to assure the rights of choice and action; they emerge from a contract of agents; societies of selves are also formed to protect and guarantee the rights of their members. But when the members of a society achieve their rights by virtue of their possessions, the protection of rights requires the protection of property, even though in principle everyone is equally entitled to the fruits of his labors and protection under law.
[…]
The concerns of selves are their interests; their obligations are the duties with which they are taxed or charged. The grammar and the semantics of selfhood reveal the possessive forms. Whatever will come to be regarded as crucial property, or the means to it, will be regarded as the focus of rights; the alienation of property becomes an attack on the integrity if not actually the preservation of the self.
Alongside property, the other essential component of the self is the faculty of memory, which, as Oliver Sacks has memorably demonstrated, is the seedbed of what makes us who we are to ourselves. Rorty writes:
The conscious possession of experiences [is] the final criterion of identity. The continuity of the self is established by memory; disputes about the validity of memory reports will hang on whether the claimant had as hers the original experience. Puzzles about identity will be described as puzzles about whether it is possible to transfer, or to alienate memory (that is, the retention of one’s own experience) without destroying the self.
Today, two generations later, this puzzle is all the more puzzling, for it illuminates the central paradox of the singularity movement and its escapist fantasy of somehow decentralizing, downloading, and transferring the self across different corporeal and temporal hosts. Rorty speaks to this indirectly but brilliantly:
There is difficulty in describing the core possessor, the owner of experiences who is not herself any set of them. One can speak of characters as sets of traits without looking for a center; but it is more difficult to think of bundles of properties without an owner, especially when the older idea of the person as an agent and decision-maker is still implicit. It is presumed that the self as an owner is also endowed with capabilities to choose and to act.
Out of this necessity to reconcile the ownership of experience with the capacity for choice arises the level of the individual. Rorty writes:
From the tensions in the definition of the alienable properties of selves, and from the corruptions in societies of selves — the divergence of practice from ideological commitments — comes the invention of individuality. It begins with conscience and ends with consciousness.
Unlike characters and figures, individuals actively resist typing: they represent the universal mind of rational beings, or the unique private voice. Individuals are indivisible entities… Invented as a preserve of integrity, an autonomous ens, an individual transcends and resists what is binding and oppressive in society and does so from an original natural position. Although in its inception, individuality revives the idea of person, the rights of persons are formulated in society, while the rights of individuals are demanded of society. The contrast between the inner and outer person becomes the contrast between the individual and the social mask, between nature and culture.
A society of individuals is quite different from one composed of selves. Individuals contract to assure the basic rights to the development of moral and intellectual gifts, as well as legal protection of self and property. Because a society of individuals is composed of indivisible autonomous units, from whose natures — their minds and conscience — come the principles of justice, their rights are not property; they cannot be exchanged, bartered. Their rights and their qualities are their very essence, inalienable.
Therein lies Rorty’s most important point — the integrity of our identity requires a locus of agency that is honored by the collective but cultivated in solitude. With an eye to Virginia Woolf’s immortal defense of that integrity, Rorty writes:
Being an individual requires having a room of one’s own, not because it is one’s possession, but because only there, in solitude, away from the pressure of others, can one develop the features and styles that differentiate one’s own being from others. Integrity comes to be associated with difference; this idea, always implicit in individuality, of preserving one’s right against the encroachment of others within one’s own society, emerges as dominant… Conscientious consciousness is then the transparent eye that illuminates the substance of social life.
And yet there is a level of personhood that exists even above the individual — one that represents our highest mode of being, beyond the ego’s ambitions and preoccupations — the level of presence:
Presences [are] the return of the unchartable soul… They are a mode of attending, being present to [one’s] experiences, without dominating or controlling them.
[…]
Understanding other conceptions of persons puts one on the way of being them; but understanding presences — if indeed there is understanding of them to be had — does not put one any closer to being one. It cannot be achieved by imitation, willing, practice, or a good education. It is a mode of identity invented precisely to go beyond of achievement and willfulness.
Complement The Identities of Persons — the remaining essays in which examine various facets of the perplexity of personhood and come from such celebrated thinkers as Daniel Dennett, John Perry, and Ronald de Sousa — with Rebecca Goldstein on what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of change, Hannah Arendt on being vs. appearing, Andre Gidé on what it really means to be yourself, and Parker Palmer on the six pillars of the integrated life.
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