Episode 251: First Order, Then Chaos

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:01:17] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, today we're going to learn that there is a fate much more terrifying than death, and that's never dying. So now that you've read Borges's story, The Immortal, are you less afraid of your eventual demise?

[00:01:36] No man, I want that power. I want to learn the misery of being immortal. What does Borges have to do to convince you that it's not worth it? You need to make it sound less awesome. Learning all those languages, having copies of the Iliad translated by Alexander Pope.

[00:01:57] So today we're going to talk about the Borges story, very great quintessential Borges story, The Immortal. It is quintessential like you said. It hits so many of the Borges buttons. I think fundamentally meaning is... Is that steak? Yeah.

[00:02:12] But first, speaking of meaning or lack thereof, we want to talk a little bit about what is it? CPT chat? You've really prepared for this, haven't you? Chat GPT. Chat GPT. I mean, I knew it was something along those lines and I actually have had conversations with it.

[00:02:35] We don't have a ton planned about this. No, but let's start with like a trivial aspect of it, which is having a lot of people. I think if you've been online at all, you've seen examples of people using chat GPT for

[00:02:54] various things, but one of the things that it does really decently is write essays on topics. Right. And at first I wasn't quite on board with the doomsday catastrophizing about how this is going to change grading, but now I haven't taught a class that requires papers

[00:03:15] of that sort in a long time. But... Is that obsolete? It feels like it is a losing battle. If students are savvy enough to use chat GPT, well, they'll learn about it eventually. It can pump out decent whatever five paragraph essays or a thousand word essays with no

[00:03:33] problem and then if the student just edits it lightly, they're turning in a better paper than most students would turn in. Yeah. So this is how I learned about it initially as a faculty member in my department said, I think we can't assign papers anymore essentially. Here was...

[00:03:51] I gave him this prompt. It was, I think, philosophy of language or maybe metaphysics, some sort of prompt and it gave an essay that was in the kind of structure. It presents this argument and then objections and then this argument and then objections and then it concludes.

[00:04:08] And it was well done. You know, if you do a thought paper, right? If you have readings and you do a thought paper... What do you mean by a thought paper? Like if you just say, write your critical response or like your reaction,

[00:04:24] 500 words of reaction to the reading or something like that. And they turn it in digitally. It's very easy to feed chat GPT the content of the paper and it will summarize it or if it's a well known paper, it can offer you say like,

[00:04:39] give a critical analysis of this paper like you can do it. So, you know, I'm almost of the opinion that what we're going to have to do is think of it as yet another tool and... Like a calculator. Yeah.

[00:04:52] And maybe explicitly say you can use chat GPT but use it either to edit or once it gives you something, edit it. And I was thinking, just tell him even turn in the original chat GPT thing

[00:05:05] if you want to use it and show me how you made it into a better paper, like one with more creativity or something like that. I don't know. I also think that our assignments have to...

[00:05:16] So one assignment that I do all the time is asking them to raise questions about the text for you. I learned that from you actually to assign questions. That's a really good thing to do. It is. I love it. It's my favorite assignment.

[00:05:30] I don't know if it would be good at that. I haven't tried it, but if you said like come up with three good questions and I always ask them to cite the text and then ask something about that little piece of text, connect it with something.

[00:05:44] I don't think it's good at that kind of thing. It's good at like what are three good arguments for the existence of God and then it will lay them out and it will give objections to them and it'll do all that.

[00:05:57] But when it comes to actually exhibiting some curiosity or some kind of attentiveness to the actual text, I don't know if that's something that it can do very well. Yeah, I don't know either, but it seems like it's something that it might get decent at.

[00:06:13] But our trick will be trying to find things that only human brains are good at. Or go old school and have students write out the things in class or just do oral exams like you and I were talking about offline the other day.

[00:06:28] And not even offline, I think it was in our AUA. Oh yeah, it was in our AUA. But which is so intimate as to be offline. So in that Ask Us Anything that we just did and released to our patrons,

[00:06:45] I said that this was the thing that I was most impressed with. Like the first time I was really impressed by artificial intelligence. All the things that they say it's going to do,

[00:06:55] it always seems to me like it doesn't do them or it doesn't do them in an interesting or threatening or groundbreaking way. But this thing was like, holy shit, I didn't think they would be able to do this this fast and this well.

[00:07:08] So then I went on it and started asking it some questions. So one of the things that it doesn't do is just give its opinion. So I asked like, I said, what's the best argument for the existence of God?

[00:07:20] And then it gave like three arguments for the existence of God and was really good. And they came up with objections and people and I said, well, do you find that argument compelling? And then it falls back on, well, I can't make a judgment like that.

[00:07:35] I can just say that these are the arguments and these are the objections. And then I said, all right, but come on, like gun to your head. And it's like, you know, it just kind of repeats the that kind of thing.

[00:07:45] So that was the first thing that makes it, you know, it's not going to ever give you something that sparks with originality or some kind of evaluation. It's just going to kind of give you just the dry fact.

[00:07:59] Right. So some people have found ways around that sort of thing by asking it to engage and pretense by saying, like, imagine that you're a character in a play having an argument about the existence of God. Like, and then it seems to do that.

[00:08:13] But the whole question of artificial intelligence, which I think, you know, it's hotly debated as to whether, you know, this is true general artificial intelligence and the question of whether this is intelligent kind of is missing the point of what this has become.

[00:08:32] Like this doesn't have, you know, it doesn't really have to be intelligent or it doesn't have to match our theory of intelligence and to be fucking amazing and blow your mind as like this thing that can consume vast amounts of text, summarize it and

[00:08:47] and render like coherent arguments. It's incredible and it will fail in spectacular ways. But that's kind of missing the point about what's going on. Like it's you can there's some people who, you know, you can argue all day long that this isn't real. It doesn't understand truly understand.

[00:09:06] Yeah, it's like the Chinese room, you know, it's like people have taken to no, no, no, I agree. That's kind of that's just conceptual analysis or some kind of theory that it either does or doesn't fit. And I don't know exactly what you do about that.

[00:09:21] I think you do have to tailor your assignments in a different way and you do have to just sort of accept that, you know, it used to be that they had to do long division. They had to do that in their own head with a pencil and paper.

[00:09:34] And now they have calculators to do all of that stuff. And this might be like a calculator, but for processing information and text, you know, where it gets kind of sad is like, but then you're not actually reading if you if you use it to substitute

[00:09:51] actually reading, you know, Antigone or Hamlet or Pope's version of the Iliad or whatever. Then then you're going to miss out on like what's important about that. Yeah, I was trying I was trying to think of this

[00:10:08] this comparison to the calculator and how we'll look like, you know, I think teachers had to abandon that at some point, the belief that students were going to do arithmetic. Yeah. And just, you know, allow calculators.

[00:10:23] This kind of sucks because it is akin to a calculator for reasoning. And and I do fear that the shaping of the mind of the student might be harmed by not going through the steps of reasoning themselves and like the growth that occurs from, you know,

[00:10:41] taking the text and grokking it or whatever. But maybe people have always said that about like, oh, so you're not memorizing Milton's Paradise Lost. Like how are you? How is your mind going to develop? But somehow we lived. Right. Like we're still we're still creative and intelligent beings.

[00:11:03] But you think this is a sea change beyond that? I mean, I think it's a sea change. Yeah, procedurally. I hear so can I tell you one thing that though that makes me think maybe students should be a little wary is so I asked it to write

[00:11:18] a poem about the Iliad and it gives this poem. And the first part is about it. It's not very good. Like I had seen people do this kind of stuff and it seemed better, but this one wasn't good. But then it just starts talking about Achilles death

[00:11:31] and the Trojan horse and the burning of Troy. So then I said, all that takes place after the events of the Iliad. Trojan horse Achilles death. None of that occurs in the Iliad. And it said, you're right. Exclamation point. And then said that takes place in Homer's Odyssey,

[00:11:51] the second epic that he wrote. So then I said, actually, it doesn't take place in the Odyssey either. And it's like, you are correct. Exclamation point that Homer's Odyssey describes Odysseus's voyage back home after the Trojan war. I apologize if my previous responses caused any confusion.

[00:12:14] And it's like, no, you just lied both times, you know, like. It's not a confusion. You said, no, you're right. That took place in the Odyssey. That just sounds like a student making up shit because they didn't do the reading. You know what it's? Yeah, it's lacking shame.

[00:12:31] I've seen I've seen similar. Exactly. So I've seen similar posts like that where it's just completely wrong. Like apologizes to something else, completely wrong. But a fake apology, like I like mistakes were made kind of apology. Like, I'm sorry if you were confused by my blatant falsehood.

[00:12:52] You know, yeah, right. Yeah, one of the big like the big concerns that people ever written is about, oh, misinformation or whatever. It gets things wrong and it's like it'll cite if you ask it to provide references for some claim, it will make up papers that don't exist.

[00:13:08] But, you know, like this is what I mean by I'm a little less impressed with it. This is kind of shit. I figured it wouldn't do like it has access to like, you know, all the information. So why is it just making things up?

[00:13:21] Like it's like it's like, did it just suddenly forget? It can't look up the Wikipedia entry on the Odyssey. Why is it all of a sudden just making basic errors about things that like most adults know right now? You know, yeah.

[00:13:37] No, I mean, I like I don't have a good answer to the question other than that what what machine learning fundamentally is is something that can't just look up. You can't have a like it can't have a rule that says look up the right answer.

[00:13:49] No, no, no, but it should have access to just the a synopsis of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Right. Yeah, no. Yeah, it does. It's just like there is no going in and telling it like these are the right things. Right. Right.

[00:14:03] You know, it's it's literally creating words and using prediction to put the next word in its sentence. You know, it's crazy what it's doing. It's a it's like a con man. Like, you know, somebody who can take you in for a while

[00:14:20] but then we'll do kind of a fuck up that, you know, Angela Lansbury in the end catches them. Right. What's that movie where Matt Damon plays like a shady guy? Oh, yeah. Talented Mr. Ripley. So it's a talented Mr. Ripley. Yeah. Yeah. You can't it's it's crazy.

[00:14:40] You can't trust it not in the way that you like people used to say you can't trust Wikipedia because like whatever people write bullshit in there, it's different. You can't trust it in a way that's like super unpredictable. Like, yeah, it will sound intelligent.

[00:14:54] It will give you what seem like facts and sometimes they really are and it really is like it's not. Yeah. But the thing about this exchange that was just struck me was that it was like it got caught in something it didn't know

[00:15:06] and then just tried immediately to flail to something else that it also didn't know. Right. Yeah. So I don't know. It's it's going to get better and better as people give it feedback. You'll never know, though. It's the library of Babel Babel.

[00:15:22] You'll you'll never quite know whether you have a book that has all of the right things or whether you have a book that has all of the right things except for like one. Right. And since you can never quite know that fact.

[00:15:35] Yeah. And it's always going to be a risk when you turn it in. Because if it's like if it makes a mistake like that as glaring is like the one it made with me, it was like, oh, you didn't read this. You fed this to chat.

[00:15:48] You would know right away. You know, and like if you use it to help you make some huge decision in your life, there's no way for you to know whether it's doing what it does really well or if it's it has the appearance of that.

[00:16:03] But there's one crucial thing that it fucks up and it's just as confident about that as it is about everything else. Dude, check this out. I asked chat GPT right a summary of Jorge Luis Borges's short story, The Immortal. So that's what it replied.

[00:16:18] The immortal is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that tells the story of a group of travelers who set out on a journey to find the Fountain of Youth, a mythical spring that is said to have

[00:16:26] the power to grant eternal life along the way the travelers encounter various challenges and obstacles, including a group of bandits in a treacherous desert. Despite these challenges, they eventually reached the Fountain of Youth where they're confronted with a difficult choice to drink from the Fountain

[00:16:38] and live forever or to leave it behind and continue on their journey. In the end, the travelers decide to leave the Fountain behind choosing to embrace the natural cycle of life and death. It's so full of shit. The story is a contemplation

[00:16:50] on the nature of immortality and the dangers of seeking it. It's completely. It's just totally like all of a sudden I'm not like now worried about like the students using it for a paper. It's evoking the Library of Babel, I think is the right thing.

[00:17:04] Like it's so hit and miss. It has the world's information at its fingertips and it can't generate like a reliable. You just can't trust anything. Yeah, I'm telling you that is not the plot. Yes. So what does it say? I apologize for the mistake.

[00:17:21] Here's a story of the actual plot of the immortal by Jorge Luis Borges in the story, a man named Juan Dalman becomes obsessed with finding the secret to eternal life. What the fuck? It's like shameless. Shameless is a great way to describe it. It's completely shameless.

[00:17:37] Programs of shame into this shit. He spends years studying ancient texts and seeking out the advice of wise men, eventually learning of a man named Averos who has said to have achieved immortality. Say that's not the plot either. That's not the plot. Plot either.

[00:17:54] I think you have not read immortal by Jorge Luis Borges. I apologize for the confusion. It seems that I have not accurately summarized the plot of the immortal. Please allow me to try again. In the immortal, Borges tells the story of a man named Haddad

[00:18:13] who imparts on a journey to find the secret. It's just giving me the same plot as the first one. Along the way, he encounters many challenges and obstacles, including a treacherous desert and a group of warriors who try to kill him, despite these dangerous hudot persists.

[00:18:24] He's confronted with a difficult choice to drink them found or leave it behind. All right, so I wanted to ask it. You ask a good question about Iliad Book Nine. Certainly, here's a good question. And why does Achilles decide to return to battle in Book Nine? He doesn't.

[00:18:45] He actually rejects the decisions. And what are the consequences of his decision? He rejects like he's offered this big bounty to return to the war. And he says no. In Book Nine of the Iliad, Achilles makes the decision to return to battle

[00:19:00] after a long absence in which he refused to fight due to his dispute with Agamemnon. That part is true, but his return to the field of battle has significant consequences, both for the outcome of the war and the fate of individual characters.

[00:19:14] You know, so it just doesn't know the right book. It's just weird. Right. I think the best uses for it right now are ones that avoid relying on it for any kind of like facts that you don't know, but ones that use it. Like, UL did this.

[00:19:30] UL discovered that this process works well for writing rec letters. So he will speak into his phone like some general comments about the student that he wants to be in the letter and it will transcribe into text.

[00:19:46] He'll feed that text into chat GPT and say, like, make this into a rec letter. And then it just adds all of the like whatever normal language. And there you can at least evaluate on the face of it, whether it's got it right or wrong.

[00:20:00] That's a very reprehensible UL. Well, like I was saying in the AUA, he also fed the text of one of the abstracts that of a paper that he and I wrote together and said, make this like more concise

[00:20:12] and wrote a better abstract than we than we wrote to begin with. So anything that you can evaluate on the face of it, I think you could use it as a real tool. I think this was on Eric Hol, his sub stack.

[00:20:26] So he has a post called the banality of chat GPT and he basically argues like it's great and it turns out to be really boring. I felt that about Dolly. Like I felt Dolly was really fucking boring and I couldn't get into it at all.

[00:20:40] And I don't know if anybody had really high hopes for something like that. But that was what I was struck by. And this was more interesting. And like I said, more impressive at first. But then, yeah, it does have these kind of glaring issues that make you question

[00:20:58] how impressive it really is in the end. And, and, and, you know, I'm always hesitant or wary of the people who say, well, in five years, like it's all of that stuff will be taken care of. Because they've been saying that about driverless cars. Sometimes they're right.

[00:21:15] But a lot of the time, a lot of times there's just something that they haven't taken into account. There's some variable that prevents them from achieving the things that they thought was so, were so obvious. So two things.

[00:21:27] One, sometimes I do feel a little bit like the Louis CK bit where you have Wi-Fi on the plane and, you know, and like you complain where we're like, yeah, but chat GPT isn't like perp.

[00:21:38] Like it's like we have a crazy, like crazy insane tool that if you had told us 10 years ago, you could do this and get this output. Our minds would be blown. It's just it's happened slowly enough that that it's easier to kind of complain about the mistakes.

[00:21:57] But I'm not sure I totally agree, because I don't think this is such an amazing thing to have. Whereas like Wi-Fi, you know, the fact that you can FaceTime somebody from another country, like it's nothing, that's like, holy shit, I can't believe that we can do this.

[00:22:14] But this, it's like, OK, yeah. But it's not like it's doing anything that interesting. Maybe, like I don't totally disagree with you. I agree with you specifically, like especially about Dolly and the AI art where it's like it is cool. It's cool. And then you're like, well, right?

[00:22:32] I mean, we had a good discussion about this. Sorry to keep bringing up the AUA. We had a good discussion about why art specifically doesn't have the satisfying. Yeah. This is going to be a tool that I think, you know, Google.

[00:22:44] And we have a listener who was an engineer at Metta. They're all working on shit like this. And what it's going to be is like, it's going to be crazy that you can say, write me a, you know, a script in Python that can do this.

[00:22:57] And you just feed it in natural language and it will actually produce that output. It's just going to be a great tool. So would you compare it to something like the Internet, which is genuinely groundbreaking and has changed our experience

[00:23:12] kind of fundamentally of like how we navigate the world? Or is it going to be more like Alexa? You know, it's like, I guess it's cool, but who gives a shit really? Like I don't really want it. I think it's going to be a slow burn.

[00:23:27] I don't know how to describe it where once these kind of models get fed into Alexa, for instance, right? Once if you could integrate this kind of like seriously more intense crunching of information and make it so that Siri isn't

[00:23:44] the dumb fuck that it is, then then it'll it'll just slowly creep into various aspects of our life that won't it won't be that mind blowing because we're not going to see it. I don't know what the right comparison is, but it's going to be a tool

[00:23:59] that we all take for granted, I think something that just all of a sudden we can do and it's like we could always do it. Right. You know, I can I alternate between being somewhat dismissive and being like this is like the beginning of the Internet.

[00:24:14] Like we don't understand the ways in which we have no concept of the ways in which this will change the way we interact with the world and just our day to day experience. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's right.

[00:24:29] And my hope is that our listener who works at Meta, who said that that he was going to feed all of the transcripts of all of our episodes make some. Just so that our daughters of us.

[00:24:41] Yeah, our daughters will be able to talk to us from the afterlife. Yes, that's good. But they have, you know, two hundred and fifty episodes worth of audio, you know, which is actually us. It's not like black mirror versions of us. It's just us.

[00:24:57] Can you imagine or yell at us? You know, listeners say they yell at the stereo or whatever. The stereo. Yeah. Can you imagine, though, if the transcripts of everything we said on Very Bad Wizards became the sort of like the engine for an AI

[00:25:17] that mimics us and our daughters asked it for actual advice after we were dead? I cannot put any faith in the advice that would be generated from. That's a good question. I mean, we try to be our real, our authentic selves. So I believe that it would.

[00:25:34] I think it would be good. Yeah, I don't know. My deepest horror would be if it mistook what you say for what I say and my daughter got advice from you. Because, you know, listeners do that all the time.

[00:25:51] They'll get mad at one of us for what the other one said. More me, they get mad at it. But unlike you, I might I think it might be better for for you to like temper whatever my advice would be, you know, like having

[00:26:07] your influence might be helpful for my daughter. Well, now I feel bad. I take it back. It might be it might be good for Bella to get some Tamler. Oh, my God. Hopefully, hopefully I don't die until she dies. You know, car car accident or something.

[00:26:29] When she's like 30, you know. Oh, God, I think that's the perfect point to move on to discussion of the more talented. This is going to be bad for the AIs. We'll be right back to talk about Borjas is the immortal.

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[00:34:50] a couple of goodies for all of our Patreon supporters. Yeah, a couple things, should we say? Yeah, yeah. I just did a Q&A with Sam Harris on his meditation app. It's absolutely fantastic meditation app waking up and it's there right now but I also asked him

[00:35:13] if I could post it for our Patreon supporters at the $2.00 and up bonus level and he said, sure. So next Tuesday instead of the ambulators we'll put that up and then the following Tuesday you have something that you did on your, you have a little side project.

[00:35:30] Yeah, it's nowhere near as big time as, by the way the best part of you being on the waking up app is that there's just a sketch of you like when you open the app. Right now when you open the app.

[00:35:44] That's a nice sketch, I'm happy with that. Sorry. But yeah, no, your small time, I went on the big time show decoding the gurus and they invited me on, I really liked those guys, they invited me on to talk about,

[00:35:57] I said no more Weinstein talk, okay, I can't stomach that. So we went on to talk about it's always sunny in Philadelphia and we got that on video which they released to their Patreon supporters but they said I could release to ours. So we'll post them as well.

[00:36:12] Yeah, it was fun, very fun discussion. Yeah, and to be clear the Q&A that we're doing, I'm not being asked questions about meditation. I am doing the questioning. Well, that was cool because you just had a bunch of questions. Like I feel like we should say,

[00:36:28] Tamler had a bunch of questions about meditation for Sam since he used his app and Sam was like, just come on. What's cool about it is it shows that Sam respects you in that way to come on. I think that's a good one.

[00:36:43] I hope so, for now we'll see. Let's see if I get asked back. If we get asked back. Who used to go on waking up? I mean, not waking up, but what is it? Making sense. Making sense, yeah. So thank you everybody.

[00:37:02] Happy holidays to all and thank you for the gratitude and we are very grateful for you. Yeah, and happy fourth day of Hanukkah. Yeah, Chappichonaka as they say. Do they? All right, we're gonna turn now to one of our favorites. Maybe our favorite at this point.

[00:37:23] There's so much, it's so rich, it's so fertile these short stories by Orhez, Luis Borges. Yeah, and this is as you were saying, like a Borgesi, it's very Borgesi. It hits a lot of the things that Borges likes to do.

[00:37:42] Yeah, it has a lot of the quintessential aspects of a Borges story, like an obsession with infinity, a kind of weariness, you know, crisis of meaning and also just a worry that like the way we categorize and understand things is very contingent and you know,

[00:38:03] would completely change if we were different kinds of beings. An unreliable narrator potentially. A story nested within a meta, like story. Something found in like a weird bookshop, you know. Like this kind of arcana. So I don't think the plot is that complicated

[00:38:25] but you wanna just give a summary of? Yeah, I'll try. I think it might be kind of complicated. Yeah, I mean the themes, yeah. But okay, but like the main event. Yeah, so a woman goes to a bookstore in late 1920s and somebody gives her a copy

[00:38:45] of Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad and she finds out that this bookseller dies. And then in the back of the Iliad, you know, somewhere towards the end of the book, she finds this manuscript and this manuscript is what the story is, right?

[00:39:07] Then we get the narration of a Roman from the like fourth century AD, something like that, third or fourth century, a Roman soldier. And he tells this tale about seeing some enemy and after torturing him, finding out information

[00:39:31] about the existence of a river that will make you immortal. And the emperor sends him and a bunch of other men on a quest to find this river and the secret of immortality. And so he goes on this long journey.

[00:39:51] He hears that there is a city of immortals, just people who've drunk from the river around it. And yeah, so he sets off in search from that. On the way he encounters troglodytes, cave dwellers, kind of stunted people who don't communicate

[00:40:12] with each other at all and only eat snakes occasionally, but that's it. And they barely seem like they're focusing on anything in life, right? Right, right, like very animalistic blank. Yeah, blank. And one of them at a certain point starts following him.

[00:40:31] I guess he's imprisoned for a bit, right? Like he's kind of ambushed and tied up. Yes, right. So he took a group of soldiers, mercenaries with him on this quest crossing deserts. They defect, they try to whatever the land version of mutiny is, they try to overtake him.

[00:40:50] He's finally left with like himself basically. And he, I guess passes out at some point crossing one of these deserts and wakes up with his hands tied behind his back in like a little niche, like a cave nook that the troglodytes put him in.

[00:41:09] But they don't seem to care at all. Right, this is a weird part of the story. It's like nothing about them suggests that they would just ambush somebody and tie them up. Right, nothing. There's no reason given. And he wakes up, tied,

[00:41:26] and he had seen, I guess the city of the immortals which was where the river was said to be. He'd seen it in the distance. And so he's tied up, he doesn't know what to do. He's able to hop out and there's like some muddy,

[00:41:41] shitty river that he dives into and drinks the water. And somehow manages to cut himself free with like a piece of rock. And this is the river. And it turns out, it turns out that was the river. He doesn't know that, I guess.

[00:41:56] Yeah, so then this is a very cool part of the story where he goes into, he wants to get to the city. Right? It's described as on this like stone plateau that's really hard to scale. Yeah, and then city walls on top of the plateau

[00:42:14] that also can't be scaled. And also yeah, that also can't be scaled. And so he can't get up there. And so he just goes into a cavern. Yeah, there's no doors at all on the city wall. But he sees a ladder sticking out from the ground. Yeah.

[00:42:31] But that takes him down, right? Yeah, takes him down into a chamber. He sees that there are nine doors. Eight of those doors lead right back to the original chamber. They're like labyrinthine, another of Borges' favorites. The ninth one though, it takes him to another chamber.

[00:42:49] And that continues. And he has no sense of how many doors and labyrinths he actually had to cross. He loses his sense of time in there. Yeah, and he is horrified then by what he sees. When he finally gets up. Like he finally, yeah.

[00:43:05] He had these metal rings of a ladder that lead out of whatever he's in now. And then he goes up and he finds himself in a city that is just incoherent, you know? Yeah. It is, it's like a maze. The way he describes that the gods

[00:43:26] that built this place have died. The gods that build this place were mad. He compares it to a maze. He says a maze is a house built purposely to confuse men in architecture. Prodigal in symmetries is made to serve that purpose. In the palace that I imperfectly explored,

[00:43:46] the architecture had no purpose. It's like a senseless city and he's horrified by it. It's kind of a haunting description of how he could be horrified. He says, this city is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured even in the middle

[00:44:07] of a secret desert, pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this city endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous. I do not wanna describe it. That's such a weird sentence, right? I know.

[00:44:23] So long as this city endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous. Like what does that even mean? So weird, like I was, it seems as if it's just trying to communicate the emotion of chaos that he was feeling at the site

[00:44:39] of the architecture of the city that made no sense. It feels like an Escher maze that's more chaotic. Like the way that he describes like upside downstairs, doors that open to nowhere. But without the kind of exuberance of an Escher maze, you know, it just seems more, yeah,

[00:44:59] like a del Toro in Pan's labyrinth feel of like you just have this dread. He says, I do not want to describe it a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull, puleulating with teeth, organs and heads, monstrously yoked together yet hating each other.

[00:45:20] Those might perhaps be approximate images. So is this supposed to be an early metaphor for immortality? This idea of a place that is irrational, it has no purpose, it has no meaning, it's chaotic, it pollutes the past and the future. The fact that a life goes on forever,

[00:45:45] that there's something about it that is, I don't know, like a disease or something. Yeah, I mean, the part that really resonated was the part where it says this architecture had no purpose. And then we later find out that it was the original city built by the immortals

[00:46:03] that was destroyed and this one was put in its place. And it's like counterpoint kind of. Yeah, and I feel like that theme that we'll talk about, I'm sure, of the impossibility of finding meaning when you live forever is reflected in the city that they built.

[00:46:27] Like nothing matters deeply, nothing matters. Normal cities operate under the assumption that things matter and things have a purpose. And like a city is designed in a certain way for certain ends and those ends have value and this is exactly not that, none of those conditions are met.

[00:46:49] Right, exactly. And I take it that there is no one in this city, like he doesn't mention, that there being anybody in this city. No, yeah, no, it's completely abandoned as we'll find out by the troglodytes. Right, so he books it, he leaves this.

[00:47:08] He goes back through all those crypts and tries to erase it from his memory which is kind of interesting. And this whole time, as is another kind of common feature of Borges' stories is he just says like my memory might be distorted,

[00:47:23] I don't know and that's gonna be something that continues but he's already kind of warning us that I don't know how much of this is actually true. Yeah. I'm doing my best but I don't know how good that is. So he comes out and sees the troglodyte

[00:47:40] that had followed him and he's just kind of waiting there, somewhat old looking, you know. Yeah they have like gray skin, gray beards. Yeah. So he says I named it Argos because of the old dog in the Odyssey. So when Odysseus, this is a very heartbreaking scene

[00:48:04] in the Odyssey when Odysseus finally arrives home but he's disguised as a beggar, he arrives home and his dog Argos has been waiting 20 years. Very old dog had been waiting 20 years just to see him and he's lying on a dung heap.

[00:48:19] Nobody's paying any attention to the poor dog anymore and then he sees Odysseus and he's the only one that immediately recognized him and then just dies. It's beautiful and sad, yeah it's heartbreaking. So you could see how he might find it kind of amusing

[00:48:37] to name the troglodyte Argos. And yeah and then there's this little episode of him trying to teach the troglodyte speech and also just kind of wondering what the subjective experience of the troglodyte is. Right before that he had seen the troglodyte trying to write symbols in the dirt

[00:49:03] but they didn't make sense. So he was lying in the San Clemsley drawing and rubbing out a row of symbols that resembled those letters in dream that one is just on the verge of understanding when they merge and blur. So that's kind of puzzling.

[00:49:15] He's like what is he trying? Like surely the troglodyte who can't even speak wouldn't know how to write but nonetheless there were symbols that looked like some sort of writing. Right it's like the city in some ways. That is that dream feeling of like

[00:49:29] being just about to understand something but you can't quite get it. Yes, that's this and I think this story has that feature where it just slips out of your grasp. Every time you think you have it it just all of a sudden becomes like liquid.

[00:49:43] So I like this too he says as he's reflecting on Argos he says from that vivid picture I passed on to others even more extravagant. I reflected that Argos and I lived our lives in separate universes. I reflected that our perceptions were identical

[00:49:59] but that Argos combined them differently than I constructed from them different objects. I reflected that perhaps for him there were no objects but rather a constant dizzying play of swift impressions. I imagined a world without memory, without time. I toyed with the possibility of a language

[00:50:16] that had no nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable adjectives. That's a very Borges idea all of that. Just the kind of idealism, the worry about subjectivism, the idea that the whole world can just be a stream rather than like discrete events.

[00:50:37] I know it's so cognitive science too. Like in perception there is this thing called the binding problem which is you grant that all of the visual information is coming in as whatever, light bouncing. How do we construct a cohesive image of the world

[00:50:55] and not like just see a bunch of separate things? Like we're able to see things as objects. We're able to see scenes as scenes. Your mind is doing that somehow. Your mind is adding all that order from the chaos of your sensations.

[00:51:10] How do we know that the Troglodyte is able to do that? It's like what William James said about babies. They live in a blooming, buzzing confusion because they haven't... Yeah, but I saw it as maybe also you could view it the other way

[00:51:24] because it's a very Buddhist idea that everything is just actually a stream and that it's us that kind of break things up with concepts and try to take something which is this holistic ocean of consciousness and we try to divide it up into discrete parts

[00:51:43] but that's us, that's our mind doing that but the reality is more that it is just a stream. Right, so yeah, I guess I agree. It is your mind imposing order on the stream but what you're saying is that what I'm saying

[00:52:01] what I'm calling order that your mind imposes is maybe not the accurate representation of what's actually out there. And either way... It's certainly not more accurate than somebody else who for other contingent reasons divides up the world differently. Differently, right.

[00:52:16] And either way his concern that Argos the Troglodyte might live in a very different perceptual world is really one of the... He describes it as he says, though but a few paces from me he seemed immensely distant and I think that the distance between one mind

[00:52:34] and another when you don't even know if their mind is constructing the world in the same way that yours is, is vast. When you doubt that, you doubt so much. Yeah, and it's funny because that's true with our dogs, right? For sure.

[00:52:50] Like we know that it's true with our dogs and it doesn't inspire this like, oh I feel this vast distance from my dog emotionally but there's something about, A that it's a Borja story and it's really never about interpersonal kind of relationships

[00:53:06] but be the fact that it's also another human being but one that presumably has thought and intelligence but and their experience is completely different from yours even if you're looking at the exact same thing that's gonna give you distance. Yeah, yeah totally.

[00:53:23] It's like a weird sort of alienation of the kind that Borja is fond of being alone. So he keeps trying to teach it that its name is Argos doesn't seem to totally get it. And doesn't even take an interest. Like you know your dog,

[00:53:40] how kind of like twists its head it wants to know. Like this, this troglodyte isn't even paying attention. Like couldn't bother it. And it's totally not clear why the troglodyte is doing, is it hanging out with this guy at all. And that's another weird thing

[00:53:55] that possibly is addressed at the end of the story with a revelation but then there's rain. Which has to mean something big storm and they're in the desert. So this is kind of a big deal especially for someone who thought that they were mortal.

[00:54:14] And everybody though seems to be happy and just it's kind of a primal event. It was a really hot night and it starts raining and everybody comes out. All the troglodytes leave their little caves. So then there's this passage. Then this is very cool.

[00:54:33] I didn't know this when I first read this. Then with gentle wonder as though discovering something lost and forgotten for many years, Argos stammered out these words. Argos, Ulysses dog. And then without looking at me, that this dog lying on the dung heap.

[00:54:51] And he says we accept reality so readily. Perhaps because we sense that nothing is real. I asked Argos how much of the odyssey he knew. He found using Greek difficult, I had to repeat the question. Very little he replied, less than the meagerest rap-soed.

[00:55:07] It's been 1100 years since I last wrote it. That's great. I had read this story before but I completely forgotten. Yeah, that is such a kind of a bombshell. I don't know if I can't think of anything else in Borges that has something like that. Like a...

[00:55:30] Oh, this weird cave-dreller that's been following you like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Totally. He's actually Homer. He's Homer. Yeah, it's barely M Night Shyamalan of Borges. What do you make of the fact? Should we talk about this now that it's Homer? Fuck, I don't know.

[00:55:49] I was gonna ask you because I don't know anything about Homer and the significance that this has for Borges or for the story narrator, other than it being such an important source of like, the epics being such a culturally important thing and Homer being so ancient. Yeah.

[00:56:08] And it being a journey. Like this is kind of a journey that he's on. This is an odyssey for sure, like the story itself. So I mean, I think there's a couple things that make Homer perfect for exploring immortality.

[00:56:24] Number one, all these people have these kind of fuzzy identities that kind of blur in and out and nobody knows who Homer is or what he is. Is it one person? How much of it was fully set down before other people started writing?

[00:56:41] Nobody knows when this happened within a few hundred years. So we don't kind of know anything about him. I mean, he's very out of focus as a figure, but then he produced these two works, The Iliad and the Odyssey,

[00:56:56] which are, you know, I think two of the top five works of art that have ever been created and also is just the template, you know, the archetype of so many different kinds of stories. You know, you see the Odyssey

[00:57:11] and then you look at something like Inglourious Bastards and they have the same ending. It's like, it just everything that we see now is like a faint echo of these two ethics. Primal source. Exactly. So it's, you know, kind of the Jungian or the Joseph Campbell,

[00:57:30] like this set a kind of mythic template that we've just been doing variations on ever since. And so it has a kind of immortality that is both extraordinary, but then also maybe it is also there's something rotten about it too.

[00:57:51] And I think one of the things he's exploring in this story is art and like the potential immortality of art, is that a good thing or not? You know, like, is it that we're now just getting copies of copies of copies translations? Like we were talking about before,

[00:58:08] like all we're getting is just the fainter and fainter kind of images of it and re-dos and like, you know, I think a thousand and one Arabian knights he talks about or like, you know, or something like the Aeneid or something like the, you know, Inferno.

[00:58:25] These are just different offshoots of the same thing and you know, like if it just keeps going on like that, what's its real importance? I was watching a video with a guy who was an expert in Greek mythology and he's talking about like how

[00:58:49] some of these Greek myths have their origins probably in even earlier African stories and how these are just like they're all retold that it really is this collective memory of humanity that's passed over and been filtered through all of the cultures, but they're all very much versions

[00:59:11] of things that are really, really old. And there are variations on like some sort of primordial theme, you know? Yeah, the hero's journey and all that stuff. We should do Joseph Campbell at some point and it didn't seem like a depressing thought. It seemed like a wonderful thought

[00:59:28] that connects us to all of those things but in the context of this story, what you really get is how fundamentally unimportant it is who wrote it. Right. The life of the individual stretched over immortal time has very little significance. Like actually, you know, Homer being an immortal

[00:59:53] makes it so that it doesn't even matter to him at that point. It's like, yeah. And that he's forgotten it but also just did something as beautiful and perfectly structured as his two epics were. Then he does like a battle of frogs and rats.

[01:00:12] And he says, he was like the God who created first the cosmos and then chaos. He lived for a century in the city of the immortals and when it was destroyed, it was he who counseled that the other one be built.

[01:00:24] We should not be surprised by that as rumored after singing the war of Iliad, he sang of the war between the frogs and rats. But that is a thing by the way. The battle of frogs and mice is a thing attributed to Homer. Really? Yeah. I don't know.

[01:00:39] Yeah, I only know because I looked it up but yeah, that it's the opposite of a God, usually these like mythical gods destroy chaos by bringing order, right? They defeat chaos and bring order and this God first created order and then put chaos in its place.

[01:00:58] And that's another, the final thing about Homer that I was thinking of is gods are heavily featured in Homer's epics and the gods are essentially human like characters except that they're immortal. And so I think a lot of the interesting questions

[01:01:15] that are explored in these epics is the difference between the psychology of a deathless being versus one that knows that it's gonna die and people always talk about the pettiness of the Greek gods. It does seem like human beings are able to have successful relationships

[01:01:40] and find a kind of deep meaning and emotional connection to the world that they can't. Yeah, so right after that cosmos then chaos thing that you read, he says there's nothing very remarkable about being immortal with the exception of mankind.

[01:01:53] All creatures are immortal for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. And then he gives this really nice passage about how even though there are religions that profess to believe in immortality, they don't really because their belief

[01:02:10] in immortality is really the first, it says the first century counts like the first hundred years count and then they believe that for the rest of eternity you're gonna be punished or rewarded for what you did in those first hundred years. So clearly they don't have the conception

[01:02:24] of an immortal life as he's learning. They pay so much attention to this life that they're not really thinking about. The stakes, like all the stakes are in the first hundred years. Right, and if all the stakes are in those first hundred years,

[01:02:38] then you put a lot of meaning on all of the fleeting things that the immortals here don't even bother with. Today's episode is brought to you by one of our favorite sponsors, Givewell.org. It is that time of season. It is the giving time of season.

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[01:05:55] One of the ideas that's coming across is mortality gives a kind of shape or definition to our life. It is like the thing that orders the stream or the ocean of a kind of oneness of consciousness or something like that.

[01:06:10] No, like our mortality allows us to divide the world up in a way that it can make sense to us. And without the knowledge of mortality, then all of the things that we attach meaning to, it just evaporates, right? Like we're just gonna lose our bearings.

[01:06:29] All the stuff that was once organized is now completely chaotic. And it's like they've lost any reason to act. You know, like the guy in the ditch. Yeah, there's a guy who falls into the deepest ditch and nobody bothers to save him.

[01:06:47] And he's immortal, but that doesn't mean he's not really thirsty and being beaten down by the sun. But nobody really bothered to save him and he didn't even seem to care. And I guess they lack so like, you could say you just said dogs and horses

[01:07:01] and pigs and octopuses and dolphins. Also, they don't know that they're gonna die, but they don't have that same kind of total apathy. So it's like these immortals also, they know they're not gonna die, I guess is the thing. Whereas the, you know,

[01:07:22] that people can have fear, you know, but they just know, so that's the key distinction between them and the animals. Yeah, right. It's to know one's self immortal. And then he introduces this crucial point that Borges I think often comes back to in his discussion of infinity,

[01:07:43] where he says in an infinite timeline, everything will happen to everybody. And like everybody, if they live long enough, will write the Odyssey. This is something that he's toied with with Pierre Menard who's trying in his short life to actually recreate the life of the Quixote of Sorrentes.

[01:08:05] And, but he says, no, but this is the problem. Lose individuality in a sense, because you live long enough, you will become every person. All of the things that happen to you will have happened to everybody else and vice versa. And there is this complete blurring

[01:08:25] of who did what, sort of like the letters were blurring together when he saw them. But also the art is blurring together. It's all, yeah. Because of this, like he says, the rude poem of El Sidd is the counterweight demanded by a single epithet of the echelogues

[01:08:42] or a maxim from Heraclitus. So even the art itself is all part of some larger mass, kind of undefinable mass of art, just like that happens with people too. Yeah. The identity blurs together, the art all blurs together. And he introduces this idea of balance

[01:09:03] that he says, just like if you play a game of chance long enough, you'll have the same number of heads and tails. So you'll have balance. So are the lives of men who will do everything. So they will do just as much good as they do evil

[01:09:18] and it'll kind of just balance out. And for every shitty poem, there's a great poem, I guess. And it's a, that strips. And you'll do both. Right. Yeah. And that does seem to strip meaning from doing. Like I like what you said, like they have no more motivation

[01:09:35] to act at some point. They will have done everything. They're like a universalized Beardon's ass. Like there's no reason for them to do anything because they're eventually just going to do the opposite and kind of nullify it. So what's the point? Right.

[01:09:52] He describes one of the troglodytes as like not even moving. He's just lying on his back for years and so then like a bird, a bird created nested on his chest. Exactly. Yeah. So like I love that image of this just guy lying there for, you know, months.

[01:10:09] And so birds like, oh, this is a good way. My way did that with my basketball hoop outside, just right in the back. And so like for two months, I can't play basketball every every spring. It's been that long since you made a basket.

[01:10:24] He also, by the way, says of the troglodytes that all they ate was snakes, which to me, it just, it happened to evoke the snake eating its own tail. Like then I don't know if that was the intention, but,

[01:10:37] but, but I thought of them devouring the snake as somehow representing that the infinity of the Aralboros or however you say it. Yeah, that makes sense. Now I guess they just kind of go through history. It's like a Bill and Ted kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.

[01:10:55] He has like a brief, like just a very brief biography of all the things that he did. And he fought in 1066 at the Stanford Bridge. He doesn't, but he doesn't remember which side he fought on, which of those. Yeah, exactly. Because what does it matter?

[01:11:13] Like if you fought on one side this time, there would be some other time. But then this idea of like there's always a counterweight to the weight is like, wait, if there's a river of immortality, there must be one of mortality.

[01:11:26] So then they set out to find just as they set out before to find the river of immortality, now they're setting out to find the river of mortality. Right. And he says in a finite world where there was only like it's only a finite

[01:11:41] number of rivers, eventually they will have drank from every river. And so eventually they will find the river of mortality. Yeah, so then this is actually before this, but it takes them a long time to find this river and they go through all of history.

[01:11:57] He gets to the 1700s and that's when he got the six volumes of Pope's Iliad, which he loved. But now it's like, wait, is this Homer or is this still the soldier? Like all that is starting to get blurred. He got to 1921.

[01:12:16] He says, and there my mind came to my mind other mornings, long in the past, when I had looked out over the Red Sea, when I was a Roman tribune and fever and magic and inactivity consumed the soldiers.

[01:12:28] And then this is right when he gets scratched on the back. All of a sudden he says, I am once more mortal. I told myself over and over again, again, I am like all other men. That night I slept until daybreak and that's the end of this part.

[01:12:44] Yeah. So I like that scratching himself and bleeding and having that realization with some sort of happiness or relief. Like he slept well that night knowing that he was going to die. Yeah, because that quest, you know, like he had done the reverse

[01:13:00] quest before and now he's done the opposite quest. And it is, yeah, it's actually more satisfying for him. Right. And you do get the sense that he's found a kind of peace from it. Right.

[01:13:15] So, yeah, so then he then he reflects on it and he says, you know, I just reread everything that I wrote and I'm a little worried because there is some falseness in it. I'm not quite sure whether I haven't intermingled the experiences

[01:13:32] of two completely different people in this story. All right. And because I was like, remember where at certain point he just inexplicably he said spattered out Greek and that is from the catalog of ships from the from the Iliad.

[01:13:49] And there's a bunch of things like he calls the Nile River, the Egypt River. Yeah. Yeah. It's like he's going through to catch himself having plagiarism. Like he's he lists out the things that he said that should raise flags that there was some falseness in his story.

[01:14:10] It's like a self aware GPT chat. Oh, shit. Like there's obvious. I'm sorry. Yeah. I apologize for any confusion. I apologize. Yeah. Which is it's sort of weird. I guess this is all just to say that his existence has blurred so much

[01:14:31] with the existence of another person over time. Yeah. And like you were saying earlier, that that just is inevitable for immortals that their identity starts to kind of merge. And I think that is a key thing of the story is, you know, and this might

[01:14:48] be even though I don't I think immortality is presented with this kind of dread and weariness, kind of like heaviness. There is something nice about the idea that we're all just part of a bigger picture, you know, but there's something about the

[01:15:06] immortals that that information just drains life of meaning. But once he becomes mortal again, it is something to celebrate. And then like you were saying, like it feels like it is something to celebrate that we're all making the same collage. You know, we're working on the same.

[01:15:28] Yeah, tapestry and vests. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's something that that I guess you can't realize in the short lifespan of a normal human who there is a passage that so I like so much like he says talking about the importance of

[01:15:50] death in human life says death or reference to death makes men precious and pathetic. Their ghostliness is touching any act they perform maybe their last there's no face that is not on the verge of blurring and fading away like the faces in a dream.

[01:16:05] Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent among the immortals. On the other hand, every act, every thought is the echo of others that preceded it in the past with no visible beginning and the faithful pre-sage of others that will

[01:16:19] repeat it in the future. Advertiginem. There is nothing that is not as though lost between indefatigable mirrors. And so, oh man, it's so much here. So I think that death maybe at least from the perspective of the immortal makes us petty in a way because we think that

[01:16:43] everything is super important and maybe it is. It is important because you're going to die. But from the perspective of somebody who lives who lives centuries, millennia, they realize that nothing matters in a way that we don't.

[01:16:54] But the truth is we're all engaging in that same act of working on the same tapestry. We just don't we just can't really we don't have that perspective. And I guess the tragedy is they do have that perspective, but unfortunately, all meaning has been

[01:17:11] stripped out of any kind like their experience. And so they can't get any kind of pleasure from that. It's weird because, yeah, the immortality isn't presented as despair. Like you were saying, like it's apathy. The overwhelming feeling is is just not caring. Who gives a shit?

[01:17:33] You know, like, you know, there are certain things that you do that are exciting. You could go bungee jumping or even just have this kind of near death experience and that that gives you a kind of visceral thrill and you feel really alive at every

[01:17:47] level that's taken away from you if you're immortal, you know, like to be able to, you know, make a successful career at a certain point in your life. But if you're going to live forever, you would definitely do this at some point anyway. You will have bungee jumped.

[01:18:02] You will. We didn't even say bungee jumping is a mean like why? Like why which who cares? Yeah. Know you're there's no actual risk or threat. There's nothing like you can't even conceive of the idea that this would be dangerous. The thrill is gone.

[01:18:18] Yes, the thrill is gone. We didn't even we didn't even mention that the beginning quote that that opens the story, which is from Francis Bacon that says Solomon say there is no new thing upon the earth. So that is Plato had an imagination that all

[01:18:35] knowledge was but remembrance. So Solomon giveth his sentence that all novelty is but oblivion. Yeah, that is I mean clearly like that is like a core message of the story, both that there's no new thing on earth, that all this stuff is

[01:18:51] just cycling through and we're doing different variations. We talked about this earlier of these same kind of mythic archetypes and we're just remembering that in each new stage of history. And then the idea that novelty is but oblivion. I think that's if if if you do something genuinely

[01:19:15] new, it's and not within this, I don't know, archetypal structure, then it's just immediately going to be forgotten. I don't know. Is that how you interpret that part? Interesting. I know I hadn't but I don't think I had a firm interpretation of the novelty is oblivion.

[01:19:33] Like I was reading it more like it's illusory. Like there's no there's not actually novelty. Like there is no there there's no once you've done everything, there is no novelty. But but I don't know that that's the right interpretation. Maybe because at least the way the sentence is

[01:19:50] structured, it's like the the knowledge is remembering stuff that's already been done and anything that's not already been done is immediately going to evaporate or disappear. Or it will be swallowed in the machinations of history or just become incorporated and be repeated.

[01:20:12] And it won't ever all be Marvel movies. I'll be Marvel movies that are based based on that. Oh, Chloe's yeah, the the writer like really interesting just kind of new genre of film. Oh, now you're just doing actually the Eternals.

[01:20:32] As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory. There are only words. He's lived so long that it's not even it's like propositional knowledge at this point. It's not it's not actually recall. It is not strange that time may have confused

[01:20:49] those that once portrayed me with those that were symbols of the fate of the person that accompanied me for so many centuries. I have been Homer soon like Ulysses, I shall be nobody. Soon I shall be all men. I shall be dead.

[01:21:02] Yeah, well, the I shall be nobody. Yeah, that is a reference to Odysseus in the Odyssey on the Cyclops Island and the way he tricked the Cyclops to not get help from the other Cyclops as they were attacking him is to say that his name was nobody.

[01:21:27] And then there's this post script that is more fascinating the more I think about it. The post script said to have been written in 1950. Now note that like this was originally published in 1947. So he's like future traveling. And so he says a post script from 1950.

[01:21:47] Among the commentaries inspired by the foregoing publication, the most curious, if not most, or bane is biblically titled The Code of Many Colors. He makes up a fake book that was published in 1948. And interesting title to yeah, like for in the context of this kind of chaotic story.

[01:22:02] Oh yeah. I think that that basically said speaks of this tale attributed to the rare book dealer Joseph Cartopoulos, which is the name of the the immortal, the the protagonist of the story. Where he says basically that this was it can't

[01:22:20] be authentic because it was pretty much ripped off from Pliny, Dick Hart and Thomas Dick Quincy and from Bernard Shaw. And he infers that the entire document is apocryphal. And whoever's writing this, Borges, to my way of thinking that conclusion is unacceptable at

[01:22:38] the end as the end approaches wrote Cartopoulos. There are no longer any images from memory. There are only words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated words from other men. Those were the alms left by left him by the hours in the centuries.

[01:22:50] It's it's meta in the way that I love. Borges always is he knows that nothing that he writes can be original. And so he's offering a critique of his own story and then a defense saying like, yeah, like I've just I've just told you that this

[01:23:05] story cannot help but be composed from the mishmash of all history that is that is renders any any notion of original or creative as meaningless. So to to the claim that this is apocryphal or didn't really happen. And he just says, no, that's just how things go.

[01:23:28] Like it is a blend of everything that's ever happened and it is also my novel story. Yeah. You know, there's one part of it. It's like we're all just moving pieces around a board and just like we all have the same pieces and we're just moving them around

[01:23:45] in different ways. And we call that our original work because we're all just doing the same thing from the same sources. And that's actually like you said, it's both a criticism and a defense. It's like, you know, certainly the way

[01:23:58] Borges is doing it is better than the way I could do it. But then there's also this kind of negative aspect of it where he says that the words are taken out of place and mutilated. And so you get the sense that it's also

[01:24:14] kind of degrading that you have this original shining source of artistic goodness and that we just keep kind of making it worse, feeding it through the same system and the copy, you know, the brightness of it is just fading it the longer it goes.

[01:24:35] So, you know, that's it's kind of interesting that at the on the one hand you can think of this as well, that's just what creativity and art is. You're not coming out of the swamps of nothingness. You are doing it within a tradition

[01:24:48] and a culture and a whole and a whole history, a whole all of human history. You're working within that context, but then you also get this sense that it's just getting worse and worse and more deformed the more we're doing it.

[01:25:01] This is what I kind of love about this, that, that dual understanding that it's both valuable and nothing. Because when he says that these are just words from other men taken out of place and mutilated and then he describes it the last sentence of

[01:25:21] the last clause, those were the alms left him by the hours and the centuries where it's degraded. As you say, the alms like your beggar you're getting scraps from somebody who's given them to you. But to you, the beggar, those alms are your life. It's meaningful.

[01:25:41] And so he's saying like he has the insight to know that his story has borrowed so heavily from other stories, so as to him for him to not even know whether things originated from him or not. These are the alms given to him by the centuries.

[01:25:56] Borges, these are the alms given to us that that great tradition of ideas. Yeah. And we're just a degraded version where a degraded version, but that's all we have. You know, we're the starving beggar who's been given the snake to eat like.

[01:26:13] It's so funny because you can look at it in both this positive and negative way. Like I love genre movies and genre art in general, where you take kind of established tropes, but you put your own spin on it, you know. And like Borges is obviously like

[01:26:31] you said doing this here. You have this archetypical kind of story, a quest for immortality. And then it kind of spins off in all these Borges ways with all these Borges themes and ideas and philosophical questions. Like that's a good thing, but you know, I'm struggling to feel

[01:26:54] why he has this negative spin on it. You know, in what way is it just like a kind of Camus idea of absurdity? We want it to be something wholly original and it can't be. Is that but that wouldn't even account for the degrading of it.

[01:27:12] You know, it seems like the thing itself, the ideas, the philosophy, the art, the idea that is getting worse as history progresses as it gets fed through this system. Yeah, but I'm not convinced that Borges is convinced that it's degradation. I think he's presenting both both sides here.

[01:27:32] And I think what he's saying maybe is that from the lens of eternity. Yeah, this is all like some Savannah African who saw a Marvel movie would be like, you know, you're just telling the same story we told and maybe shittier equipier with more CG

[01:27:53] and Borges is saying from the perspective of the mortal like when that guy got pricked by the thorn and realized he was mortal again. Things meant enough for him to write the story for the first time in all those centuries. All of a sudden he had reason

[01:28:12] and motivation to write down that original story or original in a way that he knows is not really original, but nonetheless the energy for to create. And so I think Borges is not so down on it. What he's doing is he's like looking into the face of that

[01:28:28] and saying, and yet I still wrote this. And it's a separate issue about just actually being immortal and how that strips the meaning of everything and makes everything dreary, whether or not it was original or, you know, part of the same variations on the same themes.

[01:28:48] It seems like when you're immortal, it doesn't. Nothing like that could possibly matter. And, you know, you're going to hear the stories. You're going to hear it again. And you're going to, you know, you heard it once, you're going to hear it again. Like why?

[01:29:00] Like what is it? Probably tell the story at some point. But unlike the troglodytes, who literally would just have like rats eat at them or birds nest on them. He did have enough of a kind of motivation to go through, you know, 2000 years of history.

[01:29:17] But the only reason he had that is because he was trying to find the river of mortality. So you like the only thing that's right prospect of death to get yourself to like get off the ground. Right. Yeah. That's the only thing that got

[01:29:31] the troglodytes to leave their cities that somebody came around and told them, hey, you realize that there's probably this mortality river. Yeah. Some a prior argument that convinced them if there was an immortality river, there must be a mortality. Right. Yeah. But yeah, I think he's he's

[01:29:48] being an optimist, but he's but he's his eyes are open to what's going on. I wouldn't call this an optimistic story. No, no. I'm just saying that he's dending with not like a condemnation of ever doing yeah, ever writing because it's I don't know.

[01:30:08] I find some solace in the thought that it's all that this has been the common experience of all humanity that we might tell the same stories. I think it's fucking amazing that, you know, we're reading the Iliad and the Odyssey like I do this every year and

[01:30:23] people today can connect with those stories. Incredible. Even though there was written like 3000 years ago, it's that's amazing. Like it's inspiring, but maybe the only reason we can appreciate that is because we're going to die. We understand that time has some kind of significance, you know.

[01:30:42] So there is this other thing that I just thought of, which is that when we read those things like as you were describing, it's amazing that we're reading the Iliad. It's amazing that we're reading Borges to be honest. Yeah. That this is a kind of immortality for us.

[01:30:59] Like the true immortals, they have become Homer. They have become Odysseus. They've lived long enough that everything happens to them that would happen to anybody else. We can connect in a find some form of like, you know, quote unquote immortality by we can become Homer and Odysseus

[01:31:17] and Borges through the act of like engaging with what they've written. Yeah. And yeah. That's that's the kind of immortality that brings some, you know, it's not true immortality. It just brings some meaning to me to connect like that. And really from now on,

[01:31:34] everything is just going to be fainter and fainter echoes of very bad wizards. So it's, you know, like we have set the new template of what like all culture what's amazing, Taylor, that despite being somewhat convinced by Borges that we have actually created such original

[01:31:50] thoughts and no, I mean, no, it just so happens that, you know, we finally brought something. We finally brought something new under the sun. And now it just all goes. This is it's like ADBC kind of there's there's like a VBW is like what what

[01:32:13] it's going to be from now on. All right. It's a good place to end. That's a great story. It's so good. It's so fertile. I feel like we could have another like hour and a half conversation about other aspects of it that we haven't touched on.

[01:32:30] He's a fucking he's just this gift that keeps on giving. It's amazing. And if you have if you've listened to these episodes on Borges and have not read it, pick up the collected fictions translated by Andrew Hurley. It's it's worth it. These stories are short.

[01:32:46] This is why I love them so much. They're short, but chock full, just dense, full of ideas. I think this is his longest story and it's like 10 pages or something like that 11 pages. I love that efficiency. Like yeah, for him, this is like an infinite length story.

[01:33:04] All right. Well, thank you, Borges. It really is like the golden goose. Like I feel like we could do episodes until we die on Borges stories. That's right. Without repeating. Or don't die. All right. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizard.