A Visitor's Guide to the Museum of Human Intelligence
(21) The Atrophied Self: How the Self Is Not an Ineradicable Feature of the Cosmos but There Might Be Ways of Keeping It Going
By Charlie Clark
“Iussisti enim et sic est, ut poena sua sibi sit omnis inordinatus animus.” — Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, Confessiones
“What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.” — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
With a final tremendous shove, you force the massive steel door inward. The calcium deposited along the stile crumbles and fills the air with dust as a whoosh of warm, dry air rushes through the opening. Whatever this structure is that you’ve found in the side of the hill beneath the kudzu, it has temperature control—and positive pressure.
LEDs slowly brighten to reveal a small vestibule. The floor is tiled with blue-green slate, and the opposite wall is the rough limestone of the hill—in its center, an inner door. You suspect that the builders, whoever they were, took advantage of a natural cave system. The inner door is carved from a dark hardwood. It’s smaller than the one you’ve just pushed through, but still more than man-height. Above the lintel, brass letters read, “Museum of Human Intelligence.”
The inner door swings open easily on oiled hinges, and you let out a small gasp as the space beyond comes into view. The room is a tall rotunda with several corridors opening off of it. Both walls and ceiling are the same natural limestone as the outer wall but carved and polished into gleaming flutes and facets. The room is lit by hidden skylights, the day outside transported by mirrors down through the hill. In the center of the room is a large, semi-circular reception desk of the same dark wood as the door you’ve just passed through. You fail to register the soft click and thump as the door latches and seals behind you. Behind the desk sits a woman with a boxy telescreen for a face.
The woman stands and approaches you as the screen flashes, “Welcome to the Museum of Human Intelligence. I am the Docent.” The words fade, then new ones appear, “If you can read this message, please be advised that several alarming things are about to happen. You are in no danger. Simply remain where you are until the tracking procedure is complete.”
As soon as this message disappears, the room is plunged into near darkness as a siren begins to wail. Foul-smelling smoke pours in from several of the corridors. The siren is replaced by the howls of wild animals and claps of thunder, and red flashes like lightning crash through the smoke. One corridor remains clear, a bright white light shining at its end. You feel an instinctual urge to flee in this direction, but you force yourself to stay still. After a few moments, a pair of sliding steel doors slam shut across the lit corridor. The sounds abruptly cease, the lights come back up, and the smoke rapidly clears, whisked away by hidden fans. Above the now-sealed corridor, you read the legend, “Remediation Wing.”
Returning your attention to the Docent, you watch a new message appear: “Thank you for your patience. The Founders of the Museum designed the Remediation Wing to assist future visitors who lacked skills, such as the ability to read Latin script, that they considered essential to engage the larger collection. Visitors to the Remediation Wing are instructed in both spoken and written English, logic, and arithmetic. They are released after 12 years or upon demonstrating the ability to prove the Pythagorean theorem.” You suppress a small spasm of panic, and struggle to formulate your question in the archaic English of the Docent: “And . . . me . . . how long . . . must I stay?”
A new message appears: “I detect that you have asked a question. The minimum stay for a non-remedial visitor is 4 hours. I will provide a further explanation of the rules for visitors momentarily. Before we proceed, I should clarify a point that may be disappointing to you. While I am capable of responding to a limited number of questions, I am not programmed to generate guesses or speculations. Such devices were becoming increasingly common at the time of my creation, but the Founders intentionally excluded them from the design of the Museum.
“Which brings me to my next function: to explain the history and purpose of the Museum of Human Intelligence, as understood by its Founders. As you explore the collection further, you may encounter many sources of the Founders’ beliefs. You may also—it is worth noting—encounter sources that contradict or complicate the Founders’ beliefs. All this is by design. My design, as the Docent, is to provide you with a summary of their views, a brief orientation to their project.
Some went so far as to conclude that rationality was a feature—perhaps the defining feature—of ‘human nature.’ This was, of course, rubbish.
“For many thousands of years before the construction of the Museum, hominids had been evolving ever larger brains. Evolutionarily speaking, this enormous investment in neural hardware seems to have been driven, at first, by the need to operate the primates’ wonderfully articulate hands. With their expanded fine motor skills came advances in tool-making, until the hominids became the first species to live not only in a natural environment, but in an artificial world of their own making. At some point, those big hominid brains were applied to articulation in a different sense, and symbolic language emerged as an entirely novel dimension of creaturely existence. On the foundation of language, Homo sapiens erected the edifice of abstraction, self-reflection, and social organization that constituted human intelligence.
“As human society became more complex, different varieties of human intelligence became concentrated in particular sections of the population. Some human thinkers came to identify intelligence with the aspect of cognition characteristic of the leisured upper classes, which they variously described as wisdom, rationality, or science. The knowledge that sustained human daily life was devalued by comparison. Some went so far as to conclude that rationality was a feature—perhaps the defining feature—of ‘human nature.’ This was, of course, rubbish. The many expressions of the innate human capacity for acquiring and acting upon knowledge were responses to complex scaffoldings of external conditions. Take away these conditions, and the relevant varieties of human intelligence soon disappeared.
“The conditionality of human intelligence was proven by humanity’s experience in the Industrial Revolution. It had taken humanity perhaps five hundred generations to establish the rudiments of agriculture. Then—in about five generations—agricultural workers virtually disappeared in ‘developed’ areas as farming was mechanized. A vast deskilling occurred: most of the population lost the knowledge of how to produce its own food. Not long after, a similar process began to affect so-called ‘knowledge work’ as humanity’s digital tools became capable of automating first their own programming and then many other kinds of textual production. Human intelligence began a rapid devolution as the ‘cognitive elite’ abandoned even moderately difficult kinds of reading and writing in droves. The Founders called this new turn in the human condition the ‘Abdication.’
“In the year 2027 C.E., a group of scholars, artists, and other humanists gathered here in Lost Cove, Tennessee, to devise a response to the Abdication. The Lost Covians feared that the Abdication risked putting future generations beyond the reach of intelligible conversation with the past; they feared, indeed, that future generations would be effectively post-human. The Museum would preserve the conditions of human intelligence—which had remained more or less constant for four thousand years—for experience, study, or replication by the post-humans.”
You blink rapidly. Your eyes feel flooded by the huge stream of words that has passed over the Docent’s “face.” Your brain gasps for air. A final line of text remains fixed on the screen, “Would you like me to repeat this message?” Having learned that even as a “non-remedial visitor” you are temporarily imprisoned, you only absorbed about a third of the Docent’s historical exposition. Cautiously, you nod your head, and the message begins to scroll again, starting from, “For many thousands of years . . . .” You understand a bit more on this second attempt. This time, the Docent concludes, “Shall we move on?” Again, you cautiously nod your head, and again, she begins to “speak”:
“Rules for visitors: 1) No running. 2) Attempts to harm the Museum or its contents will result in the visitor’s forcible removal from the premises.” A brief, somewhat ominous pause, then she continues, “I’ve already mentioned 3) Minimum stay is 4 hours. 4) No photography, audio, or video recording.” This last rule is succeeded by a rush of text, as the Docent returns to “speaking naturally.” She adds, “Actually, you should find that any electronic devices on your person have been permanently disabled by electro-magnetic pulse. Sorry about that. But the Founders considered memory-demanding and body-integrating practices essential to the Museum’s function. Where appropriate, pencils and paper are provided so you can take notes in longhand. (You still have hands! The Founders would be so pleased.)
“Now, with that introduction out of the way, my function is to accompany you on your tour of the Museum and provide brief explanations of the contents. My display will present a map of the Museum for your consultation. Note that I do not provide turn-by-turn directions. Already at the time of the Museum’s founding, a large proportion of human beings had lost the ability to read maps—and, indeed, the ability to orient themselves in space at all—through overreliance on navigational technology. Do not be discouraged by the challenge of finding your way around the Museum: it is an intended and valuable part of your experience of human intelligence. While you are free to begin your exploration in any direction, might I recommend beginning in the Conservatory?”
Many humans had come to believe that taste was a matter of only individual, subjective significance—that what one liked had no bearing on one’s moral or intellectual qualities.
You wonder whether your 4-hour minimum visit has just started or whether it started when you first entered the rotunda. Either way, you have at least three and a half hours left, so you take the marble corridor that, according to the Docent’s map, leads to the Conservatory and “Thaumaterion.” The corridor ends in a small vestibule with two doors leading off in different directions. The door on the right leads to the Conservatory. You take it.
For a moment, you believe that you have exited the Museum entirely, that the door has brought you out of the caves to the surface. In the next moment, it occurs to you that it’s at least thirty degrees warmer in here than it is outside. The air is moist and fragrant; you are surrounded by greenery, and many of the plants are bright with colorful blooms. A small brook babbles across the moss-covered limestone. Looking up and around, you realize you are inside a huge, subterranean greenhouse. Refracted daylight shines in from skylights in the expanse of cavern above the glass.
As your eyes adjust, you notice that there’s piano music playing in the background, something intricate and harmonious. You also see that some panels of the greenhouse walls have been replaced with patterns of colored glass: some depicting people or animals, others apparently abstract. There is a gravel path that winds around the room over the moss, through the small trees and blooming plants. There are several dark wooden benches. In the four corners of the room glass frames or cases enclose decorative objects: a painting of a seascape, a sculpture of two entwined human forms, a large black-and-red vase, a pair of leather shoes. Near the center of the room, beside the stream, stands an ornate iron table and chair. Beneath a cloche on the table is a china teapot, teacup and saucer, and a plate bearing a buttered scone, a dish of clotted cream, a basket of strawberries, and a small knife. The tea is strong and hot. The knife is razor-sharp.
As you eat strawberries and cream, the Docent explains, “The Founders believed that the primary obstacle for reintroducing human intelligence would be the repair of the post-humans’ taste. For some time prior to the Abdication, many humans had come to believe that taste was a matter of only individual, subjective significance—that what one liked had no bearing on one’s moral or intellectual qualities. In retrospect, this was, if anything, even more foolish than the belief that rationality was an ineradicable feature of human nature.
“The Conservatory is designed to provide the post-human subject with an immersive experience of the best and highest sensations available to the individual in solitude. Here you are surrounded by true pleasures—natural and artificial, simple and complex—addressing themselves to you through all five senses. While a single visit will do little to recalibrate your taste toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, we hope that the food at least will inspire you to return for many more. You may also be interested to know that the collection in the Conservatory rotates. (You find us in rather a classical mood today.) When you come again, you may be greeted by jazz or tamales or ikebana.”
Having finished your tea, you leave the Conservatory and proceed into the Thaumaterion. There is shingle underfoot and the air is damp and salty, but while the ocean before you disappears over the horizon, its waves are motionless and silent. The “beach” on which you’re standing is a cove enclosed by high rock walls, and to each side, one to your left and one to your right are the entrances to “sea caves.” Roughly in the middle of this stretch of beach is a large, irregularly shaped tide pool. As you approach the tide pool, you discover that it is teeming with real sea life: anemones, sea stars, crustaceans, a few small fish, as well as many varieties of seaweed.
Overhead, you see that clouds move across the sky, which must be an enormous telescreen. You wonder whether the room can simulate rain. In a kind of answer to this unvoiced question, the Docent pipes up, “The Thaumaterion’s ceiling provides a highly accurate simulation of the sky as viewed from the Lagoon of Pyrrha on the Isle of Lesbos. The display is currently set to 2pm EET on March 14, 1879. You may adjust the time by gesture.” Feeling somewhat foolish, you wave your hand at the ceiling. Nothing happens. You turn an invisible dial. Nothing. The Docent, seeing your confusion, says, “Allow me to demonstrate.” She reaches up one of her hands and mimes taking hold of the sun, then with a jerk of her arm, flings it to the west.
The heavens revolve rapidly, flashing between light and dark, until like a wheel losing momentum they slow and then settle on a night sky filled with millions of stars. Next, she makes a double-handed motion like spreading a curtain, and you watch as a section of sky grows larger, red Mars growing from a pinprick to an apple then hanging larger than the largest moon, like you are flying out into the infinite night. You stare awestruck for a long moment. Then, the Docent brings her hands back together and the sky snaps shut. “You get the idea,” she says.
You reach up and grasp a bit of sky and slide it over until the sun rises in the east. Then, you consult the map that returns to the Docent’s face whenever she is not speaking. You see that the sea cave to the south is labelled, “Hall of Perennial Questions,” while the sea cave to the north is the “Gallery of Known Unknowns.” The Docent chimes in, “Those are some of our more abstract exhibits. Perhaps something to see on a future visit.” You give a small shrug. “Shall we proceed to the Curatorium?” she says. You leave the Thaumaterion and walk back toward the rotunda.
The Founders believed that the defining challenge in a world of such overabundance was the problem of curation, of selecting what from among all that one would choose to know.
You follow the Docent’s map down another of the Museum’s corridors to the door of the Curatorium. Entering in, you find that the Curatorium somewhat resembles the rotunda—but double the size and turned upside down. The edges of the room open into a dozen small corridors like spokes from the hub of a wheel, but rather than rising to a dome, the center of this room descends into a deep basin. The basin is carved into several terraces, each lined with a row of large desks, each desk flanked by a triptych of empty bookcases. In the heart of the room, at the bottom of the basin, is a nine-sided cabinet filled with hundreds of small drawers.
The Docent says, “Please take a seat.” You walk down a couple of terraces and take the second desk from the end. “Excellent choice,” says the Docent. “And welcome to the Curatorium. In the late twentieth century, a human scholar by the name of Robin Dunbar established that the average social group size for a given species of primates was correlated with brain size. The bigger its brain, the more social relationships the primate could keep track of. Thus baboons could manage a troop of about 50, while chimpanzees could manage up to 100. Dunbar calculated that the human brain should be able to manage about 150 social relationships. That 150 became known as Dunbar’s number.
“The Founders recognized that something of the same kind was true about relationships with writers, musicians, and other kinds of creators. Obviously, a human could read more than 150 books or listen to more than 150 symphonies. A human being could even read more than 150 authors or listen to more than 150 composers. But studying the lives of the well-educated, it became clear that something like Dunbar’s number was in effect. There was a limit to the number of sources the human mind could effectively work with. A great scholar of Greek literature could know Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Sappho, Pindar, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon—know them inside and out. He could also be well-versed in Virgil and conversant with Cicero. He might read Shakespeare and Dickens for pleasure and play Bach sonatas on the violin. But there were limits. If he knew all that, he probably couldn’t tell Revolver from Rubber Soul and his opinions on Faulkner were not to be relied on. The average person, meanwhile, knew far less.
“Meanwhile, the libraries where humans collected texts had become unfathomably bloated with texts. A university’s library might easily exceed ten million items, representing the accumulation of many thousands of works in each of many thousands of sub-subspecialties. The Founders believed that the defining challenge in a world of such overabundance was the problem of curation, of selecting what from among all that one would choose to know. Hence, the Curatorium. They consulted among themselves and with other educated humans to create a collection of 22,500 (150^2) of the best and most important texts and recordings from every era and culture. Technical manuals and reports of scientific research were generally disfavored, except where they would be intelligible and interesting to a non-specialist. Genre fiction, self-help, and celebrity memoirs were excluded. (Exceptions were made for works that had proven particularly influential within and beyond their own genres.) The result was a total collection smaller than many community libraries, comprising the ‘trunk’ of the tree of human knowledge.
“The heart of the Curatorium is the index.” The Docent gestures to the nine-sided cabinet. “The index sorts each item in the collection many times over: by topic, author, genre, influence, chronology, geography, language, format, selector, and more. Having witnessed the damage to human intelligence inflicted by both natural language search and algorithmic recommendation, the Founders rejected all proposals for a digital catalog. Much thought was also given to the physical organization of the collection. Like items are not always shelved together: there is significant continuity within individual shelves and the contents of adjacent cases are at least obliquely related, but some placements were left to chance so as to encourage serendipitous encounters.”
The Docent gestures to the three bookcases behind your desk, “As you continue your adventure in human intelligence, you are invited to create a collection within the Collection. Each set of visitor’s shelves was designed to hold approximately 150 items. (The Founders hoped that the human love for making lists of favorites would survive in the post-humans.) Our facilities are designed to automatically copy and replace any item transferred to a visitor’s shelf, so don’t hesitate to claim a new favorite for your own.”
You spend a long time flipping through the cards in the index and then an even longer time wandering the “stacks” in the corridors leading off of the Curatorium. You return to your desk with three items in hand. You don’t feel up to figuring out your desk’s ancient videodisc player, so you shelve Seven Samurai for a future visit. But you’ve seen pictures of phonographs in ancient texts, so with a little help from the Docent, you manage to get A Love Supreme playing at 33 ⅓, then spend half an hour thumbing through Ornithological Biography. When the record stops, you shelve both it and the book, then turn to the Docent. “Time . . . to go?” you ask.
The Docent nods, and then begins to speak, “Yes, you have completed your 4-hour minimum stay. You are free to go.” She stands and follows as you begin walking toward the rotunda. As you’re walking, she continues, “In the future, you might like to visit some of our other facilities. There are the Reflection Rooms, which are modeled on the cells in which certain ancients sought the limits of human intelligence. There’s the Puzzle Garden: lots of fun. And of course, there’s the Critical Annex. (Some of the Founders thought it should have been left out of the design entirely, but several of the rooms are quite interesting: There’s the Judgment Lab, where you can review items that were excluded from the Curatorium’s collection. And there’s the Natality Café where you can try your hand at making texts of your own accompanied by a soundbath of idle chatter and on-demand caffeine.)”
When you reach the rotunda, the Docent resumes her place behind the desk. She says, “Before you go, the Founders programmed me to warn all visitors that their reentry into the post-human world could prove challenging. Even in the ancient world, you could get yourself killed by displaying too much human intelligence. At the same time, the Founders believed that human intelligence would not come to full flower in isolation. It was incomplete until shared, until it became an object of communion. So back into the world you must go. You may return as early as tomorrow and as often as you like. Godspeed.”
Charlie Clark is a writer and retractor. He lives in New Hampshire.
