Knowledge

It is late, and a question arrives the way they usually do, sideways, from something half-read: what is the difference between a virus and a viroid? I don’t open a browser with its eleven tabs, or one of the large hosted models. I type the question into a window on my own machine, and a few seconds later an answer appears. A viroid is a bare loop of RNA, no protein coat, no genes for making proteins, a parasite reduced almost to a single gesture. The answer is not brilliant. It is adequate, it is immediate, and it never left the room. …

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story about a young man named Ireneo Funes who, after a fall from a horse, could forget nothing. Every leaf on every tree, every cloud he had ever seen, every sentence spoken in his presence, remained available to him in total, permanent, unbearable detail. Borges’s point in “Funes the Memorious” was not that perfect memory is a gift. It is that a mind which cannot forget cannot think, because thinking requires generalization, and generalization requires the discipline of throwing most of the world away. Human memory works precisely because it is lossy, associative, and biased toward what mattered emotionally rather than what happened exactly. …