Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

You will never be again What you never were before.  Theodor Storm Every morning Odysseus sits on the beach and casts his eyes across the sun-freckled water. The breeze is fresh and the waves rumble gently as they break. He is crying. For seven years he has been a prisoner in paradise, the unwilling consort of the beautiful nymph Calypso, who loves and fawns on him. Odysseus can’t bear it. Since leaving Troy victorious, he has wandered the seas, hounded by the god Poseidon, who would prevent him from finding his way home to Ithaca. Eventually Zeus is driven to pity and orders Calypso to release him. “Where shall a man find sweetness to surpass his own home and his parents? In far lands he shall not, though he find a house of gold.” Odysseus builds himself a raft, and after one last night of lovemaking and weeping he sails off alone. The home we return to is never the home we left. When Odysseus lands on Ithaca, he learns that his estate has been occupied by suitors vying for the hand of his wife Penelope, and dissipating his fortune while they wait. Odysseus comes to her, disguised as a beggar, and kills the suitors. After he proves to her who he is, the couple goes to their bed, which Odysseus had made with his own hands, using a tree planted in the ground as one of the bedposts. They make love and fall asleep. There is no space between the two of them, between the couple and Odysseus’s handiwork, between the bed and the tree, between the tree and the earth. It as if they all sprang fully formed from the soil of Ithaca. Oneness has been restored. At least for now. The fate of Aeneas was to be different. Troy was no more, vanquished by the craven guile of the Greeks. As they poured from the belly of the wooden horse to destroy the city, Aeneas reached for his sword to resist. But Venus in a vision urged him to flee with others. A priest grabbed the fetish statues, their defeated gods, and headed for the ships, while Aeneas lifted his father onto his back and followed. In the confusion he became separated from his wife, and would never see her again. As the ship made for open seas, he watched the flames consume everything he had ever known, then turned his back on Troy forever. Odysseus would face many more dangers and suffer worse deprivations than Aeneas would on his journeys, but the Greek knew that Ithaca still existed in time and space, that hope for return was not vain. This balm is denied Aeneas. Only ashes litter the site of ancient Troy, and no Penelope awaits him. The Aeneid is not about loss, though. It is a phoenix story of rebirth, about a city rising, quite literally, out of the flames. While on his journey Aeneas makes a stop at Delos to consult the oracle about his fate, and he receives an enigmatic reply. The land of your ancestors will welcome you again, return to her generous breast. Seek out your ancient mother. He is baffled. But soon he has a dream in which his fetishes confirm the prophecy: your home is elsewhere. That elsewhere would turn out to be Rome. The fetishes convince Aeneas that his ancestors were originally from the Italian peninsula, and not from Anatolia. By migrating to Italy, Aeneas will only be recovering what was rightfully his, just as Odysseus did when he returned to Ithaca. By building a new city inspired by Troy, and by making it more magnificent than the one he came from, invincible and prepared to conquer the world, Aeneas will in a sense be moving backward and forward in time simultaneously. Throughout his journey the gods confirm that this is his destiny. He is made to visit Hades and finds it crowded with Roman heroes of the future, who all look up to him as to a father. He is called to be the redeemer of history, the link between past and future. He accepts, and the poem then recounts in bloody detail how he conquered the native tribes and, in the book’s last lines, brutally killed a rebel leader who had come to surrender. Yes, he thinks, laying down his sword in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. Nostalgia is a mood that mixes pleasure and pain in equal measure. Consider photographs. Why do we take them? Ask parents this question and they are likely to say that they want to preserve the memory of their children at every stage of development, so that one day they can look back and measure the time traversed. Photography is an exercise in anticipatory nostalgia. We foresee that come a certain age we will want to experience an odd pleasure that comes from reflecting on what has been lost. Yet how to describe the flood of feelings set off by seeing all those pictures? There are the simple pleasures of self-recognition, of recalling happiness and pride, of seeing life as a continuum, of reliving the journey. There is also bitter with the sweet. Baby pictures bring out longing for a time when the child was an innocent wonder, and regret over not having appreciated how fleeting it would be. It is a pain that the arrival of grandchildren only partially relieves. Vacation pictures remind us, or delude us into thinking, that family relations were once simpler and happier than they are now. We see ourselves, thinner and with more hair, looking carefree as we cradle the nursing baby or put our arms around wet, shivering, reluctant teenagers on a beach. This brings pain, then pleasure in the pain. There is something mildly masochistic about the family album. Do we really want to return to the past conjured up by the images? In the end, no. Whenever we have tried to relive moments from the past, we have