Skywritings

In later years
you said and felt
that I philosophize.

And you were right.

Though what you meant was nothing
means anything
any more
and maybe never did.

That’s true too. But I,

not quite yet as advanced
in that no-sum no-quarter game
of life of which AE,
philosophizing,
said (untruly)
“boshaft ist der Herrgott nicht,”

can’t seem to lose
or still
or foil
that impulse to sift out and mouth
a sense that always
posthumously
proves no more
than soil.

“Never again.”

I’ve never before felt or understood or believed the full finality of what that really means.
Now I understand.

There’s nothing more terrible.

I’m ashamed
I’m unable
to dam the tears
but had all this
no place to go
nor would I

Anticipating pleasure
— counting, banking, trading, surviving
on what’s to come —
sets our breed apart, they say,
from brutes for whom all’s ever
now or never.

But there’s a diabolic downside
to this being
forever ahead of the game:

<i>My enemy’s enemy
is my friend.</i>

Just so, despite ourselves,
to spite ourselves,
we fast-forward
to the sequel’s sequel
and know then that there’s no
pleasure in’t,
just pain,
an incommensurable currency,
as both now and then
pick up speed
and the whole pre-emptive pyramid
forecloses on itself.

 

Why do I diminish
your pure essence,
dearer to me
than anything there is or was,
into poor verse?
for shelter or for show?

Again for me, and not for you.

Prose falls shorter still
and who’s its addressee?

Deeds, vain too.
Now you are no more
no more are they for you
than if, when you still were,
done adiabatically
so you would never know.

What is not imposture, then?
If words can’t in good faith
embody what I feel
is feeling itself
any more true?
Or just another go
for shelter or for show?

<i>Vuelve, o, vuelve!</i>

 

 

Istenveled anyukám. Bocsáss meg. Bocsáss meg.

Appeared in: Képes Figyelő 1945 November 17 (originally June 1945)

Why Did You Let Them?
by Nelly Kotányi

It was six years ago that I saw her first, on a warm summer afternoon in a flowering schoolyard in Szekszard. The municipal music school had invited me to serve as an outside examiner that year. We were hearing the well-prepared pupils in the auditorium of the renowned Garay Gimnazium. A diminutive little girl was announced: seven years old, but hardly looking even that.

She began to play music. And it was indeed music she was playing, not just piano — music immemorial, her miniature fingers sculpting Bach and Mozart out of that oversize keyboard. She even played us a few little pieces she herself had written. A great gift, first spreading its wings. No one was surprised to hear that we awarded her the prize book. In the fullness of her 7 years she was already well-known in that town; many were predicting she would one day be the pride of Szekszard.

Four years pass. Now eleven, she plays Beethoven’s C-minor piano concerto in the student concert. By now everyone recognizes that hers is no ordinary talent. She is brought up to Budapest. The Music Academy Director receives her with tokens of his admiration and respect: He “would admit her immediately to the Academy, but the Jewish-Laws forbid it.” He adds that he hopes the regime will soon fall; till then he would still like to follow her development closely. The little girl is happy. A radiantly bright autumn day. Anny can come up to Budapest two more times, so the Music Academy’s celebrated piano maestro can hear her. Then comes March 19, 1944, and the maelstrom of deportation.

After the siege’s end, I hear nothing about them. Just two weeks ago, I learned from the deathlist of the Muhldorf Camp, that Anny’s father had perished there. Last week I met some people from Szekszard. My first question is about Anny. They tell me. It was in Auschwitz on a December day that they saw her last. The executioners came for Anny, to separate her from her mother. The little child with the God-given gift had been found unable to labour hard enough. Her mother, Rozsi, would not leave her, so she was taken to the gas chamber too. Never seen again.

Little Anny Engel! This is the first article about you, and it will have no successors, because the little artist is no more.

Yet what an endless joy it would have been for me, if you had played the first movement of the C-Minor concerto once again. You know, that last trill, at the end of the cadenza, the one for which you need bigger hands — I would leave it as you played it for the time being.

Women, mothers, you whom the star of fortune spared from the horror and who are happily embracing your children now: don’t you hear them sometimes, on calm nights, the muted moans?

Why did you let them?

(Translated May 20 2000)

---

Anny Engel was my cousin; her mother, Rozsika, from Kalocsa, my mother‘s sister. Nelly Kotanyi was Anny’s piano teacher.

My mother learned what became of them in June 1945, the month of my birth, from a slightly earlier and longer (but suppressed and apparently lost) version of this article.

This version was retrieved for me after some searching (at my request) by a friend in Hungary in May 2000.

During my mother‘s pregnancy my parents had been hiding under false identities in Rimaszécs helplessly witnessing the brutal deportation and destruction of the local Jewry by the local gendarmerie. (Rimaszécs is now in Slovakia, partly by my father‘s doing when he was consulted by the commanding officer of the Russian liberating army (who happened to also be a Jew) as to whether it should be accorded to Hungary or Czechoslovakia; he was also able to dispatch the head of the local gendarmerie to Siberia with a pofon.)

As far as I know, there are no Jews left in Kalocsa.

---

Miert engedtetek?
Kotányi Nelly

Hat ev elott lattam eloszor, meleg nyari delelotton a szekszardi gimnazium viragos udvaran. Abban az evben vizsgabiztosnak hivott meg az ottani varosi zeneiskola. A nagyhiru Garay-gimnazium tantermeben hallgattuk a novendekek szepen betanult jatekat. Beszolitottak egy pottomnyi kisleanyt. Het eves volt de annyinak sem latszott.

Muzsikalni kezdett! Nem zongorazott mert muzsika volt, ahitatos zene, ahogy kicsiny ujjai Bachot es Mozartot megszolaltattak! Meghallgattuk nehany apro darabjat amit o komponalt! Egy nagy tehetseg elso szarnyprobalgatasa. Senki sem csodalkozott, hogy o nyerte meg a jutalomkonyvet. A varosban ismertek mar 7 eves koraban es sokan mondogattak, hogy egyszer meg buszkesege lesz Szekszardnak.

Elmulik negy ev. A 11 eves gyermek Beethoven C-moll koncertjet jatsza a novendekhangversenyen. Most mar mindenki elismeri, hogy nem mindennapi tehetseg. Felhozzak Pestre. A Zenemuveszeti Foiskola muvesztanara elragadtatassal es a legnagyobb elismeressel fogadja. Azonnal felvenne a foiskolara, de a zsidotorveny nem engedi. Remeli azonban, hogy a rendszer megbukik hamarosan. Addig is figyelemmel akaja kiserni a gyermek fejlodeset. A kisleany boldog. Verofenyes oszi nap. Anny meg ketszer feljohet Pestre, hogy a Zenemuveszeti Foiskola kivallo tanara meghallgassa. Aztan jon 1944 marcius 19.es jon a deportalas infernoja.

Az ostrom utan sokaig nem tudok roluk semmit. Most ket het elott olvastam a muhldorfi tabor halallistajan, hogy Anny edesapja szivbenulasban elhalt. Mult heten szekszardiakkal talalkoztam. Elso kerdesem, mi hir Annyrol. Elmondjak. Auschwitzban egy decemberi napon lattak utoljara. A gyilkos pribekek jottek Annyert, hogy szetvalasszak edesanyjatol. Az istenaldotta kis muzsikustehetseg nem tudott eleget dolgozni. Vittek a gazkamraba. Edesanyja nem hagyta, vele ment. Azota nem lattak oket.

Kicsi Engel Anny! Ez az elso cikk rolad, melyet nem fog mas kovetni, mert a kis muveszno – halott…

Pedig milyen vegtelen orom lett volna nekem, ha meg egyszer eljatszanad a C-moll koncert elso tetelet. Azt az utolso trillat tudod, ott a kadencia vegen, amihez nagyobb kez kell, meg egyenlore elengednem!…

Asszonyok, anyak, kiket szerencsecsillagotok megvedett a borzalmaktol es boldogan olelitek gyermekeiteket, nem halljatok neha csendes ejjeleken a halk sohajtasokat: Miert engedtetek?

My mother’s mother, the year before my birth
dispatched the gentle gendarme
of Kalocsa
to Budapest
with the yellow star
to fetch my mother
and bring her home safely

My mother declined

and so I am

but had she summoned me
I know if I know aught
I would have flown to her
unhesitatingly

and ever would

Biztonságos Áthaladás

Édesanyám édesannya
egy évvel a születésem előtt
el küldte Pestre a Kalocsai csendőrt
sárga csillaggal
édesanyámat biztonságossan haza hozni

Édesanyám viszautasitotta

és ennélfogva létezem

de ha engem hivot volna
tudom biztosan
ha barmit tudok
haza jöttem volna hozzá
habozás nélkül

mindörökké

meaning of martyr
innocent victim
just cause – not
monster
or moron
murdering innocents
with bullet
or bomb belt

 

Arnold Trehub [AT]: “you assert that feelings are caused by the brain“

I said that (for what it’s worth) I believe that feelings are caused by the brain almost as confidently as I believe that apples are caused to fall by gravity. The difference in confidence is because we can explain causally how apples fall (we understand universal gravitation) but we cannot explain causally how the brain causes feelings.

I also said that I do not believe it is possible to explain causally how the brain causes feelings (but all I gave to support that belief was negative evidence [that telekinetic dualism is false] plus a methodological argument [incommensurability].

AT: “you assert that feelings have no causal consequences”

I asserted that in the form of the empirical fact that telekinetic dualism is false: All causal consequences of brain activity are causal consequences of the four known fundamental forces. There is no fifth force (feeling).

It is a fact — an unexplained fact but a fact — that we feel, and it is almost certain that our feelings are caused (mysteriously) by our brains. But as feeling is not an independent fifth force, whatever feels as if it it is caused by feelings is actually caused by the brain (which also [mysteriously] causes feelings).

The paradigmatic example is the feeling that my finger moved because I willed it. It does indeed feel that way, but all evidence is that it moved because of activity in my brain — perhaps the same activity that (mysteriously) caused the feeling that my finger moved because I willed it.

Feelings have no causal consequences; it is only what (mysteriously) causes feelings that has causal consequences. It only feels as if the feelings are the causes.

It is for this reason that although it is a mystery — and I think an unresolvable mystery — how we feel, it is an even bigger mystery why we feel. For it looks as if everything that we do that is accompanied by feelings — including the feeling that the doing is happening because of those feelings — can be done without feelings: Indeed, the fact that the doing is accompanied by feeling is not an explanatory aid (apart from the fact that it squares with how we feel when we do): Rather, it is an overwhelming explanatory burden, because we cannot explain either how feeling is caused by the brain or what feeling itself causes that is not already caused by whatever (mysteriously) causes feeling.

This might help set intuitions: I don’t think anyone will deny that if the human species were able to do all it can do — talk, learn, teach, socialize, invent, do science and engineering, write history, biography and fiction, etc. — but it did not feel, then there would be no mind/body problem or explanatory gap. Things would be much more straightforward: Cognitive neuroscience would only need to explain the (formidable) capacity of this hypothetical insentient species to do and to say all that our own species can do and say, but not the fact that they feel (because they do not feel).

(I am not here suggesting that Zombies are possible: I am just trying to highlight the extra explanatory burden that the undeniable fact of feeling imposes on causal explanation. It should be clear that the existence of feelings is a liability rather than an asset for causal, functional explanation.)

Now I said things would be a lot more straightforward, explanatorily speaking, if there were no feeling, just doing — if all “functing,” nonbiological and biological, were just unfelt functing. There would, however, be an unresolved puzzle even then — though it would not be a causal puzzle: Why would such an insentient species speak of feeling at all? Why would they say “I am feeling tired” rather than just “I am tired” (meaning my body is fatigued)? (I don’t think there would be any problem with the use of the indexical “I” by such a species, by the way, despite all the fuss some make about the concept of “self” and “self-consciousness”: the trouble, as usual, is with the felt aspect and not the functional aspects of “selfhood.”)

Possibly the feeling vocabulary would be useful as a shorthand for speaking of internal states in the speaker and others. After all, internal states are just as invisible as mental (i.e., felt) states. “Feeling happy” and “feeling sad” may all have internal functional counterparts in the sort of “mind-reading” that this twin species would still have to be able to do, if it were to have the same adaptive social and verbal capacities as our own species. (To “feel happy” might for them be an internal state that was relatively free of processes correlated with actual or impending tissue damage, or free of data predictive of other current or future untoward adaptive consequences, and/or correlated with the attainment, or the impending attainment, of a functional goal, perhaps related to survival, reproduction, competition, or social success: all of these make sense as purely adaptive, functional categories, in a Darwinian survival machine, irrespective of whether it just functs them, or also feels them as it functs them.)

Maybe even the locution “I am sincerely sorry,” uttered in its pragmatic social context, has a purely functional role to play, even for a Darwinianly successful Zombie; and the only reason we find that counterintuitive is that we do feel, and find it difficult even to imagine what it would be like not to — with good reason, because “be like” means “feel like,” and of course it would feel like nothing, “feeling” being an uncomplemented category.

Thus does the fact of feeling not only create the mind/body [feeling/function] problem and the gap in causal explanation, but the anomalous nature of “feeling” as a category adds a further sense of “mystery” to the explanatory gap:

A tougher distinction in such a Zombie species would be the distinction between Zombie psychopaths (who, like our psychopaths, purportedly do not feel guilt or remorse) and Zombie normals, who purportedly do. But I think that it only takes a little reflection to see that there are behavioral and functional distinctions between our psychopaths and normals that could, in Zombie psychopaths and normals, be based on responsiveness to certain internal states, without the internal states having to be felt states. (These behavioral and strategic distinctions might even be relevant to explaining functionally why the psychopath genotype exists at all, in our sentient species.)

(Note that, because we do feel, we have trouble imagining a species saying and doing the same things we say and do, but without feeling. But the real trouble is in the other direction! It is the Zombified version of feeling-talk and feeling-action that has the straightforward functional explanation, and the feeling that is the a-functional dangler, not the other way round!)

So what about “the mind/body problem” itself? Would philosophers in this hypothetical insentient species still ponder and argue over the causal power of feeling when they in fact have no feeling, and the only referent for “feeling” in their discourse is “internal functional state”? Would Zombie philosophers “know” that for them, there was no distinction between felt and unfelt functing? Would they really have any knowledge at all, as opposed to mere know-how, given that they are incapable of more than lip-service to the Cartesian “sentio ergo sentitur“? The cogito does not work, after all, for inferred states: It only works for felt states. (That’s the quintessence of Descartes’ method of doubt.)

Some may want to conclude that this puzzle is in fact evidence for the causal power of feeling after all, for only a species that actually felt could engage in discourse about the feeling/function problem coherently!

I’m inclined to conclude otherwise. I happen to doubt that there could be a feelingless (“Zombie”) species (natural or artificial) that was nevertheless Turing-Indistinguishable from ourselves. If they were really feelingless, there would be other differences in what they did and said. And what squares our own species’ discourse with our feelings is whatever it is in our brains that keeps our feelings so correlated with our functing: It is not an independent causal consequence of the fact that we feel, but a consequence of the common (functional) cause of both our doings/sayings and the feelings that they (mysteriously) generate as a lockstep accompaniment.

So the question of how and why we feel (which is exactly the same as the question of how and why we are not just Darwinian Zombies) also leads to the question of how and why there could not be Zombies that were Turing-Indistinguishable from us — if there could not be. For if there could, then the mystery could be just due to some (colossal) evolutionary quirk or coincidence in the case of the terrestrial biosphere. If there could not be Zombies, then the mystery could be a fundamental principle of functional organization that we will never know or understand, because the felt component will always be functionally superfluous under any causal explanation that does not cheat or beg the question.

AT: “you are claiming feelings are either (a) non-physical events caused by the brain in a dualistic universe and naturally have no causal consequences for subsequent brain activity, or (b) they are physical events cause by the brain but have no causal consequences for subsequent brain activity. Which case (a or b) do you endorse?”

I hope it is clear by now that I endorse (b) and add only that I think that how the brain causes feelings is also inexplicable, because of the incommensurability of function and feeling, despite their correlation. (I invite others to attack me on this, and force me to defend it more rigorously: Is it coherent to say “correlated yet incommensurable”?)

AT: “[You say] that in order to explain why we feel we would have to show that feelings have causal consequences.”

Indeed we do, otherwise feelings remain the mysterious, unexplained dangler they are — and the explanatory gap gapes.

AT: “Am I correct in assuming… you believe we can explain how the brain causes feelings, but we are unable to explain why the brain causes feelings?

No, I don’t believe we can explain how the brain causes feelings either (but I do believe the brain causes feelings). I do not, however, believe that feelings cause anything else: As I said, there’s no causal room. Hence here it is not a matter of an actual causation that we cannot explain (the way we cannot explain how the brain causes feelings, even though it undoubtedly does) but an inexplicable lack of causation, making it inexplicable why we feel.

---

Prior Postings:
— THE FEELING/FUNCTING PROBLEM IS INSOLUBLE
— ONE EPIPHENOMENON (AND PROBLEM) IS ENOUGH: THE PROBLEM IS EXPLAINING THE CAUSAL STATUS OF FEELING
— (untitled 633)
— (untitled 642)
— FEELING, FUNCTING, AND ALAN TURING
— SENTIO ERGO SENTITUR
— WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO FEEL
— (untitled 676)
— ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE ON FEELING
— UNCOMPLEMENTED CATEGORIES, OR, WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BACHELOR?
— “ACCESS” CONSCIOUSNESS – “PHENOMENAL” CONSCIOUSNESS = ZERO
— ON NOT BLAMING THE MESSENGER
— (untitled 716)
— (untitled 717)
— (untitled 718)
— (untitled 719)
— ON PSYCHOPHYSICAL INCOMMENSURABILITY AND SENSORY-SEMANTIC DUALS
— CORRELATION, CORRESPONDENCE AND INCOMMENSURABILITY
— (untitled 750)
— TELEKINETIC DUALISM: MIND OVER MATTER
— ON PREDICTING WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE A BAT…
— ON MEASURING, FEELING, AND COMMENSURABILITY: (AND MIND THE ONTIC/EPISTEMIC GAP!)
— (untitled 801)
— UNTOWARD CONSEQUENCES OF UNCOMPLEMENTED CATEGORIES
— PREDICTING WHAT WE FEEL IS NOT EXPLAINING THAT WE FEEL
— FUNCTING” IS ALL OF PHYSICAL, BIOLOGICAL AND ENGINEERING CAUSAL DYNAMICS
— (untitled 838)
— THE EXPLANATORY GAP IS EPISTEMIC, NOT ONTIC
— (untitled 857)
— WHY WOULD TURING-INDISTINGUISHABLE ZOMBIES TALK ABOUT FEELINGS (AND WHAT, IF ANYTHING, WOULD THEY MEAN)?