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In the moment of transition between life and death, only one thing changes: you lose the momentum of the biochemical cycles that keep the machinery running. In the moment before death, you are still composed of the same thousand trillion trillion atoms as in the moment after death— the only difference is that their neighborly network of social interactions has ground to a halt.
At that moment, the atoms begin to drift apart, no longer enslaved to the goals of keeping up a human form. The interacting pieces that once constructed your body begin to unravel like a sweater, each thread spiraling off in a different direction. Following your last breath, those thousand trillion trillion atoms begin to blend into the earth around you. As you degrade, your atoms become incorporated into new constellations: the leaf of a staghorn fern, a speckled snail shell, a kernel of maize, a beetle’s mandible, a waxen bloodroot, a ptarmigan’s tail feather.
But it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an accidental collection: each was labeled as composing you and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you’re not gone, you’re simply taking on different forms. Instead of your gestures being the raising of an eyebrow or a blown kiss, now a gesture might consist of a rising gnat, a waving wheat stalk, and the inhaling lung of a breaching beluga whale. Your manner of expressing joy might become a seaweed sheet playing on a lapping wave, a pendulous funnel dancing from a cumulonimbus, a flapping grunion birthing, a glossy river pebble gliding around an eddy.
From your present clumped point of view, this afterlife may sound unnervingly distributed. But in fact it is wonderful. You can’t imagine the pleasure of stretching your redefined body across vast territories: ruffling your grasses and bending your pine branch and flexing an egret’s wings while pushing a crab toward the surface through coruscating shafts of light. Lovemaking reaches heights it could never dream of in the compactness of human corporality. Now you can communicate in many places along your bodies at once; you weave your versatile hands over your lover’s multiflorous figure. Your rivers run together. You move in concert as interdigitating creatures of the meadow, entangled vegetation bursting from the fields, caressing weather fronts that climax into thunderstorms.
Just as in your current life, the downside is that you are always in flux. As creatures degrade and your fruits fall and rot, you become capable of new gestures and lose others. Your lover might drift away from you in the migratory flight of tropic birds, a receding stampede of wintering elk, or a creek that quietly pokes its head under the ground and pops up somewhere unknown to you.
Many of your same problems apply: temptation, anguish, anger, distrust, vice— and don’t forget the dread arising from free choice. Don’t be fooled into believing that plants grow mechanically toward the sun, that birds choose their direction by instinct, that wildebeest migrate by design: in fact, everything is seeking. Your atoms can spread, but they cannot escape the search. A wide distribution does not shield you from wondering how best to spend your time. Once every few millennia, all your atoms pull together again, traveling from around the globe, like the leaders of nations uniting for a summit, converging for their densest reunion in the form of a human. They are driven by nostalgia to regroup into the tight pinpoint geometry in which they began. In this form they can relish a forgotten sense of holiday-like intimacy. They come together to search for something they once knew but didn’t appreciate at the time.
The reunion is warm and heartening for a while, but it isn’t long before they begin to miss their freedom. In the form of a human the atoms suffer a claustrophobia of size: gestures are agonizingly limited, restricted to the foundering of tiny limbs. As a condensed human they cannot see around corners, they can only talk within short distances to the nearest ear, they cannot reach out to touch across any meaningful expanses. We are the moment of least facility for the atoms. And in this form, they find themselves longing to ascend mountains, wander the seas, and conquer the air, seeking to recapture the limitlessness they once knew.Eagleman, David (2009-02-10). Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Kindle Locations 1009-1041). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. See also "Possibilianism."
Intelligence? It's a word that we usually reserve for something abstract and cerebral, something associated with problem solving and planning and passing IQ tests. We tend to picture intelligence as a property of brains and especially big human brains. We're generally willing to grant some intelligence to dolphins and chimps and clever birds like ravens, but it's hard to know how to think about so many other things happening in the world. For example, my skin cells heal a wound. Is that intelligence or is that just biochemical cascades? A plant grows towards sunlight. Intelligent. A worm gets its head cut off and it regrows it. That's amazing. But we don't tend to call that cognition. But what if we've been looking at the whole notion of intelligence too narrowly? What if intelligence isn't just about neurons and genes, but it's about goals? And specifically, it's about the ability of a system to navigate towards an objective, to adapt to its circumstances, to make decisions along the way. That's a broader definition of intelligence. And if we apply it, suddenly intelligence doesn't just belong to creatures with brains. It becomes something that shows up in places we didn't expect…
TEN
The Nature of Intelligence
INTELLIGENCE AND EVOLUTION
Any exploration of the nature of intelligence is a precarious venture. Before we start out, we must know what we are seeking, and there is no generally accepted definition of intelligence. It is as hard to describe where intelligence begins and of what it consists as it is to define life itself.
There is no consensus about the point in evolutionary development at which life might be said to begin, nor even an exact demarcation between life and nonlife. Did life begin when amino acid molecules first formed self-replicating chains? Where is the boundarybetween the replication of crystal formations and that of carbon compounds? Indeed, there is no boundary. Life is a flow. It begins in inorganic material and emerges gradually along its course to sentience and intelligence.
The same may be said of intelligence. It begins with the simplest awareness of limited elements of the environment and it proceeds toward awareness of the self and then to abstract ideation by the most gradual stages. We may examine it and analyze it at any point along this continuum, but no one has yet been able to summarize its totality to the satisfaction of anyone else.
Before we go any further we must make it clear that our investigation is not about the qualities of especially brilliant human mental achievements or of the nature of the minds of those gifted individuals we call "bright," "great brains," or "geniuses," but of intelligence as an expression of life itself. By what means does an organism "know" its surroundings and what it must do to exist in them? What is the mechanism by which it makes a decision to take this path rather than that one? What, in fact, is a "thought"? Thought is nonmaterial. We cannot touch it, see it, or measure it. Yet at its inception arises from a material organ, from the living tissue of the brain, and as its outcome it directs concrete actions. This is the mystery of the thinking process. It arises in the concrete and ends in the concrete, but is itself intangible.
If we trace the thinking process back to its origins in the brain, we find ourselves back again at the origins of life. Sensitivity to external stimuli is a property of every living cell… [Other Senses, Other Worlds, pg 127]
The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat theories of everything as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have large and unpredictable second-order effects.
My new favorite theory of everything is the orality theory of everything. This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were among the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, in which writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and develop ever more complicated ideas that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that form the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking person…
“The pool? Yes. It's in great shape. No. Ready? Thugs. They just told me a little while ago. Six have been arrested and like six or seven are under arrest. They have pictures and everything else. They went to the bottom and it's not a paint job. It's very expensive. It's not rubber but it's like rubber. And they went down with probably a box cutter or a very sharp razor of some kind of a knife. They cut and then they started ripping it up. You know why? Because there's sick people. And then the side of the pool, right at the water level, they took razors and they started cutting this very expensive stuff. It's incredible stuff. It's beautiful. And it's still beautiful. We have one area where they cut it. It's still holding. It's not leaking. But they hurt it so probably maybe after July 4th or maybe before. I don't know. We'll let a little water out because it's at the edge. They'll cut it. They'll replace it and it'll be as good as new. But these people should go to jail for a long time. You know, there's a statute that I saw when I had my first here that if you do anything to hurt statues or monuments, fountains in Washington, D.C. or federal fountain, it's actually federal all over the country. But you go to jail for 10 years and there's no shortcuts. In other words, it's not five years for good behavior. It's a very tough statute. And so tough that it really hasn't been used very much over the years. But I used it when they had a problem in Washington where they were trying to hurt — the sickos, would try to hurt things, and I announced it. As soon as I announced it, read it, announced it. And I said, 10 years for anybody, everybody dropped what they had, including ropes. They had ropes. They were tying ropes around Thomas Jefferson's head, Andrew Jackson right up there, a rope around his head on that incredible statue. I said, as soon as I invoked it, everybody left, that's still in play. They could go to jail for 10 years. They better be careful. They have a gash on that beautiful pool. It's a reflecting point. This is a very expensive material. Then on top of it, we did a much bigger job than we said we were going to do because we did all the outer areas. We did a beautiful job. It's like a piece of glass. And for some reason, this disturbed the radical left lunatics. You know, the guy that one of the guys, he's a member or a big pair to Act Blue. He's a big Hillary supporter. He's a big supporter of Sleepy Joe Biden. No, this is a very political thing. But as I understand it, six are under arrest. This was pure vandalism. It's an amazing thing that we did. Don't forget, it hasn't worked properly since it was built because it always leaked in 1922. So it was built in 1922. So that's 100 years more ago. It's never worked properly. I always said, had great potential. And I said in my first term, I'm going to do something. So Biden and Obama, between the two of them, spent over $100 million. It was a disaster. Obama, because of the environment, took the water from the Potomac, and it was horrible. It was bad. I don't want to have to tell you what happened, but it was really bad. You can read about it. Biden, he didn't have any idea what the hell they were doing because he didn't know what anything was happening. But they spent over $100 million. We spent 14 or 15 in a lot less than that because a lot of these people worked for the Parks Department anyway. So they're going to work. So I would say a lot less. And we put a great surface on it. This is a world-class surface. It looked beautiful. But they came in and they cut it. And then they grabbed it and they pulled it up. That's why it's all ripped. And who would even think of it? They're sick people. So I think they're in big trouble. But here's the bottom line. We temporarily patched it. Even though we stoppedb— it's so good that with all that damage they did, it's not leaking. And it looks really beautiful. I just had pictures taken. It's reflective. It's beautiful. Like it did a week ago. And then we're going to let a little water, because you have to let the water out to fix it. We're going to fix it. And then the water goes back in and won't take long. We may do it before July 4th, or we may do it just after July 4th. Now, we have it a little bit fenced up, because we have a big fireworks this day. And tonight, I'm making a speech. And people like my speeches. But I guess we're going to have a lot of people over there. But tonight, we're going to have a lot of good entertainment. What are the greatest opera singers in the world? We think he's great. Lee Greenwood's going to be singing our favorite song. And we have a lot of great things. But I think I speak at about 7 o'clock tonight. So that's over at the Mall. Now, when the water looks great, but we will do the final fix up. But just remember this. They took razor blades, 350 feet coming from where he comes. They don't do that. They took razor blades. And knives, and they cut patches like that 350 feet long. A lot of them are like a foot, a foot. They cut the lining. And these pictures of the guy bending over. I don't know if anybody saw that. But there're pictures out there. And you say, who would do that? Maybe it's trumped arrangements. You know, we fixed over 50 fountains and monuments in the city. The city is the safest it's ever been ever. We have virtually no crime. We're a crime-free. When I came here, when we came here at the beginning, it was a horrible crime-ridden city. And we have no crime. Everything's fixed. We have new grass. We took so much. Nobody's ever seen anything like everything had graffiti on it. It's all gone. The tents all over the lawns, which were terrible. A royal gun. The fences are all gone because nobody goes on the lawns anymore. But we fixed all this. You know, grass has a life just like people have a life. And we fixed the lawn, and it will be fixed. Now, one of the other things they did a job around the reflecting pool, we have a huge field of grass. They poured acid on the grass. The same people, I guess. They poured acid. So that's in the process. It killed, acid kills grass quickly. So that's me fixed. But the reflecting pool is great, and it's going to look beautiful. It's so sad to see what they did. And then the fake news tries to say, oh, well, it didn't work. Of course, it worked. Everything I does work. What I do works, what I do best, is build. And we fixed — I think it's 52, all over the city talking about it. But you know, the biggest thing is we have one of the safest cities. If you would have come here two years ago, you had a good chance of being mucked all over, very big guy. They would have mucked him up. They would have beat their head like—. That's me. He wouldn't set up never going back. Now you can walk with your beautiful wife. You can walk with your friends. We were losing all our restaurants. Nobody wanted to go out. Even if you got into the restaurant, they'd rob you when you're in. Now you can't get into a restaurant. But the restaurant, too, is a opening restaurant so all over the city. I'm so proud of it. Also, Memphis, take a look at Memphis. Take a look at in Louisiana. Take a look at what's happened. What we've done in Louisiana with New Orleans is incredible. The governor, Governor Landry, called me. They just had morning grow-up. He said, it's the safest morning grow we've had in 75 years. It's great. We've done a good job. And you know what? In Chicago, they had many murders over the last week. Many we could solve. I could make Chicago with this group of strong people, this strong people. That's OK. You know, one thing we got from the Supreme Court, we have merit. So if you have great students, great marks, great scores, great boards, you get into a good college. If you have bad, you don't get into a good one. In other words, it's based on a tough decision for them. But that also applies to the military. We have tough, tough people in the military. And the National Guard has done an incredible job in Washington. And my people have done an incredible job. So if you look at Memphis, crime is down 78%. I have a friend from Memphis who's going to leave. And he called me and said, I've never seen anything like this. It's like a different city. And also in New Orleans, it's like people can't believe it. I could do that for Chicago. I'd love to do Chicago, because Chicago's potentially a great city. But you're going to lose it. It's got to be done. And we do something much more than they can do, because we take people out and bring them back to the country from where they came, where they came out of jails, where they're drug lords and drug dealers, and people from mental institutions. And I'd love to do it in Los Angeles. And I'd love to do it in New York City. I live in New York. I'd like to see that a lot of problems in New York over the last couple of weeks. If we were there, they wouldn't have any of those problems. And we remove the bad people from the city, so they never come back. Now, some liberal people probably don't like the sound of that. But 92% of crime is caused in these cities. It's caused by 2% of the people. I love that number, because it's easily solved. Think of that, 92% of the crime in Washington was caused by 2% of the people. We moved out almost 5,000 career criminals and people from other countries. And Washington now is one of the safest cities, I could say, on the planet. But let's just say, in the US. And it's beautiful now. The reflecting pool, but we have 52. I think it's much more than that. It's going to soon be more than that. You see them opening up. And my team has done an unbelievable job. [Interior Secretary] Doug Burgum has been great. Department of the Interior and his people. Greg, and all — I mean, these people, they're phenomenal. But think of that, you work so hard, you get it open way ahead of your life, what your life was, what was it key. And then somebody's in there with a knife cutting it and ripping the floor. It's terrible. But the 350 foot gash in the side, it's a terrible thing. Ready? Here, I'm going to end on this. I'm so proud of Washington, D.C. It's become one of the hottest cities in the world. But what is the hottest in the world is the United States of America. We have the hottest city. And you know that. You were talking about that. Two years ago, we were laughed at. We were a joke. We were a dead country. Now we're the hottest country anywhere in the world. Thank you very much, everybody.”
Elon Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is the empathy exploit
"There's a guy who posts on the internet who's great, Gad Saad, and he talks about basically suicidal empathy. There's so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So we've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.
I believe in empathy. I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.
I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot. Its weaponized empathy is the issue."
As a young man in New York, Donald Trump was determined to stamp his name onto physical structures. He was Fred Trump’s son, he was on the make, and he wanted to leave his own indelible mark on Manhattan—the wealthiest borough in the city and one his father had never conquered. Putting his name on a gleaming Fifth Avenue tower was an exercise in branding into the American consciousness. For Donald Trump, to be famous was to exist.
Forty years later and at the pinnacle of American power, the by-now-seventy-nine-year-old Trump was obsessed with dreams of legacy and determined to use the scope of an imperial presidency to imprint his name on everything, including the low-rise cityscape of Washington, D.C.
By the norms of history, the naming rights for monuments belonged to subsequent generations, and those honors were conferred by Congress, by historians and commissions, and by public acclaim. It was the American way. But Donald Trump had long since demonstrated that he could adore himself far more, and in greater detail, than anyone else might. Why wait? He had watched in rage as his name was removed from buildings in New York City in protest during his first presidency and after its calamitous end. It was a mistake to assume others would praise you for your efforts, he told The New York Times in 1980. “If you let people treat you how they want, you’ll be made a fool,” he said, before adding, “I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.”
John F. Kennedy had never named anything for himself. Nor had any other President in American history openly campaigned for a public structure to bear his name—though a few, like Washington and Hoover, had buildings or landmarks named for them by others while still in office. President Gerald Ford went so far as to refuse to sign a bill that would have renamed a courthouse and federal office building after him. Ford said he knew of no federal buildings that had been named for a President while still in office, and if he were to accept the honor it “might begin a precedent I believe it best not to establish.”
One of Kennedy’s legacies, together with the First Lady Jackie Kennedy, had been turning the White House into a showcase for American arts and high culture, inviting poets, musicians, actors, and dancers to perform at social events, special concerts, and state dinners. When Kennedy was slain it seemed natural that a nation searching for a way to celebrate his life would name a cultural center in his honor. On January 23, 1964, the National Cultural Center—created by an act of Congress at the end of the Eisenhower administration—was officially renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, to serve as the “sole national memorial” to the thirty-fifth President.
Since then, the Kennedy Center had served as the cultural center of the capital city, the longtime home of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera, and the host of the world-renowned Kennedy Center Honors.
In this most political city in the country, the Kennedy Center was for decades managed by a bipartisan board, maintaining a reputation for political neutrality, focused on artistic excellence rather than partisan favor. But Trump had refused to attend the Kennedy Center award ceremony during his first term because so many of the artists had made it clear they were anti-Trump. Now, in his second term, he would not only attend the ceremony, but he would have a hand in picking the honorees. And he would appoint himself the evening’s host.
When on December 18, 2025, the board of directors of the Kennedy Center had voted unanimously to change the name to “the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” Trump feigned surprise and humility that the board—which he had personally selected just a few weeks after his second inauguration and of which he was now the chairman—would bestow such an honor.
The renaming was enthusiastically embraced by Sergio Gor, then the head of the presidential personnel office, but later dispatched as ambassador to India. When Gor raised it with Trump months earlier, the President loved it. You’re doing all this work for the Kennedy Center, Gor had told him flatteringly. You got the money. You should at least get your name on it with JFK.
The White House quietly ordered the large letters “DONALD J. TRUMP” to be added to the facade well before the board had even rubber-stamped the authorization to rename the building…
Haberman, Maggie; Swan, Jonathan. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (pp. 365-367). (Function). Kindle Edition.
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| "Maggot?" How juvenile. |
By midway through the year, a picture was emerging of how the Oval Office operated in Trump’s second term. It was of a President spending his days at the Resolute Desk in a series of rolling bull sessions, accompanied by a core group of intimates; these were supplemented by a rotating cast of extras, and on any given day they could be Republican lawmakers, titans of industry, former pro wrestlers, country musicians, Gulf royals, crypto bros, or friends of felons seeking pardons. They would enter and exit the frame, with some invited to stay for meetings they had no business attending. The conversations ran fast, often straying far from the point, or from anything visitors imagined when they arrived at the White House. The President’s sentences often began on one topic and ended far away.
The ever-present Natalie Harp was generally on a chair off to the side, her laptop open, head cocked, listening but never contributing unless ordered to by Trump. She fulfilled, in a flash, any request, whether a “Trump 2028” hat needed to be fetched from the merchandise room, a quick Google search, or producing the latest story from right-wing websites like Breitbart or Gateway Pundit. Once Dan Scavino became the head of the Presidential Personnel Office in late 2025, he mostly handed over Trump’s Truth Social account to Harp.
Most presidents had adhered to the mantra that their most valuable commodity was time. George W. Bush and Barack Obama scheduled their days down to blocks of ten or fifteen minutes. The ideal “gatekeeper” function of a White House chief of staff was to guard those blocks of time against needless interruptions. But Susie Wiles had little interest in micromanaging her boss’s time, perhaps correctly calculating it was futile. She could try to control access to who got into the Oval Office, and what their agenda might be, but otherwise she would let the President set his own pace.
In Donald Trump’s White House, time was a flexible concept. To outsiders, the administration appeared a hive of activity, but those brought into the Oval Office would often remark that Trump seemed to have all the time in the world. Unless the meeting concerned an imminent military operation, Trump was usually relaxed, gossipy, unhurried. Many visitors to the Oval were charmed. Even those who didn’t like him would often describe the President as solicitous and flattering, offering Diet Cokes and candy as if he were a greeter at one of his clubs. He would tell bawdy jokes and compliment his guests on how good they looked. He signed MAGA hats and extra ones for their kids and would urge them to come to Mar-a-Lago that weekend or to one of his golf clubs. He would spend hours examining the minute details of Oval Office decorations and plans for the ballroom he was plotting on the grounds of the East Wing. He loved showing off the quality of the speakers that piped his music—Pavarotti and Sinéad O’Connor and James Brown—into the Rose Garden patio. And he would regale visitors—especially foreign leaders—with the details of his 2024 election victory, subject them to his familiar litany of complaints about “Sleepy Joe,” and pepper them with questions about the dangerous animals in their countries with the fascination of a child.
“I still can’t fully describe what the Oval Office is like with him,” said one visitor. “You’d have two people on two different speakerphones. Another person on a cell phone. I’ll never forget talking about a highly classified program, and this guy—looked like just a salt-of-the-earth, country guy—walks in and he’s got samples for the Rose Garden paving. Pops them on the desk. And the President stops what we’re talking about, gets up there, and walks out there with him and I see a lot of hands moving. And he comes back and then looks over our shoulders, and the curator is there with somebody to drill the cherubs into the wall that he had brought up from Mar-a-Lago. And then he goes back to the people on the phone, gives them guidance. And then he tries to come back to us, but we’re out of time.”
This pattern would repeat all day long. The President’s last three meetings of the day would often blur into one contiguous meeting. Trade, national security, a visiting CEO. All would be mashed together into one borderless conversation. Trump had run his days this way—unstructured and improvisational—since the years he spent working from his corner office in Trump Tower. But in his second term, Trump had made the White House more fully his home—not just fixing it in accordance with his aesthetic, but fundamentally changing the rhythms and structures and operations of the place…
Haberman, Maggie; Swan, Jonathan. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (pp. 169-171). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Italy's Meloni To Trump: 'My Popularity Is None Of Your Concern. I Suggest You Focus On Yours.'
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hit back at President Donald Trump's continued insults against her on Saturday, telling Trump to focus on his own dwindling popularity.
"These constant, unprovoked attacks are senseless," Meloni posted on Instagram in response to Trump's comments earlier in the day, where he once again claimed Meloni "asked, over and over, for a picture with me."
Meloni previously called Trump's claim "completely fabricated." On Saturday, she said attempting to be Trump's friend "has certainly not helped" her own popularity.
"As for my popularity, being your friend has certainly not helped it, nor does it depend on my relationship with you," Meloni posted.
"My popularity is none of your concern. I suggest you focus on yours," she added.
