Review: Two Arms and a Head

Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher by Clayton Atreus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Two days ago, I held Jasper in my arms as he died. My grief at his sudden death has overwhelmed me, and I've struggled to find ways to deal with it.

My latest method, apparently, has been to read this book-length suicide note by Clayton Atreus. I wouldn't say that it has helped much with my reaction to Jasper's passing, but I did find Two Arms and a Head compelling reading. Atreus became paraplegic in a tragic accident, and he ultimately disvalued the resulting life afterward so significantly that he committed suicide.

I doubt that I would have gotten along with Atreus, had I met him in his prime. His experience of life differs greatly from mine, and, to be quite honest, feels a bit shallow. But he is correct when he says that we are our own arbiters of our own value, and the fact that he values differently than I is not a good reason to dismiss his point of view.

Atreus gives a defense of his sanity in choosing to die prematurely, explaining his disagreements with other persons with a similar disability. He provides a cogent argument, even if in the process of doing so he shows just how different his values are from what I would consider the norm. Several times, he makes claims that I completely disagree with; I would certainly, for example, live 25 years in what he called a "head garden", as a full quadriplegic, rather than die immediately, and perhaps I fall prey to the same typical mind fallacy as he does when I say that I believe there are many who would agree with me rather than with him about this. Nevertheless, these disagreements are ultimately ones of personal value, and they do not harm the greater argument that he makes in his suicide note.

His disrespect for the larger community of activists with disabilities like his is tough to read. Rather than just argue against them, he uses derogatory terms for them that I find particularly distasteful. But, in a way, I almost want to forgive him for this, as from his perspective their actions certainly seem to have caused him a lot of unnecessary pain.

It's hard rating a text like this so highly. I can't stress how much I doubt I would have gotten along with someone as shallow as he in his prime. I find it utterly surprising that he can't even admit the possibility that people might not be lying when they say that they honestly can find life fulfilling and meaningful even with a major disability. I wonder if he would have been receptive to the argument that future humans might very well (in a post-singularity existence, for example) have access to abilities and experiences that we cannot currently imagine. Compared to these future specimens, our most thriving exemplars of humanity might be considered severely disabled. Yet we thrive nevertheless! And so could he, if he allowed himself to enjoy other things.

Then again, I imagine Atreus replying: that would not be me. And I suppose he'd be right, as he appears to define himself in just such a way that would make him impervious to this kind of argument. How convenient for him.

Jasper's death a few days ago was done as a form of euthanasia. The doctor put him to sleep, then stopped his heart. My heart broke in the process, too. Maybe it wasn't the best idea to seek out an essay that argues, in part, for allowing euthanasia of this kind. It hasn't helped me in any real way. But reading Atreus' words did help me to connect with Clayton Atreus, in an odd way, at least for the few hours that his text had me spellbound.

If you're interested in also connecting with him, I recommend the book. It's available in full at 2arms1head.com. Atreus is smart, writes well, is kind of an asshole, and he lacks sufficient epistemic humility. But his suicide note is worth reading, even if it uses unnecessary derogatory terms in several places. I'm going to go ahead and give him a break on that, given the fact that he's doing it while in the process of preparing to end his own life.

Note: While Two Arms and a Head is recommended, I didn't bother reading his contemporary account of the accident, which he also posted on forums as it happened here: advrider.com/f/threads/seattle-to-arg...

View all my reviews

ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος

Twitter user @jimkwik asked the other day for the happiest 4 word story people could come up with. Before deleting his response in favor of AI alignment message marketing, Eliezer Yudkowsky answered: “Death isn’t the end.”

He's right. Death is the scourge of value at the individual level. We must do what we can to stop it.

I won't spend time here defending the idea that reducing deaths are important. The trite arguments about overpopulation and death being part of life are easily dispatched even through listening to a bit of light fiction, such as CGP Grey’s retelling of Nick Bostrom’s Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. (I prefer the sheer power of Bostrom's original essay, but Grey's adapted and animated version also hits the main ideas well enough.)

Dylan Thomas is right: We should not go gentle into that good night; we must rage against the dying of the light. Certainly this is true if you believe in the A-theory of time, but I think it remains nearly as true even if you subscribe to the B-theory of time. If having a bar of chocolate is good, having a longer bar of chocolate may be better. So, too, is this true if we extend the length of time that we exist.

(I want to take a moment here to address the idea that the B-theory of time should make us more accepting of death. The question is: more accepting than what in comparison? If you start out believing naively that the A-theory of time is the only possible situation that can hold true, then you may think that death is a kind of erasure. If you believe this, then learning of the B-theory of time will give comfort in realizing that, even after death, one still exists, just earlier in time. And this is no less of an existence than saying that one still exists even if they are far to the left of where your reference point lies. So it is true that, in this situation, understanding that {the B-theory of time might be a better way of looking at things} will result in one feeling more comfortable with death than they were previously. But that doesn't mean we should be accepting of it! Just because a store of value still exists unerased does not mean that we should not lament not having even more of that store of value if that death had not occurred.)

Eneasz Brodski's HPMOR podcast
is particularly well done.

Fiction is rife with this idea. The title of this journal entry, ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος, comes from 1 Corinthians, where the hero, the literal second coming of Jesus, will, after defeating all tyrants and evil-doers, take on the final enemy: death itself. This idea, that death is the ultimate enemy, is one which inspires me greatly. The central theme of Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality may be (obviously) the methods of rational thinking, but the end goal — the only end goal if you find yourself in sudden possession of magical ability — is to figure out how to end death. (Well, I guess not the only end goal. But you know what I mean.) This theme continues beautifully in Alexander Davis' sequel Significant Digits, and even further in Nanashi Saito's further sequel Orders of Magnitude. While these stories are merely rational fiction, they should and do inspire those of us who want to do what we can to further the lifespan of all of us.

(Incidentally, while I fully endorse reading at least HPMOR if you have any interest in rational fiction and the Harry Potter fictional setting, its anti-death message is only the 2nd most inspiring concept I've encountered in fiction. Hal Clement's much shorter Mission of Gravity has a surprisingly heartfelt message that I find even more inspiring. It's not rational fiction, but it's perhaps one of my favorite hard science fiction stories written prior to the past couple of decades.)

My beloved companion, Jasper Hess.

Yesterday, Jasper died. The grief I felt from his sudden absence remains greater than any prior grief I've ever felt. Jasper was a daily part of my life for the past eight years. He was a beloved part of my close personal family. I feel utterly distraught by his sudden death.

Seeking comfort, my mind went to possible situations that would allow him to still exist. For others, this might have consisted of visions of heaven. Of his soul continuing on in some other place, or in another time. Perhaps of reincarnation, or as the oneness of all things. But I don't particularly take stock in non-physicalist theories (as does 56% of professional philosophers (the 2020 philpapers survey will update this soon!)), so this is not where my mind went.

Fleetingly, I reminded myself of the B-theory of time. That Jasper exists still, but…his existence now is still. I received little comfort.

Then I thought of the possible infinite extent of the universe. Even in the least exotic Tegmark level 1 infinite universe, there are only so many combinations of rearranged Planck-length particles that can occur in a given observable universe. (If you have a set of 100 lego bricks, and you are instructed to build something out of them in a given standard amount of space, and then you repeat this ad infinitum, then you can only make so many things before you start to repeat yourself. If the universe is level 1 infinite in extent, then there are infinite observable-universe-size volumes, in which only a finite number of lego bricks (5.4x10^61 planck lengths) can exist. Therefore, unless there is some reason to suspect a form of order in that infinitude that precludes there being other copies of you, there almost certainly exist other copies of you.) I imagined Jasper living still, but then I thought also of him as a Boltzmann brain, and the comfort was ruined. S-risks threatened to take over in my imagination, so I relented and briefly stopped thinking about infinities.

I am still so attached to the continuity of consciousness. It's hard to envision the set of all versions of me as the proper reference class, rather than just this one instance. I keep thinking that I am separate from other identical versions of me, and this results in the horror that death remains the end, even when identical copies exist elsewhere. Yet I know that many people that I highly respect maintain that instead we should consider ourselves to be the group of all identical people, and that when time causes that identicality to break because of different circumstances, our awareness will follow probabilistically to the various outcomes. This gives us the idea of quantum immortality, but it is more than this: it provides immortality even amongst other situations where copies exist elsewhere, e.g., in other Tegmarkian levels.

From here we get to Greg Egan's Dust Theory, which he introduces in the scifi novel Permutation City. (If these concepts are new to you, I highly suggest reading the novel before looking at the dust theory faq, as the novel properly dramatizes the unveiling of the theory in a way that is spoiled if you understand the theory first.)

Further afield (or perhaps less afield?) are the strange loops from Douglas Hofstadter, which holds that we exist in others' minds. (His I am a Strange Loop is well worth reading, regardless of how seriously you end up taking the thesis.)

But even if Jasper's existence remains through any of these ideas, I no longer have access to him. He isn't here. I cannot hold him. These otherwise comforting ideas just don't emotionally help me in the here and now. Jasper is dead, and the me that exists writing this cannot be with him.

There are worse things than death. Existential risk, for example, seems worse because it is a kind of mega-death. But also Roko's Basilisk-esque S-risk scenarios are technically worse outcomes, and maybe Nell Watson's W-risk scenarios are equally frightening. But the death of an individual nevertheless still unnerves me. Maybe death is not technically the ultimate enemy. But these other end bosses seem like exceptionally powerful optional bosses, not the main villain of the story.

So is it strange that I have not yet signed up for cryonics?

Don't get me wrong: the likelihood of cryonics being able to extend my lifespan is very, very low. You might be tempted to call it negligible. But the upside, if it works, is so great that even an exceptionally tiny chance cannot be immediately dismissed as negligible. If the cost is not so high for insurance that would pay for cryonics, then why not take the chance? The expected value is surely positive here, even if the absolute chance of it paying out is incredibly low.

Yet I still have not signed up. I feel wary of this being an example of Pascal's mugging. But, if one day I do sign up, how bad will it have been to know that I did not also sign up Jasper? I feel torn.

Death may not be the ultimate enemy, but it is surely close enough that we should all band together to defeat it. The effective altruism arguments for organizations like the SENS Research Foundation seem interestingly compelling, especially while I grieve for Jasper, but then I remember that we are not the only ones that matter. As Pablo Stafforini so astutely points out:

"Longevity research occupies an unstable position in the space of possible EA cause areas: it is very 'hardcore' and 'weird' on some dimensions, but not at all on others. The EAs in principle most receptive to the case for longevity research tend also to be those most willing to question the 'common-sense' views that only humans, and present humans, matter morally. But, as you note, one needs to exclude animals and take a person-affecting view to derive the 'obvious corollary that curing aging is our number one priority'. As a consequence, such potential supporters of longevity research end up deprioritizing this cause area relative to less human-centric or more long-termist alternatives."

It is perhaps selfishness that makes me feel as I currently do. At the end, I just want Jasper back. I want the events of the past few days to be undone, All Night Laundry-style.

And so I cry.

Jasper Hess

Jasper occasionally
has a drinking problem.

When Jasper was young, his nickname was Saucer Eyes. Such huge eyes on such a tiny kitty! His human family at the time was normal, I suppose, but not what I would call great. They bought him, presumably, from a breeder, as he is full blooded Himalayan. They had his front claws taken out, presumably because they valued their furniture more than his lack of suffering. But they were still loving, in their own way, welcoming him into their home.

Welcoming, that is, until, when Jasper was but two, it turned out that one of the human children turned out to be severely allergic to Jasper’s fur. He had been part of their loving home, but now he had to go. While they didn’t want to send him to a pound, they did start asking among friends and family who might be able to take him in. And so word got around, the sister of the human parent talked about it while doing hair at the salon, and Terry spoke up: “I know the perfect person who can take care of Jasper.”

Terry’s daughter, Katherine, soon met with Jasper. It was an uneasy meeting at first. Jasper does NOT like change. Upon seeing his new home, he hid and was not seen for days, only coming out for water, food, and the litter box. But Katherine was persistent, and after a few days of hiding in his new home, Jasper left a dead bug on the table where Katherine ate breakfast each morning. It was at this moment that she realized it was all going to work out.

Now, Jasper is 18 years old. He has slowed down. He doesn’t play with toys anymore. He’s been eating less. But he is still a beloved part of this family, and he always will be.

But cats’ lives are short. Jasper nears the end of his life. Today, as I write this, he is in the emergency room. They are doing blood work and giving an MRI. Afterward, we are not sure what will happen. He has not been well lately. His has lost proprioceptive knowledge of where his back feet are. He has lost enough muscle mass that he has very little energy. But worse: he has been acting confused. He has been acting out of character in terms of where he chooses to walk. He appears to have some sort of possible neurological issues.

Soon, we will find out if these issues are temporary, possibly as side effects to a new medication that he has recently been put on, or if this is a newly arisen problem that we can’t really do that much to help about. If the former, then we will get more time with him. If the latter…

Jasper is a beloved member of our family. Grief haunts this moment of time, caught between the emotional turmoil of rushing to the hospital and when we learn what will happen next. For now, we are stuck in the car. Covid prevents us from being able to even be in the building where Jasper now is being examined. The wait is excruciating.

Last evening I slept while Katherine stayed up with Jasper. When I woke, she slept, and I took care of Jasper. Mostly this consisted of holding him, trying to encourage him to eat, allowing him to get down when he wanted. During my time with him, I let him walk around as he chose, even though it was strangely out of character for him. Eventually, he would run out of energy, and I would retrieve him, bringing him to my arms and giving him care. By the late morning, I gave him to Katherine, though she still slept, and let him rest in her arms. They stayed like this for several hours. But, after a time, he seemed uncomfortable, yet was too weak even to move himself to a better position. That’s when I helped to rearrange how he lay, and woke Katherine to let her know the issue. We called his petsitter, who asked us questions to see what we should do, and he started to open his mouth, breathing no longer solely through his nose. This was enough to cause us to get to the car and drive here, where we now wait.

We love you, Jasper.

The wait. It rests uneasily. Not being able to even be in the building with him now… It hurts. The saying, I think, is that fear can be palpable; only now do I feel it in just this way. It is like a fog around me, obstructing not my movement nor my sight, but my… …? Obstructing my courage, maybe? It’s strange. I can _feel_ the fear trapping me in. But I don’t know how to convey it other than to say: my fear is palpable.

Soon, we will get a call. The doctor on the other end will just be a few meters away, inside the building in front of us. She will be with Jasper. She will tell us what will happen next. But for now I wait.

Edit a few hours later:
Jasper is dead. He died in our arms. I feel terrible.

Fuck the Dragon Tyrant.

— Eric Herboso (@EricHerboso) March 14, 2021

ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος· (1 Corinthians 15:26)

— Eric Herboso (@EricHerboso) March 14, 2021

This afternoon Eric and I held Jasper the cat as he passed away. For sixteen years, he has been my constant companion...

Posted by Katherine Hess on Sunday, March 14, 2021

Review: Ibyabek

Ibyabek by Hannah Blume
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There's a rich history of good science fiction that takes contemporary political issues and gives them the trappings of a science fiction setting. It can be helpful for readers to see real-world events reflected in sci-fi, to better understand and identify with the characters involved.

Ibyabek follows in this tradition, showcasing the drama of what we might imagine a space-version of North Korea might look like through the eyes of a young boy trapped within its system. I'm not sure it succeeds at helping readers to identify any more strongly with its real-world analogues, but it definitely does an excellent job of telling a compelling tale.

While Ibyabek does include intrigue, with spies and ambassadors, and weaponry so powerful that it can melt a planet's surface to little more than glowing lava, it does all this solely in the background of a much more immediate story of romance as told by Kyeo, a relatively naive but narratively satisfying character who has lived his entire life on a totalitarian world.

In this short story, we follow Kyeo from his perspective as he learns, grows, and heals. The larger direction the story goes in is somewhat predictable, being so analogous to the real-world equivalent of North Korea for the fictional world of Ibyabek, but the details were still surprising and enjoyable to experience alongside Kyeo. Even the background details were pleasurable to go through; the author Alicorn successfully integrated reasonable descriptions of economics, politics, and the social side of futuristic technology into the background of this story, all told from the perspective of someone who has a very different worldview from us as readers. It's not quite a Flowers for Algernon-level difference between the reader and the protagonist in terms of how they see the world, but this story made the much more difficult attempt to truly give rational depictions of society and culture through that minimal viewpoint, and I'd say that, for the most part, the author succeeded.

I do have a few qualms with the story. There are parts that, if I were Alicorn's editor, I'd have them reconsider entirely. But that goes into spoiler territory, so if you haven't yet read this short story yet, stop reading this review and add it to your reading list. I heartily recommend it, especially given how fast a read it is.

If you're still here, then be forewarned: the rest of this review is spoilery.

There are two big objections I have to the story, and both are so large that I don't think they are fixable without significant effort. First: Alicorn has successfully got a story started where the point of view character has a completely different way of looking at things. This is great! When Sarham is introduced, they are reserved in what they say, which is also great. It allows us to learn things from what is deliberately not said, even when Kyeo doesn't. But then, when Sarham returns later in the story, he is allowed to speak freely -- and it turns out that he's highly competent. There isn't anything wrong with including such a character in most stories, but in this particular story we already have this great tension between what we as readers have to figure out and what Kyeo is saying to himself. Yet when Sarham is free to speak later on, he just tells us things that we no longer have to figure out on our own. I realize that reworking Sarham to be less intelligent would completely change the story, and it would no longer be the story that Alicorn wanted to write here, but I find myself wishing that I could read an alternate story that keeps that same divide between the protagonist's POV and the reader's POV all the way to the ending. The latter part of the story lost that special feeling of having to puzzle things out that the earlier parts held.

Second: Reading Sarham's account felt too much like telling instead of showing. I realize that this partially the point: we are trying to go back and see things from Sarham's point of view, after all. But there had been a build up of suspense on what Sarham might have written about, and when we finally get to the point where it is read, it is just... read. Sarham's writing is...explanative. I realize this is on purpose; it's how this Sarham would write. But it slowed the action to a crawl during the book portions. Narratively, it might have been better to show this in a different way, or to not show it at all. In a movie, I can imagine them switching to a flashback from a different character's perspective. In a short story, though, I'm not sure what would have worked better. All I know is that I had a feeling of tension that gripped me throughout the buildup before the book section, and all that tension dropped while I read Sarham's actual text.

I also was not entirely happy with the ending. I like the idea of the specific ending line and its callback to Kyeo's earlier fears, but the six paragraph section felt too rushed to me. Too much happened too quickly. At the end of the previous section, Kyeo was still the most recent arrival to Crane Mountain. In the final section, new arrivals appear, he got used to making plans, he started getting a stipend, he passed a test, and he moved out. This is several months worth of events described n only a few short paragraphs. While I do think the ending line is great, and the line necessitates him being in his new place, the speedup from the previous section was not at all expected and felt too rushed to me. The first three paragraphs of this section, in retrospect, depicts events over the course of months, but as you are reading it for the first time, you can't know this until you get to the line where he passes his "integration test", which you know must be months later. As a result, I had to stop, reinterpret the previous three paragraphs as a big time skip, and then continue to the ending. I would have instead appreciated a line like: "As the months passed, Kyeo met the new people coming in...". While not great, something like this would key in a first time reader to realizing that the events of the next few paragraphs are occurring at a much different pace than the preceding sections. I think that would help with making the steps toward the final line be a little more smooth.

View all my reviews

Katherine Hess is the 2020 Maryland Art Educator of the Year!

The NAEA Awards are for every state in the US.

Congratulations to Katherine Hess for earning the Maryland Art Educator of the Year award!

It feels like déjà vu because this seemingly keeps happening every year. But in fact Katherine has continually won more and more prestigious awards each year for her excellent work as an art educator. In 2017, she was presented with the Montgomery County Secondary Art Educator of the Year award, showcasing her high school work at the county level. Then, in 2019, she won the Maryland Secondary Art Educator of the Year award, which is presented to high school art teachers at the state level. But this year, on March 4–7 at the virtual 2021 NAEA National Convention, the National Art Education Association will award Katherine the 2020 Maryland Art Educator of the Year award, the highest award that an art educator of any kind can receive in the state of Maryland.

MAEA is the Maryland division of the NAEA.

Previous awards she's won have been high school based and more local. But the Maryland Art Educator of the Year award is available not only to educators at the elementary, middle, and secondary levels, but also those in higher education, museums, preservice, emeritus, or any other level. This is a big step up from her previously won awards!

Learn more about the IB.

I'm extremely proud of just how much she has done to promote art education in the state of Maryland. Katherine serves as the Department Chair for the Art Department at Seneca Valley High School (2014–present) and the Vice President of Communications for the Maryland Art Education Association (2018–present). She's done quite a bit to help art education both nationally and internationally, including as an International Baccalaureate Visual Arts Examiner in the Eastern and Southeastern Regions of the United States and as an International Extended Essays Examiner for the International Baccalaureate Organization throughout the world (including students from over a dozen countries!). In Maryland, she's headed the Academy of Commercial and Fine Art, developed Secondary Visual Arts Curricula for Montgomery County Public Schools, and helped to develop the first IB Middle Years Programme in Maryland.

Katherine and the always fluffy Jasper.

Katherine has been especially active during the pandemic, focusing on running social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram that help art educators in Maryland succeed, as well as publishing the MAEA Gazette, the MAEA Year in Review, and the Black Lives Matter statement for the Maryland Art Education Association. I am constantly amazed that she has enough energy to do all of this while still providing a positive learning environment in her virtual classroom. (The only lack this past year was in not being able to present her artwork in public anywhere because of the pandemic. A shame, really, as her work has been displayed across five states and won multiple awards in themselves.)

I can think of no better art educator in the state of Maryland than her for this award. Congratulations, Katherine!

(You can send her your congratulations directly on her facebook wall.)