David Boles: Human Meme

Someone approaches you and asks for a piece of string. That's all they say. No context, no explanation, no qualifying details. Just: "Can I have a piece of string?" In that moment, you hold something more precarious than you might realize. You're standing at the intersection of mathematics, psychology, and potentially someone's survival. How do you answer? More importantly, how do you act?

Right now, as you listen to this, your larynx is trying to kill you. This isn't metaphorical. Your voice box sits dangerously low in your throat, creating an intersection where food and air must cross paths every time you swallow. No other mammal has this problem. Horses can drink and breathe simultaneously. Newborn humans can nurse and breathe at the same time. But somewhere between three and six months old, your larynx descended, and you joined the only species on Earth that regularly dies from eating dinner.

Here's something that should stop you cold: humans are the only animals on Earth that cry emotional tears. Not tears to clean the eyes, not tears from irritation, but tears from joy, from grief, from being overwhelmed by beauty. Elephants mourn their dead without weeping. Dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors without crying at their own reflection. Your dog, who seems to love you completely, has never shed a single emotional tear. This is not speculation. This is measured fact. And nobody knows why.

The first sign something was wrong in the neighborhood came when Patricia Reeves knocked on her own door and asked her husband if Patricia Reeves lived there. She stood on the porch in her gardening clothes, dirt still under her fingernails from planting the tulips we'd all watched her plant an hour before. Her husband assumed it was a stroke. The doctors found nothing. Brain scans perfect. Blood work pristine. Patricia simply no longer knew she was Patricia. Within a week, three more people on Millbrook Road forgot themselves. Not amnesia where everything disappears. Something more precise. They remembered their children's names, their job skills, how to drive, what they had for breakfast. They just didn't remember being themselves. Marcus Chen could still perform surgery but couldn't recognize his own hands doing it. Sarah Thompson could recite every case she'd ever tried in court but insisted someone else must have tried them. They lived in their own homes as guests, polite strangers wearing their own face

When we invoke the Boodle Boy, we're also invoking a kind of professional shamanism. The shaman moves between worlds, bringing back knowledge from spaces others can't access. The Boodle Boy moves between disciplines, between technologies, between ways of knowing. He speaks theater to programmers and code to dramatists. He finds the musical structure in a business plan and the corporate logic in a symphony. This isn't interdisciplinary work in the academic sense; it's transdisciplinary in the most radical sense, refusing to acknowledge the borders between different forms of knowledge.

Here's a thought experiment I want you to try. Tonight, pick one moment from your day. Just one. Don't photograph it. Don't write it down. Don't tell anyone about it. Just hold it in your mind. Try to recall it tomorrow, next week, next month. Watch how it changes. Notice how it connects to other memories, how it grows or fades, how it becomes less about what happened and more about what it meant. Because here's what cognitive scientists are discovering: the difference between remembering and retrieving data isn't just technical, it's existential. When you remember something, you're not just accessing information. You're reconstituting yourself. The memory changes you as you change it. This recursive loop between the rememberer and the remembered? That's consciousness itself.

“Taking the black pill” names a posture of fatalism that migrated from fringe men’s forums into the wider internet. The metaphor riffs on the pills in The Matrix, but where the “red pill” claims to reveal hard truths, the black pill says those truths are terminal and change is pointless. In its most specific and consequential register, it is tied to the incel subculture that coalesced online in the early 2010s. Encyclopædia Britannica traces the phrase’s popularization to the incel blog Omega Virgin Revolt and records a further radicalization after May 23, 2014, when some forum users glorified Elliot Rodger’s Isla Vista murders with talk of “going ER,” a dark shorthand for destruction and loss of hope. 

Consider a thought experiment: one intelligence is trained exclusively on everything known about apples. Another is trained only on oranges. They are allowed to communicate but are strictly forbidden from discussing the specifics of their respective fruits. Would the apple expert learn about oranges, and vice versa? Surprisingly, the answer is almost certainly yes. Information inevitably leaks through the structure of communication itself. While their specific knowledge is specialized, they share a common linguistic framework. They both understand concepts like color, shape, growth, and climate.

Consciousness is the raw fact of experience itself, what philosophers call qualia. It's the redness of red, the sharp bite of winter air, that peculiar texture of anxiety sitting in your chest. Consciousness is simply the lights being on, the "something it is like" to be you. A mouse likely has consciousness; it experiences pain, pleasure, fear, but probably has little to no self-awareness. Self-awareness, by contrast, is consciousness turned inward and recognizing itself. It's not just experiencing, but knowing that you are the one experiencing. It's the ability to form a concept of "I" as distinct from "not-I," to see yourself as an object in the world with a past and future.

There is no single universal definition of “Indigenous peoples.” The most rigorous contemporary practice rests on a cluster of criteria: self-identification; descent from societies that predate colonization; continuity of language, institutions, and spiritual traditions; and a sustained relationship with particular territories and waters. Since the late twentieth century, international law has converged around this approach.

When you really sit with these ideas, the boundary between matter and mind starts to shimmer and dissolve. Forests think with water. Worms dream soil into being. Consciousness flickers like a strobe light, creating the illusion of continuity from discontinuous moments. We're not separate from these processes; we're expressions of them. Your thoughts at this moment are as much a product of ancient earthworm digestion and forest hydrology as they are of neural electricity. The carbon in your neurons once moved through the bodies of worms, the water in your blood once fell as rain summoned by trees.

The concept of spiritual and moral hollowness that T.S. Eliot crystallized in "The Hollow Men" (1925) emerged from a crisis of meaning that had been building in Western consciousness since the mid-nineteenth century. While Eliot's immediate inspiration came from witnessing the spiritual devastation following World War I, the metaphor of human hollowness had deeper roots in the philosophical and literary traditions he inherited. The image appears to have first gained currency through Nietzsche's declaration of God's death and his warnings about the "last men;" all comfortable, mediocre beings who had lost all capacity for greatness or genuine feeling. But even before Nietzsche, we can trace intimations of this hollowness in Kierkegaard's analysis of the aesthetic life, where individuals flit from pleasure to pleasure without ever achieving authentic selfhood.

A persistent gap between public imagination and technical reality defines the common understanding of artificial intelligence. The popular discourse, shaped by a century of fiction, centers on the fear of emergent machine consciousness, while the more urgent, tangible story is about how today’s powerful, non-sentient tools are actively beginning to restructure our world. The central misunderstanding is not that AI is unimportant, but that its immediate impact is philosophical rather than what it truly is: a practical, economic, and social force compelling a fundamental human reorganization.

The old archivist, Dr. Aris Thorne, felt a jolt of audacious heresy as he slid the glossy print into the maw of the machine. It was a photograph that had become a part of the national bloodstream, an image of pure, unthinking ecstasy at the end of a long and brutal war. He had chosen Alfred Eisenstaedt's "V-J Day in Times Square" for its raw, kinetic power, a sailor dipping a nurse in a spontaneous, jubilant kiss, a sliver of peace captured forever. The AI, which he had nicknamed ‘Clio’ after the muse of history, whirred to life. Its function was straightforward, yet revolutionary: to take the static past and give it the breath of motion. On the large monitor, the image flickered, and then, impossibly, it began to live.

In the sprawling, often-anonymous landscape of the internet, a persistent shadow lurks, eager to sow discord and inflict reputational harm: the online troll. These digital phantoms, armed with keyboards and a seemingly endless supply of vitriol, can target individuals, products, and companies with a barrage of harassing reviews, leaving a trail of distress and frustration. Understanding how to contend with this modern-day menace requires a multi-faceted approach, one that sinks into the psychology of the troll, outlines a strategic response plan, and ultimately, empowers us to fortify our online presence against such attacks. It is a battle fought not with anger and retaliation, but with a calm, measured, and informed strategy.

It's a wonderfully curious thing, isn't it, how two little words like "less" and "fewer" can stir up so much conversation and, at times, even a little bit of friendly debate? It’s a perfect example of how our language is a living, breathing entity, constantly shaped by how we, its speakers, choose to use it. Let's take a warm and friendly stroll through the landscape of these two words and see what we can discover together. 

So, after all this time, have we ever actually found evidence of alien life on Earth? It's a question that gets to the heart of our place in the universe. For more than fifty years, we’ve been looking, and despite some tantalizing clues, the answer is still no. We don’t have a single piece of reproducible evidence. What we have is a fascinating story of discovery and disappointment, a lesson in how science separates a true signal from wishful thinking.

The cosmos harbors many mysteries, but few capture our imagination as completely as black holes, regions of spacetime where gravity so dominates that nothing, not even light, can escape once it crosses a critical boundary. They represent the ultimate triumph of gravity over every known counter-force. When matter is compressed into an extremely small volume, general relativity predicts spacetime curvature so severe that it creates what looks, to outside observers, like a “hole” in the fabric of reality. (The geometric picture is subtler, but the metaphor is serviceable.)

Nowhere was the tension between local and standard time more vivid than in Indiana. Before 2006, the state was a confusing patchwork of time observance. Some counties followed Daylight Saving, while others steadfastly refused. Some aligned with Chicago on Central Time, others with Ohio on Eastern Time. Locals became "time-bilingual." A dentist in Jasper might advertise appointments at 9 a.m. "slow," knowing that patients driving from Louisville, already on "fast" time, would show up at what their own clocks read as 10 a.m. The question, "Your time or my time?" became as essential as a zip code. The situation bred both confusion and comedy. In 2001, a software company famously missed its own earnings call because half the team dialed in on "fast" time and the other half on "slow." Finally, in 2006, the logistical headaches for businesses and even Little League tournaments compelled state lawmakers to adopt uniform time observance. The old idiom, however, persists, a linguistic fossil from an era when time was

The phrase “if the center holds” has its conceptual roots in the broader cultural and literary assertion that social, political, or ideological cohesion can be sustained only so long as the core remains intact. This phrase is often considered a response to William Butler Yeats’s famous lines from his poem “The Second Coming,” in which he prophesies that “the centre cannot hold,” implying an irreversible spiritual or cultural unraveling. The contradictory statement “if the center holds” presupposes that even in moments of uncertainty or crisis, there remains a stable pivot, a moral or structural nexus, that prevents total collapse.