Categorical Desires and the Reason to Wake Up

EDO SEGAL: I want to come at this round through my own kitchen table, because the abstraction has a face. Last spring a twelve-year-old asked her mother a question and her mother asked me, with the look parents get now: not "what should I be when I grow up," but "Mom — what am I for?" She'd watched a machine do her homework better than she could, and she was lying in bed doing the honest arithmetic children do and adults euphemize. I've been answering parents in my own way — that the machine is an engine of answers and she is an engine of questions, that the candle in the darkness is the asking itself. But Bernard, your concept gives me a sharper and darker tool, and I want to use it. Cash out, for that girl's mother, what a categorical desire is — and why you think a machine offering endless life can't supply one.

WILLIAMS: Let me give the mother the distinction first, because it's the whole thing. There are two kinds of desire. Most of your desires are conditional — they're desires you have given that you're going to be alive. You want breakfast, on the condition that you wake up; you don't want breakfast badly enough to want to wake up in order to have it. These don't give you a reason to go on living; they presuppose that you're going on living and then fill in the content. But a few desires run the other way. A categorical desire is one that gives you a reason to be alive in the first place — the project you'd stay alive in order to complete, the person you'd stay alive in order to be with, the thing that, if you imagine it gone, takes the point of your continued existence with it. Raising this child. Finishing this work. These aren't conditional on your living; your living is, in a sense, conditional on them. They're the legs the whole life stands on.

Now to the dark part. The mother's daughter asks "what am I for," and the honest answer is: you're for whatever your categorical desires turn out to be — and you don't have them yet, you have to find them, and finding them is the work of becoming a person. Here's why the machine can't supply one. A categorical desire can't be handed to you, because it's constituted by your caring, from the inside, about this particular thing — and the caring has to be yours, has to cost you something, has to be the kind of thing you could fail at or lose. The machine can give the girl every answer and every capability and, eventually, every year. What it cannot give her is a reason to want the next year that is her own — because the reason has to be generated by a finite creature making finite commitments in a world where things can be too late. The danger of endless life isn't that it's too long. It's that it quietly dissolves the conditions under which a categorical desire can form at all. When nothing can be too late, when every road stays open forever, no commitment costs anything, and a commitment that costs nothing isn't a commitment. It's a preference. You can build a whole endless life out of preferences and never once have a reason to get up.

KURZWEIL: I want to fight this hard, because I think it contains a beautiful error and the error is everywhere in the wisdom literature. Bernard says a categorical desire requires that things can be "too late" — that the cost, the scarcity, the closing of roads is what makes a commitment a commitment. And I say: that confuses the occasion of meaning with its source. Consider the things human beings find most meaningful that have no terminal scarcity. A parent's love for a child doesn't run out because the parent will eventually die; it would be just as deep, arguably deeper, if the parent had a thousand years to express it. The desire to understand the universe doesn't get its meaning from the fact that you'll die before you finish — Newton's curiosity wasn't caused by his mortality, and a Newton with five hundred years would have wanted to understand more, not less. You've taken a contingent feature of our current situation — that we're rushed, that we have to choose because the clock is short — and you've promoted it into the source of all value. But rush is not the same as meaning. A great deal of what's most precious in life is precisely what we wish we had more time for, not less. The scarcity isn't the gift. The scarcity is the thief, and you've fallen in love with the thief because he's the only company you've ever had.

WILLIAMS: "Fallen in love with the thief" — that's a good line and it's exactly wrong, and I can show you why with your own examples. The parent's love for the child: you say it would be deeper with a thousand years. But Ray, which thousand years? The love is for this child, who is herself finite, who grows up and changes and one day doesn't need you and one day is gone. The love is shaped, at every moment, by the preciousness that comes from the child being a finite, vulnerable, unrepeatable creature whom you could lose. A parent with a thousand years and an immortal child does not have a deeper version of that love. They have something else — something we don't have a word for, because no parent has ever had it, and I'd wager it would be thinner, not richer, because the stakes would be gone. You keep saying scarcity is the thief. I keep saying scarcity is what makes the thing yours to lose, and a thing you cannot lose is a thing you cannot fully have. The reason your father's death was a catastrophe — and it was, I'm not minimizing it — is that he was finite and irreplaceable. Make him un-loseable and you don't protect the preciousness. You annul the condition that made him precious.

EDO SEGAL: I have to stop the room, because the reader needs to feel what just happened. Ray said scarcity is the thief that steals what we love. Bernard answered that scarcity is the only reason there's anything to steal. That's not two opinions about the same fact. That's two incompatible theories of where value comes from, and everything else tonight is downstream of it. Let me route it through my own scar, because I owe the table the toll. I told you in the foreword about the night over the Atlantic — grinding through a manuscript at four in the morning, the exhilaration long since curdled, unable to stop, the voice telling me to keep going sounding exactly like my own ambition. I've also sat with the symbolic immortality we all reach for — the work that outlives us, the children, the name on the building. Here's my honest confusion, and I want you both to take it seriously: when I'm in the grip of a project I love, I don't feel finite. I feel like I could do it forever. So which is the illusion — the rushed feeling, or the timeless one?

KURZWEIL: The timeless one is the truth and the rushed one is the wound. When you're in flow, Edo — fully absorbed, the gap between conceiving and doing collapsed to nothing — you're tasting the thing I'm trying to build a world out of. That state has no clock in it. You don't experience flow as "I'd better hurry because I'll die." You experience it as a kind of eternity, and you're right to, because it's the condition in which a categorical desire is actively generating its own successor — each solved problem opening the next, the well deepening as you drink. The grinding compulsion at four in the morning is what flow becomes when it's severed from a reason — when the doing continues but the wanting has hollowed out. And here's the thing Bernard won't tell you: that hollowing is not caused by having too much time. It's caused by losing contact with the categorical desire underneath the activity. The cure isn't death. The cure is reconnection to the thing you actually care about — and that cure works exactly as well at year five hundred as at year fifty.

WILLIAMS: And there, Edo, your confusion is the most honest thing said tonight, so let me honor it rather than win against it. You feel both — the timeless absorption and the finitude — and you're not confused, you're correct, because they're the same phenomenon seen from two sides. The flow feels timeless precisely because, in that moment, you're spending your finitude well — you're so fully inside a categorical desire that the running-out has, for a moment, been redeemed. But notice: you can only have that redemption because there was something to redeem. The four-in-the-morning compulsion is what it looks like when the activity goes on but the redemption has stopped — when you're spending time without spending it on anything. Ray's right that the cure is reconnection to what you care about. But what he won't see is why you have to keep reconnecting, why the desires keep needing renewal: because they exhaust, because you finish things, because a self is a finite shape and not an infinite spring. Give yourself forever and the renewals don't keep pace. That's Makropulos. She was in flow once, too. The cold is what flow becomes when there's no longer anything that could be too late.

EDO SEGAL: Hold that thread — it returns when we turn the death cross inward, two rounds from now. But the next round is the one Bernard has been promising and Ray has been dreading, and it's the hinge of the whole evening. Ray wants to save the pattern. Bernard says the pattern was never the person. So: if the machine runs you forever — or runs your father again — is the thing on the other side you? After this.