Mayfly Fifteen
Emplotment & apophenia ~ The Evolution of Human Science ~ The garden of Eden & The Apocryphon of John ~ The Alchemist ~ Amusement arcade
Emplotment & apophenia
In the study of history there’s this idea of ‘emplotment’, or ‘narrativity’.
The ‘linguistic turn’ changed the study of history from Real Research of True Things That Happened to a postmodern relativist discourse where the truth could never be known.
It could not be known because we are not time travellers; and even if we were, we would only be able to see one thing at a time. And even if we were all-seeing, that doesn’t mean what we saw was as true for others as it was for us. There is no objectivity.
Furthermore, evidence we use about the past, which is most often a text of some sort, is not pure truth, it is what somebody wrote; somebody who’s likely to be as amnesiac, myopic, misinformed, mistaken, or mendacious, as we are.
While accepting how little we can know what is true, we can agree that some historical statements are not false. Auschwitz happened.
Yet, while individual statements about the past might be true, the infinite ways we can pick and choose them, and join them into coherent narratives, show us such interpretations are artistic expressive contructions in the present rather than ernest factual reconstructions of the past.
The historian starts at the beginning of the thing he wants to study, but the thing he wants to study is only defined by him, so has no beginning of its own. Same with the end. And the topic of study is not even a thing with boundaries and characteristics. Most often it’s a small number of notable events, with infinitely more contemporaneous events ignored, that have been grouped together by commentators to be called The French Revolution or The Glorious Revolution or…
Does the story of the past even exist to be found? Any story we tell is sure to be too simple to capture the complexity of any set of events we choose to examine. Nobody, not even Hannah Arendt, can explain Auschwitz.
We arrange curiosities like dots on a page, and then draw lines between them, saying “aha! an elephant!” when we could equally draw different lines and get an aeroplane, or perhaps nothing at all. And don’t forget all that space between our dots is only blank because we’ve decided beforehand to ignore the dots which would otherwise be there.
I am fascinated by this idea of apophenia, which is the very human tendancy to find patterns where perhaps none exist. It is an artefact of our neurology, a selective advantage, perhaps key to our world-dominating intelligence, and yet it is flawed.
I say all this because it relates to much I have discussed and want to discuss:
What is our knowsys? How do we know? What is the difference between reasoned, experienced, received, and felt knowledge? How do we weigh them against each other? How should we calibrate our scepticism? Do they exist in different realms? Some can be described with words, others cannot.
How does our insistence on imposing pattern, order, narrative, explanation on our experience of the world affect and effect our personal experience of the world. The word comprehend comes from the Latin cum prendare, meaning take within oneself. To comprehend is to appropriate, to seize. We colonise what’s out there and impose our meaning on it in here. By doing so we separate ourselves from the world. And the meaning we impose depends at least as much on our expectations as it does on the evidence of our senses…as so many illusions prove. This is one of Ananke’s restraints. Can we escape this trap? Should we want to? If we could, would this introduce new ills as it cures old ones?
How does this influence the state of our politics? We observe fake news, policy-based evidence making, increasing complexity, uncertainty and non-linearity under the all-encompassing tent of Surkov’s circus. And it becomes even more urgent to understand emplotment and to judge the discourse about the ‘facts’ as we enter a new age of deep fakes and algorithmic control of our echo chambers.
While we don’t always understand how AI gets to the conclusions it reaches, we have only taught it to find patterns that we can’t see because the source material is too large for our little minds. What if AI has apophenia? What is the knowledge that transcends connections and probability that we humans sometimes sense, and that AI does not have? How does this influence our evolution? Is the superhuman or the transhuman the one that can escape this limited way of thinking and yet still function in this sublunar realm rather than floating away with the fairies? Will AI develop other ways of knowing that we cannot cum prendare? Capiche?
I also say all this because it gives me an excuse to comment on four pieces of fiction…
The Evolution of Human Science — Ted Chiang
This is a prescient very short story encapsulated by one of its lines: “What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans”. Superintelligent genetically-altered metahumans communicate research findings through neural transfer, and publish translated second-hand dumbed-down accounts in human journals. Humans do not understand. They try to reverse engineer the results. They fail.
The Garden of Eden & The Apocryphon of John
You may not have read the bible recently, but you know the story of the garden of Eden in Genesis. Adam and Eve are naked in a wonderful place created by God, YHWH. He tells them not to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or they will die. But a serpent tells them they should eat it, they won’t die, and “their eyes will be opened and they will be like God, knowing good and evil”. And so Eve eats it, and so does Adam. For their crime they are expelled from paradise to stop them gaining immortality by eating from the Tree of Life. The serpent is condemned to crawl on his belly. Eve is condemned to pain in childbirth and to be ruled by her husband. Adam is condemned to have to work hard for his food every day until his death. Later commentators take this to mean all Adam and Eve’s descendents are born with original sin which must be washed away by baptism even after Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice.
You know this story. You might not have thought about it for a while. If you do now, it might seem a little odd. Why is God SOOOO extra upset about his creation eating this bit of fruit? What’s it to him, the all powerful, after all? And if it’s so bad, why does he let it happen?
But did you know about the gnostic retelling!? There’s one called the Apocryphon of John and it was written some time before 180CE. It turns the meaning of the story on its head.
In this version, Jesus tells John that YHWH is a bad demiurgic god who creates matter and corruption and is opposed to a good god of peace and light. Adam is a creation of the good god who holds a spark of the light within him, but has forgotten his divine nature. YHWH creates Eden as a false paradise to trap Adam in matter and prevent him ascending in spirit, free from the body that restrains him, to rejoin the good god of light. In this garden “Their food is bitter; their beauty is corrupt. Their food is deceit; their trees are ungodliness. Their fruit is poison. Their promise is death.” When YHWH tells Adam not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil he does so because he knows if Adam does eat, as Genesis says, his “eyes will be opened and he will be like God”. Eating the fruit reveals to Adam his true divine nature and helps him escape the clutches of YHWH who wants to keep him in bondage of material flesh. And when Adam does not die, YHWH is turned into a liar with empty threats. In this version, Eve is a hero, because she gives Adam the fruit to eat. And the serpent is Christ, an emissary from the good god of light informing Adam that he should eat the fruit, helping him know good and evil and rediscover his divinity.
To my mind, The Apocryphon of John is a more coherent interpretation of the salient ‘facts’ or motifs of the story. The line drawn between the dots seems more logical. It is neater, and more elegant.
(But as I will discuss another time I do not see how elegance or simplicity can be a predictor of truth despite that being the frequent desire of physicists, simpletons and bigots).
Of course there are more dots that could be plotted, and many more lines that could be drawn, and how literally should one take all this anyway? If either Genesis or the Apocryphon of John is a mystery, or an allegory, or a metaphor — to inform in a deeper way than simplistic logical explanation — what is the intention of its author(s)? And is that intention even relevant to the effect caused on the reader? Can there be a truth to this that isn’t personal?
The Alchemist — Paulo Coelho
I must confess that I have not read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist so maybe I’m about to do it an unforgiveable disservice. I have seen it lying around, though, and I have dipped into it. I have had backpackers I’ve met in hot cafés highly rated by the Lonely Planet extol its virtues. I might have even agreed with at least one of the prettier ones for my own prurient purposes (I assure you I’m much more intellectually honest now).
If you don’t know the book, the argument is this: If you really want something to happen badly enough, the universe will conspire to make it happen.
I despise this line of thought.
Why?
Because its bullshit.
Ok, you need more than that?
Because it says that people who die of cancer just didn’t want to live enough. That sexually abused children just didn’t want to be left alone enough. That the poor, or the sick, or the disabled, or the stupid, or the unlucky, are to blame for their predicament, because they have not desired hard enough. That insufficiency of desire, somehow, can be considered a just cause for all ills.
(Incidentally this is the exact opposite of what the author of the Apocryphon of John would say).
All this is before we get into any discussion of the sentience or desire of the universe to help some, if they prove themselves worthy, and not others. As I’ve stated before, I believe the universe to be entirely disinterested. Even if it did care, there are so many individuals and so many desires they are inevitably contradictory. Logically the universe can’t satisfy all of them. So this idea seems a kind of personal exceptionalism at best, or solipsism at worst.
I can get into some more nuanced and softer analysis.
If someone really believes in something, they’re more likely to achieve it. But that’s not the universe conspiring, that’s them being lucky enough and successful enough to make it happen. Depsite all my splurging on the Agency Trap their drive might generate results.
There’s something really to be explored about our experience of ourselves as being other or separate from the universe in which we live. Coelho’s argument suggests that separation is an illusion. I agree. Any psychedelic or religious experience calls it into doubt. But Coelho abuses that insight with the self-interested direction he takes it.
We only know anything of the universe through experiences which are mediated by our senses. We judge everything according to what’s gone before. We compare it to our expectations. We have confirmation bias. We can’t help but use stereotypes and patterns as a short-hand to thinking because we can’t judge everything afresh all the time. That thing that looks like a chair will take my weight. That thing that looks like a stone won’t be good to eat, but that thing that looks like an almond pain au chocolat will. Its wise to steer clear of the dog with the bared teeth.
What we experience, therefore, is always a product of our mind at least to some extent, regardless of whether something external triggered it at all. We don’t take the time to examine the stone to make sure it isn’t tasty. Likewise, how we react to pain, or bad news, or a compliment, or traffic, is all coloured by our personal history, and that of our forebears.
In which case changing our minds CAN influence the universe. Not by making it rearrange itself for us, but by changing how we experience it AND how we act in it. If we constantly assess, recalibrate, and improve the stereotypes we use in thinking, the results can look like the universe adapting itself to meet our desires. In fact we’re adapting ourselves to meet them.
Amusement arcade
Audio
Charlie Mingus Ah Um all day long
Visual
Went back to default and watched Seinfeld, marvelling that they were younger then than I am now. Soup Nazi.
Would you rather make love to the person on the left, or the right? If you tell me your choice, I’ll tell you mine.
It has been a little more arcane this time, a little looser, a little less editing. If it’s too ill-thought out or poorly explained I apologise. Happy to clarify what I think I mean with anyone interested. If it’s just bad thinking, set me right. At least there was no bitcoin.
Peace and love.