Anthology

Citation preview

Not Nothing 2020

SARAH PERRY

“ The form of consciousness that you and I share (if you are reading this) was likely not the only one to sweep across new territory, erasing previous variation. But it is the most recent such sweep, and it has been a dramatic one. It provides particular ways of subjectively experiencing time, identity, the self, other people, external reality, and the divine. Ours is a literate kind of consciousness, gathering momentum with the advent of printing and achieving its ultimate realization (though with some subversion) in the form of the Internet. Since it appears to be transmitted by schooling and since it is the form of consciousness most conducive to industrialization, it may be thought of as scholastic-industrial consciousness.

ANTHOLOGY SARAH PERRY

CONTENTS Preface SUICIDE & ANTINATALISM The View From Hell 2008-12 1.

Excerpts from The View From Hell

2.

Living in the Epilogue

3.

Interview for Review the Future

ADAPTATION & FLOURISHING Carcinisation 2014 4.

What Is Intelligence?

5.

Toward the Synthesis of Flourishy Forms

6.

Beauty Is Fit

7.

Why Cultural Evolution Is Real

THE SACRED & MODERNITY Ribbonfarm 2014-18 8.

Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture

9.

What Is Ritual?

10. Ritual Epistemology 11. An Ecology of Beauty & Strong Drink 12. Cringe & the Design of Sacred Experiences SOCIAL COGNITION & POSTRATIONALITY Ribbonfarm 2015-18 13. The Essence of Peopling 14. Weaponized Sacredness 15. Cooperative Ignorance 16. Inequalities 17. Business As Magic 18. Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths 19. Frontierland

LANGUAGE & PHENOMENOLOGY Ribbonfarm 2015-19 20. Puzzle Theory 21. Cartographic Compression 22. Meaning and Pointing 23. Something Runs Through The Whole Thread 24. Social Media Consciousness 25. After Temporality

Feeling the Future

26. Rectangle Vision 27. On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke SYSTEMS & COMPLEXITY Ribbonfarm 2016-2018 28. Gardens Need Walls: Boundaries, Rituals, & Beauty 29. Interview II (2016) 30. A Bad Carver 31. Tendrils of Mess in Our Brains

LABOR & LEISURE Ribbonfarm 2017-2019 32. Body Pleasure 33. Luxuriating in Privacy 34. Deep Laziness 35. Notes on Doing Things APPENDIX 1 36. Systems of the World 37. The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth 38. Two Patterns 39. The Mountain 40. Folk Concepts APPENDIX 2 41. Publication History 42. Index

PREFACE Perry’s earliest public writing appears on her blog The View From Hell in 2008, arguing for the right to die and questioning the ethics of procreation. This period of work can be understood, in part, as a corrective to the dominant, if implicit, cultural metaphor of life as gift—reframing it instead as an unchosen burden comprised, for many, of more suffering than satisfaction. The right to commit suicide, to Perry, is the right to an off-switch, the right to exit that suffering and exercise full control over one’s consciousness. To frame the stance in the more popular language of consent, the suffering of living can only be understood as consensual and voluntary if there is always the option to abscond—to decide, like Bartleby, “I would prefer not to.” Perry describes this period in her writing as a necessary working-through and exorcism of her political consciousness, allowing her to move on to more playful explorations of less touchy and “sacred” domains.1 1 There are two senses in which Perry uses the term sacredness, closely linked but distinct. One is the sacredness which “binds and blinds” (following J. Haidt)—a protective epistemology which safeguards certain values or beliefs from interrogation (see “Weaponized Sacredness” beginning page 233). The other is the sequential experience of arousal and then calm before the (perceived) presence of the metaphysical (“What Is Ritual?” page 153). Sacredness can arise as an emergent feature of architectural space, group mood, the charisma of the ritual leader, and

Much of her thinking from this time has already been represented in her book Every Cradle Is a Grave (NineBanded Press, 2014); its presence in this collection has been down-scaled accordingly. Perry switches, in this period, from focusing on the right to abstain from life, to searching for the conditions that might improve human existence. “Perhaps the most important question of our time is how human beings can flourish and enjoy satisfying, meaningful lives under conditions of material abundance and extreme cultural interconnectedness,” she writes in “Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty.”2 This question forms a spinal cord for her writing in the 2010s, from The View From Hell through her tenure as contributing editor at Ribbonfarm.3 ໙ Perry’s work should be considered, in part, a response to the rationalist worldview native to sites like LessWrong and Overcoming Bias, and advocated by thinkers including Robin Hanson, Julia Galef, Luke Muelhauser, Scott Alexander, Paul Christiano, Sarah Constantin, Anna Salamon, Nancy Lebovitz, and Eliezer Yudkowsky. “The community,” Perry writes, “is characterized (broadly) by a scientific worldview, skepticism of religion and paranormal claims, atheism, and an almost fanatical devotion to Bayes rule”—as well as an interest in cognitive bias, artificial the exclusivity of an assembly. 2 page 481. 3 “All my topics are kind of related, and I have a mental map that’s a mess of everything, it’s all connected in a million places” (Perry, Nature Bats Last interview).

4 “Ritual Epistemology,” page 173. 5 Rationalism here is meant less in the Cartesian sense, as an opposition to empiricism, and more as the worldview domestic to the blog LessWrong, which was founded in the 2000s by Eliezer Yudkowsky. 6 See “Toward a Synthesis of Flourishy Forms,” page 97.

9

Preface 

intelligence, signaling theory, and utilitarianism. In contrast, Perry sees the postrational stance as a kind of “hyper-rationality,” an acknowledgment of the way that seemingly irrational systems often outperform rational refactorings in terms of human flourishing. This stance—a kind of “drunk” rationalism committed to the mysteries of emergence—(1) advocates for evolved solutions as a competitive alternative to design thinking, (2) holds a deep “sympathy for religion, ritual, and tradition,” and (3) is skeptical of the “ability of science (as it is practiced) to solve humanity’s problems and provide a sense of meaning.”4 In the early 2010s, Perry became close with a loose-knit community on Twitter that would end up incubating much of the post- and counter-rationalist discourse emerging at the time from the LessWrong diaspora.5 In July of 2014, the idea of starting a community blog was entertained as a way to formalize and preserve discourse; by July 12, the site had been registered by Sam Burnstein and named Carcinisation—the process by which organisms convergently evolve crab-like characteristics6—after a group shibboleth. Butrnstein recruited and hustled for submissions; The Sublemon, St. Rev, Matt Simpson, and Perry were joined by a more rationalist-minded, pseudonymous coalition including Simplicio and Aethercircuit. Perry’s essays during this time—summer and fall of 2014—draw heavily on their sources; they are less

arguments on their own legs than the compiling of a canon. “What Is Intelligence?”7 (July 15) extends Schmidhuber’s work on intelligence as optimization and error minimization, and places intelligence in the context of complex systems. “Toward the Synthesis of Flourishy Forms” (July 22) and “Beauty is Fit”8 (August 22) draw heavily from the writings of architect-theorist Christopher Alexander,9 and continue previous posts’ investigation of how systems’ designs prevent or promote human flourishing. “Why Cultural Evolution Is Real,”10 Perry’s last piece for the site for several years, attempts to translate the more academic ideas of cultural evolution heavyweight Joseph Henrich into an accessible defense of the field. By early 2015, the group’s use of Carcinisation as as a conversational platform slowed, concurrent with Perry’s digital relocation to Ribbonfarm—first as resident blogger, then as contributing editor. Community discourse began migrating from Twitter and blogging onto private servers—discursive, semi-permeable islands, welcoming members and exporting ideas selectively. On-shore, wild and colorful theories flourish free from the continent’s predation. ໙ Perry’s tenure at Ribbonfarm begins with “Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture,” and its audacious 7 page 91. 8 page 103. 9 Alexander is a heterodox architect best known for his theoretical writings, which advocate a bottom-up anti-design approach to architectural form, based in generative, traditional patterns. 10 page 109.

11 Compare Kyle Chayka’s concept of airspace in “Welcome to Airspace,” The Verge 2016.

11

Preface 

speculation that “human prehistory [may have] hosted a wide variety of human consciousness” very different from our own. Perry terms our contemporary and particular form of consciousness “scholastic-industrial,” describing a specific orientation to time, identity, and the self that has co-evolved with written language and economics. But for past societies—preindustrial, pre-urban, pre-literate, even pre-linguistic—the conscious experience may have been radically different. Perry cites Julian Jaynes’s theory that human minds, as recently as the Bronze Age, lacked metaconsciousness, introspection, and egoic identity (in contrast with integrated, self-reflexive “book” consciousness). Ritual synchronicity and sophisticated group proprioception, meanwhile, are types of tight and near-telepathic cognitive interlock between individuals which appear to be historically common in hunter-gatherer tribes, but relatively uncommon in modern life. Not only are these specific forms of consciousness contemporarily rare, or outcompeted, but their sheer variety has likewise been reduced to a “consciousness monoculture.” Like adjacent thinkers Gwern and Gabe Duquette, she sees potential danger in the proliferation of global culture (see her writing on tiling structures in “Gardens Need Walls”)­—its tendency towards, at best, an aesthetic-ideological blandness,11 or worse, towards material optimization untethered from—and at the cost of—human flourishing. Perry’s interest in ritual can be considered, in part, a response to a sort of automatic and unconsidered negative connotation of the practice, especially

among atheistic tribes, where the word “ritual” is used to describe a mindless and purposeless practice, a waste of time and resources without practical payoff. It derives also from personal experience undergoing ritual’s radical mental states: when Perry first tried circling (or “intersubjective meditation,” a modern group ritual invented by Guy Sengstock involving empathic noticing), the experience felt “immediately psychoactive.” Despite how powerful ritual forms are, there is a dearth in contemporary culture of new ones properly adapted to the times; Perry argues, in her interviews and writing, that the problem is twofold. For one, older rituals are perceived as less provisional, and taken more seriously merely on the basis of age (see also the folk distinction between established “religions” and contemporary “cults”). Second, ritual is a surprisingly difficult “collective art form”12 that requires coordination and has a steep learning curve, but no established discourse or methodology to assist in ritual development. Other forms of consciousness, or mental states, include flow, awe, connection, meaning, pain, pleasure, and synchronicity; such states can be induced through ritual, as in running, self-flagellation, BDSM, and meditation. Mental states form the basis of Perry’s ethical framework, one implicitly consequentialist and psychological, where external reality is an instrument rather than ends. Indeed, Perry sees reality, or its sober perception, as merely its own mental state—one among many—and takes little issue with a Nozickstyle “experience machine” (given it’s sufficiently 12 See “Cringe & the Design of Sacred Experiences,” page 198.

໙ Perry’s taste in reading is diverse but tends towards the simultaneously esoteric and universal, the scientifically occult. Society and nature, theology and evolution, institutions and the mind—all coexist, unified by their shared identity as systems—as structures of interlocking parts marked by hierarchy, causal interdependence, and flow. Poker and court cases, religion and governance, are subject to the same dynamics of custom and spectacle, ritual procedures 13 See “Excerpts from The View From Hell,” page 23. 14 “Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture,” page 131.

13

Preface 

high-dimensional and sensorily complete).13 There is a sense, in her writing, of real stakes—the direct link between, on one hand, beliefs and practices, conceptions of self and society, and on the other, the relative burden or levity of being. This link leads her writing to delve into both the introspective and practical, presenting personal histories or psychological inclinations in the service of building tools for palliation. The personal is always an exhibit or testing ground for generating and developing hypotheses: her ideas on the pleasure of flow states stem from her distance running; observations on tiling, architecture, and topdown system design are filtered through her residence in downtown Reno. The recognition, design affordance, and proliferation of mental states constitute the stakes of her writing; such states spread memetically and are reinforced through exposure; “mere demonstration is often enough to transmit them,” as if by contagion.14

of transparency and credibility pre-agreed-to by players of the Carsean game.15 Where a humanist analysis might argue for free speech as an inalienable right, to Perry it is a “coordination mechanism” that combats “preference falsification spirals” and immunizes a population to attacks on cherished values.16 Systems thinking entails systems metaphors, and analogies to agriculture, ecology, law, and immune response set the stage for ideas on religion, design, urban development, sociality, coordination, and politics. All this means that traditional political axes, when imposed on Perry, fail not by inches but by miles. Though lightly self-identifying as libertarian in interviews, Perry seems skeptical of many of the ideology’s orthodoxies—particularly its focus on individuals over groups, and its frequent prioritization, via allegiance to markets, of material efficiency over “soft” values and problems. “Much of what humans want and need is not possible to supply in markets, and the chunks that are supplied are often not good materials for composing a human life.”17 Choice—as well a radical humility towards complex systems—serve instead as the basis for her politics, be it her arguments for humans’ right to die or else her advocacy for cultural evolution. Her writings in general tend to oppose top-down, and advocate for bottom-up, solutions to problems, casting light on the “stupidity” of individual genius (or distant oversight committees) compared to the complex and evolved solutions that are tested and 15 See James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games 1986. 16 “Weaponized Sacredness,” page 233. 17 Review the Future interview, page 59.

18 “An Ecology of Beauty and Strong Drink,” page 185. 19 “Gardens Need Walls,” page 481. 20 “In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it’” (Chesterton, Taking a Fence Down).

15

Preface 

improved upon over generations.18 James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, a canonical text at Ribbonfarm, provides an argument for the instrumental value of human choice—that local knowledge, often developed and evolved over generations by those “close to the ground,” frequently outcompetes the novel, designed, and top-down solutions of outsiders. High modernism is an example of top-down’s failures— unlivable homes, ambitious urban overhauls that drive out residents—that Perry comes back to repeatedly. “Individual imagination is weak; evolution is strong”;19 while top-down solutions have been vetted theoretically by the authorities who impose them, bottom-up solutions are organically adopted and spread in correlation with their actual, demonstrated efficacy. There is a kind of Chestertonian conservatism20 in her cautionary passages on the unforeseen effects of social tampering. The influence of cultural evolution theories underlies the skepticism, especially the work of researchers like Joe Henrich and Robert Boym, both cited regularly in her writings. Henrich notes the way that the Tukonoan tribe’s extensive and painstaking preparation of the cassava

root (a process which lasts multiple days) is a chemically sophisticated method of removing trace quantities of cyanide from the root. Though toxicology knowledge at the time was not advanced enough for Tukonoan cooks to explain or justify “rationally” the benefits of such preparation methods, the ritual survived and was reproduced generation after generation. Similar examples are found in countless populations. In Fiji, strong religious taboos exist which limit pregnant women’s consumption of seafish, effectively minimizing lead exposure. In South America, maize (corn) forms a central part of the ancestral diet, and populations have evolved methods of nixtamalizing the maize to avoid niacin deficiency and pellagra, the frequently fatal disease which follows. And yet when maize was exported from the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries, it took Western science over a hundred years to identify the source of the disease we now know was pellagra—during which hundreds of thousands of people, relying on maize as a staple food, perished across colonial America and the Continent. The lesson Perry discovers in these and similar examples is the separation between abstract knowledge and concrete practice, and the way that a culture of “rational” behavior (which is to say, behavior which can be justified through scientific knowledge) can wipe out crucial and efficacious evolved behaviors for which we lack clear explanations. The elimination or decoupling of such “carefully evolved ancestral patterns” can have strong and negative unintended effects, since we often lack a full understanding of how these systems work. This is especially the case in domains like sociology, economics, and psychology,

໙ Perry’s thinking continues the 20th century intellectual tradition, from Nietzsche to Houellebecq, Weil to Wallace, concerned with the effects of religion’s decline on psyche & society. (It’s an inquiry shared by close friend and interlocutor David Chapman in his writings on Buddhism, postmodernism, and Robert Kegan for Meaningness.) For Perry, echoing the Catholic friar Adrian Kavanagh, “meaning” is embodied and actualized through practice, more than it is a product of belief. Knowledge—a frequent infohazard, in Perry’s factoring22—undermines these practices in the first place, both by atomizing and rationalizing believers’ worldviews. See Perry’s skepticism toward 21 Perry appears to see the past not as better—a place worthy of return—but as a rich resource, a place where valuable ideas and practices have been left behind—opportunities for rediscovery and reintegration into the present. 22 “Cooperative Ignorance,” page 254.

17

Preface 

where phenomena are murkily defined and verification resembles theater more than science. Perry’s traditionalism,21 and postrationality by extension, stems from a learned humility in the face of complexity, a natural byproduct of the study of systems. “The necessary ambiguities of social life,” she writes in “Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture,” can never be fully understood via “rational codification.” Following Alva Noe (Strange Tools, 2016), we might say that we are organized beings, but are not the authors of our organization; ritual, like art and philosophy, is a means of orienting and re-orienting ourselves within these systems, for which we lack another, better guide.

liberalism’s love-and-let-live approach to ideology, a historically strange way of self-organizing which requires a regular and careful balancing act. Shared belief—whether individually rational or not—underpins our ability to cooperate and trust.23 (The seemingly self-evident belief that knowledge, education, and enlightenment are not inherent but contingent, instrumental goods is a surprisingly heterodox one in contemporary culture. Even self-knowledge, Perry writes, carries deep potential for psychic harm—she points to the increase in literal and figurative mirrors, beginning in the 19th century, as a serious and potentially damaging shift in human self-image.) In the absence of communal and religious meaningness, the development of the self must “take on the novel burden of providing value and fulfillment,” a justification for suffering in the present. This is part of a persistent self-fetish in the contemporary West, a carcinogenic outgrowth of Enlightenment individualism, which not only replaces but actively opposes other ways of being in the world. The “elevation of sincerity and authenticity” so particular to the present is accompanied by a “distrust of ritual” and its automaticity. Submission and reverence are subsumed as dominant values by freedom and individualism: communal rituals ordained by a shaman or priest (such as Oaxacan psilocybin ceremonies, or Amazonian ayahuasca rituals) cannot be practiced intact by Westerners due to the ideological gap between self and activity. Instead, Mexican villages are “overrun with tripping hippies running… naked” through 23 “What Is Ritual?” page 153.

It is simpler and more orderly for analysts to deal with formal analytic schedules and criteria—“analytic formats whose adequacies are obtained and warranted by the methods of formal analysis” (Garfinkel ‘96)—than it is to keep oneself addressed to the complicated but specific wordly details that identify a phenomenon. Perhaps because her scholarship is grounded in lived experience instead of academic extension—perhaps because of her liberating irreverence towards prestige culture—Perry’s writing has as good a vantage on reality as any thinker I know. “Cringe,” in Perry’s hands, is revealed as “failed emotional manipulation” and “failed sacredness,” breeding embarrassment among guests and host alike. Similar to the “failed seriousness” of camp or the anticlimax of bathos, 24 “Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture,” page 131.

19

Preface 

town. Freedom is viewed anarchically and antisocially as a lack of responsibility; self-actualization (“finding oneself ”) is something that happens—miraculously —outside the context of the group. Of this present mode, she writes, it is “a form of consciousness that is novel, contagious, and perhaps detrimental to human flourishing.” 24 But what feels more refreshing, more unique, in Perry’s writing, is her interest in the informal and lived. A passage from Kenneth Liberman’s More Studies in Ethnomethodoloy (which Perry has read and cited) can help us understand the difficulty and contribution of Perry’s work, with its emphasis on the phenomenological:

it is a mismatch between the intended tone and the actual.25 Elsewhere, grocery shoppers are described as time-travelers flickering between past and future.26 Doctors are “priests,” medical tests are “rituals,” and the end result is identical life expectancies among the (medically abstinent) Amish and non-Amish Americans (despite billions in annual spending).27 ໙ A shared lesson of fashion, linguistics, and ethnomethodology­ —of Perry’s corpus generally—is the importance of context to meaning­—its indexicality. I’d like to preface this book accordingly—I know Sarah, casually if not well, and was lucky enough to interview her several years prior to the publication of the book in your hands. This collection was assembled in a tributary spirit: with permission, but not in collaboration, and the understanding advanced in this forward is my own, at best tracking the truth only roughly. All footnotes have been added by the editor. Though they borrow language from captions or parentheticals in Perry’s original essays, they do not necessarily reflect her phrasing or views. Much thanks to Shreeda Segan for edits and initial framing. An alternate reading order for these essays is provided in the appendix, via Perry’s short overview “Systems of the World.”28

25 “Cringe & the Design of Sacred Experiences,” page 198. 26 “After Temporality,” page 436. 27 “Ritual Epistemology,” page 173. 28 page 599.

SUICIDE & ANTINATALISM The View From Hell 2010-14

EXCERPTS FROM THE VIEW FROM HELL1 The moral issue of suicide has usually been stated in terms of whether suicide is morally permissible under any circumstances. For instance, Michael Cholbi puts the question this way:1 Are there conditions under which suicide is morally justified, and if so, which conditions?2 This formulation assumes a major premise: that it is the suicidal person who must justify his refusal to live, rather than the community being required to justify the action of forcing him to live. These notes will focus on the moral reprehensibility of forced life, rather than attempt to justify suicide from a defensive perspective. ໙ A February 2009 editorial in the New Scientist […]: Imagine you are seated at a table with two bowls 1 Perry’s early blogging was more fragmentary, with shorter posts that built off of, and referenced, one another. Some of those pieces have been excerpted or collated here. 2 Cholbi, “Suicide,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2012.

in front of you. One contains peanuts, the other tablets of the illegal recreational drug MDMA (ecstasy). A stranger joins you, and you have to decide whether to give them a peanut or a pill. Which is safest? You should give them ecstasy, of course. A much larger percentage of people suffer a fatal acute reaction to peanuts than to MDMA. The implication is that, when acting upon a stranger, we should minimize his risk of death. The lovely and talented Caledonian has a slightly different take: we should focus on the relative likelihood of harm, he says, rather than the relative likelihood of death.3 Both of these goals—acting to minimize the risk of death to a stranger, and acting to minimize his risk of harm—are laudable and widely shared. But there’s a glaring aspect of the utilitarian calculus that almost no one seriously considers in making the decision to administer a peanut or some ecstasy. This is the differential positive utility to be gained by the stranger in each case. […] While many of us would certainly consider the pleasure of ecstasy in deciding whether to eat the pill or the peanut ourselves, it’s proper and coherent not to consider the pleasurable effects of a potentially harmful action when it will be inflicted upon a non-consenting stranger whose values we do not know. This illustrates 3 “Death isn’t the point,” Occluded Sun: Tales from a Dying Earth, Feb 20 2009.

4 Seana Shiffrin, “Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm,” Legal Theory 1999. 5 Journal of Medical Ethics, 2008. 6 Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence: The Harm of Coming into Existence, 2006.

25

Excerpts from The View From Hell

The benefits/harms asymmetry is commonly manifested (including in Benatar’s writing) in the claim that no amount of benefit, however large, can make up for any amount of harm, however small. This claim comes from an intuition that while we have a duty to reduce harm, we have no duty to increase benefit. The corresponding

1.

Seana Shiffrin’s principal that, while it’s morally acceptable to harm a stranger without his consent in order to prevent worse harm (e.g., to administer ecstasy in order to avoid administering a peanut, or to break someone’s arm in order to pull him from a burning car), it’s not morally acceptable to harm a stranger without his consent in order to provide a pure benefit.4 But the ecstasy example supports a stronger inference: when evaluating actions that will harm a non-consenting stranger, his potential pleasure doesn’t count. When we’re acting toward someone whose values we do not know, we should not think in terms of maximizing his utility, but in terms of minimizing our harm to him. The distinction between acting toward a non-consenting stranger whose values we do not know, and acting toward ourselves (or toward someone whose values we know), is one that is ignored by S. D. Baum in his article “Better to exist: a reply to Benatar.”5 Baum’s “reply” (to David Benatar’s position that it is always better not to bring people into existence6) is, in relevant part, as follows:

ethical framework is often called “negative utilitarianism.” Negative utilitarianism resembles maximin in its resolute focus on the worst off—as long as some of those worst off are in a state of harm, instead of just in a state of low benefit. Like maximin, negative utilitarianism can recommend that no one be brought into existence— and that all existing people be euthanised. I find negative utilitarianism decidedly unreasonable: our willingness to accept some harm in order to enjoy the benefits of another day seems praiseworthy, not mistaken. I thus urge the rejection of this manifestation of the benefits/harms asymmetry.7 Our own willingness to accept suffering in the interest of pleasure (or any other value) is no reason to think that it is right to inflict that same suffering on a non-consenting stranger. Negative utilitarianism may not be the proper course to take in our own lives, but thought experiments like mine suggest that negative utilitarianism is the proper course to take toward the lives of others who do not consent to our interference. Many people think it’s morally acceptable to have babies, despite the fact that the babies will certainly suffer a great deal during their lifetimes and may suffer an exceptional amount (that is, bringing someone into existence does him some harm). Pronatalists generally want to point out the good things in life—the pleasant effects of puppies and sunsets—and to balance them against life’s harms. But bringing a child into the world necessarily entails harming a stranger (for one doesn’t know the values of one’s child prior 7 S. D. Baum. Emphasis Perry’s; citations omitted.

1.

to procreation). […]

໙ In my post “When It’s Permissible To Force Someone To Stay Alive For His Own Good” and elsewhere, I have addressed the fact that many people who are forcibly prevented from committing suicide later report being glad they were forced to stay alive. This fact is often used to justify coercive suicide prevention practices. Similarly, the vast majority of people appear to report that they are glad to have been born. This is occasionally used as a justification for procreation (against antinatalist arguments). […] I will jump right in with an illustrative counterexample: genital mutilation of children. In many countries, female children are subject to genital mutilation, usually for the purpose of maintaining their chastity 27

Excerpts from The View From Hell

The only case in which it is widely accepted to inflict unconsented harm in order to provide a pure benefit is when acting toward one’s children. This is an aspect of viewing one’s children as property rather than persons. (Proprietariness is also the best explanation for why parents sometimes kill their natural children—and why men sometimes kill their wives or wife-equivalents—when they decide to commit suicide.)

by making sex painful or less pleasant, though sometimes for other purposes. Those of us who find the genital mutilation of children horrifying are confronted with the fact that, in many cases, women who were genitally mutilated as children grow up to participate in, and actively perpetrate in many cases, the genital mutilation of their own daughters. The fact that they practice genital mutilation on their own children is strong evidence that these woman are glad to have been genitally mutilated. But does this make forcible genital mutilation of children morally right? Clearly not. In many cases, we may suffer wrongs that begin a chain of causation that leads to a subjectively good result. It should not take much introspection to come up with cases in our own lives when someone committed a wrong against us for which we were ultimately grateful, because the eventual consequences of the wrong were subjectively pleasant or otherwise beneficial. My claim is that this after-the-fact feeling of gladness does not render the initial act any less wrong. […] The “glad it happened” justification seems to be a species of the Golden Rule Argument—if you’re glad you’re alive, have more babies (who will presumably be glad to be alive). If you’re glad you were prevented from committing suicide, prevent others from committing suicide. And so on. The problem with this line of thinking is people like me—people who are not happy to be alive, and who sincerely wish to die. What effect would a Golden Rule have when applied to

Some8 have accused David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence of nihilism. Where nihilism is taken to mean a rejection of intrinsic value, this is at least partially a mischaracterization of Benatar’s theory of value. While Benatar’s book does not explicitly detail the values that underlie his antinatalist position, it is unfair to say that there are no values to be found. I will try to unpack his account of values and take a look at its implications. It is important to distinguish, as Benatar does, between value as seen from a universal perspective (things that are meaningful sub specie aeternitatis), on the one hand, and value to a particular person or to humanity (things that are meaningful sub specie humanitatis) on the other. Benatar’s theory in no way derogates, and in fact respects, values held by individuals and by humanity as a whole, so his position cannot be seen as nihilistic in that respect. It is when it comes to value from the perspective of the universe that Benatar might be seen as nihilistic. In Benatar’s view, the pleasure, happiness, projects, and satisfaction that might be of value to an individ8 See Jean Kazez, “Review/Discussion: Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence,” 2007.

29

Excerpts from The View From Hell

໙

1.

me—should I go around killing people because I want to die? Hardly. It is moral for me to respect the lives and desires of others, just as I feel it is moral for others to respect my wish to die. I think “do unto others as you would like to have done unto you” has a serious flaw, and the variety of human experience is that flaw.

ual or to humanity are not actually valuable in a universal sense—that is, they are not valuable in the sense that if no one existed to experience them, it would not be a shame. But this is not quite nihilism, because suffering and pain, in Benatar’s view, have a sort of universal negative value—that is, if no one exists to experience pain, it is an intrinsically good thing. Put another way, from the perspective of nonexistence, someone coming into existence and experiencing pain would be a bad thing. That this is an exclusively negative value is not much of an objection. If suffering and pain have negative value sub specie aeternitatis, then prevention of suffering and pain must have a sort of positive value. Benatar’s views accord well with my own—that, although individual humans may find things valuable in relation to their lives, there is no universal meaning or value, except that suffering is, in a sense, a universal wrong. (Of course, suffering can only be experienced by sentient beings, so suffering will always be bad in relation to them, because without sentient beings, there can be no suffering. But in the sense that it is objectively worse for a sentient being to experience suffering than for the being not to have come into existence at all, it is a universal—negative—value.) I do not see any value in sentience or consciousness or life, compared to its utter absence in the universe. However, I prickle at the notion that this is nihilistic or misanthropic, because my feeling comes from the experience that human suffering is horrible, animal suffering is horrible, and there is nothing in the world to compensate for it. However, I recognize that this view rests on a particular intuitional theory of value. Some might posit

In most liberal moral philosophies, freedoms, rights, and choices are accorded high value, whether or not rights are seen to be important only to the extent that they promote overall welfare. Sometimes, however, it is argued that rights should be curtailed because agents may make “wrong” choices if given certain rights. For instance, if people have a right to eat fatty foods, they may irrationally choose to over-indulge, causing themselves harm, because they lack the cognitive ability to make the “correct” decision that does not harm them. To the extent that the right is removed to benefit the agent, rather than to benefit others he might harm (such as the public health system), this is known as paternalism. Paternalism substitutes the state’s decision for that of the actor, presumably on the grounds that the actor lacks the ability to make the decision that will best promote his goals. Paternalism obtains when there is a fear that the actor will choose wrongly. In contrast to this, J. David Velleman, in “Against the Right to Die,”9 presents an admirable non-paternalistic argument about how being given a choice may harm an agent—that is, that merely having a choice 9 The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 1992.

31

Excerpts from The View From Hell

໙

1.

that sentience itself has value, or even that suffering itself has positive value. Some seem to take the continuation of humanity (non-extinction) as the primary value, such that no amount of suffering could ever make it not worthwhile to continue humanity. I currently see this as a clash-of-intuition situation, and am not sure how to counter it.

may harm an agent, even if he is perfectly rational and makes the “correct” decision one hundred percent of the time. Velleman takes an example from the world of negotiation, from Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict: …having an option can be harmful even if we do not exercise it and—more surprisingly—even if we exercise it and gain by doing so… The union leader who cannot persuade his membership to approve a pay-cut, or the ambassador who cannot contact his head-of-state for a change of brief, negotiates from a position of strength; whereas the negotiator for whom all concessions are possible deals from weakness. If the rankand-file give their leader the option of offering a pay-cut, then management may not settle for anything less, whereas they might have settled for less if he hadn’t had the option of making the offer. The union leader will then have to decide whether to take the option and reach an agreement or to leave the option and call a strike. But no matter which of these outcomes would make him better off, choosing it will still leave him worse off than he would have been if he had never had the option at all. Velleman relates another option from [Gerald] Dworkin’s paper, “Is more choice better than less?”10: a night cashier in a convenience store is made worse off by the option to open the safe, because his having this option makes him an attractive target for robbers. Once 10 Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1982.

Excerpts from The View From Hell

33

1.

robbed, he’s better off opening the safe, but overall, he’d certainly be much better off—less likely to be robbed in the first place—if he didn’t have the option to open the safe! Velleman also discusses a dinner party invitation as a potentially harmful choice. Given an invitation, I may refuse or accept, but I am denied the option of simply not going without answering—I have to either accept or hurt the host’s feelings, and even if I “correctly” chose the best option of those two, I might be yet better off having never been offered the invitation. Velleman’s target, obviously, is assisted suicide in cases of severe disability or terminal illness. A terminally ill person without the right to die has, in a sense, the “right to live”—and need not justify his “exercise” of that right to anyone. He simply lives, and hasn’t the option to die. However, given a right to die, there is a sense in which he loses the right to live without explicitly choosing to do so. People in this scenario (and Velleman is only talking about the terminally ill and the severely impaired, so his argument does not apply to ordinary suicides) frequently depend on others to care for them, and may be concerned about imposing a burden on others by living. This burden can only be said to be imposed by the ill person if he has some choice not to impose it—that is, a choice to die. The ill person may be best off with no choice, continuing to live and be cared for by others. But given the choice between imposing a burden on others and taking his life, he may rationally choose to die, though he would have preferred not to have the choice at all. Velleman notes that not only the burden of care, but also the exhaustion of the ill person’s assets (which may be ex-

pected to pass to his heirs on his death) may be considered, rationally, by the ill person in deciding whether to die. In the situation where an ill person enjoys living and wishes to live, but not so much that he would impose a burden on his family, the right to die makes him worse off, even if he makes a rational decision once the right is offered. “I am arguing that we must not harm others by giving them choices,” says Velleman, “not that we must withhold the choices from them lest they harm themselves.” While Velleman elucidates a valid and real concern for some terminally ill or severely disabled people, even Velleman himself recognizes that the argument should not prevent assisted suicide in all cases. His proposed solution is to do nothing, and leave the current system in place, where there is no institutional right to die, but some suffering people may still (illegally) be offered euthanasia at their doctor’s discretion. (Velleman does not address the social injustice of allowing this service to be offered only to those with a relationship with a doctor, that is, wealthy people.) Velleman also founds his argument on a Kantian belief that it is immoral to commit suicide, which I obviously reject. He says: …if I believed that people had a moral right to end their lives, I would not entertain consequentialist arguments against protecting that right. But I don’t believe in such a moral right. My interest in Velleman’s argument—the sorrow of choice—is that it applies in unexpected ways and in unexpected places, depending on where one puts the

11 “Life Rights and Death Rights,” The View From Hell 2008.

35

Excerpts from The View From Hell

An interesting feature of this argument, which I alluded to in my previous post11 on life rights and death rights, is that, given different starting conditions, it might act as an argument against a right to live. Some people, of course—I put myself on this list— would prefer to die, but might not wish to explicitly choose death. Given that we are stuck with a “choice” to live, many of us continue to live, miserably, rather than bear the responsibility for the harm our deaths may cause. We are certainly harmed by having the option to continue living; we wish that we might die

1.

initial assessment of value. Now that I’ve explained the argument in detail, I’m going to put it in a shorter outline form, so we can see how the moving parts work, and apply it to new problems. I’m going to be putting things in what might sound like flippant language—I do this in the interest of clarity, and not in any way to disparage Velleman, who is like a god to me. 1. The right to live is morally important, and the right to die is not. 2. Given the right to die, people who are a burden on their caretakers might choose to die rather than be a burden, even if what they really wanted was to live without having to explicitly choose to live. 3. Therefore, the freedom to die harms the person. 4. It’s wrong to harm people, even to harm them by giving them choices. 5. No right to die.

or be killed in our sleep, but we are denied our best option by a “right” to continue to live. If we started with the assumption that the right to die was more important than the right to live in many circumstances, the sorrow of choice would act in favor of euthanasia—even without consent. This argument—and I don’t mean it either as a reductio or as a serious statement of my position—goes like this: 1. The right to die is important, more so than the right to live. 2. Given the right to survive (on a respirator, say), people who wish to die will suddenly bear responsibility for choosing death, and may choose to go on suffering in life instead, even though they’d prefer to die, all things considered. 3. Therefore, the suffering person is harmed by the choice to remain alive. 4. It’s wrong to harm people, even by giving them choices. 5. Euthanasia for everyone. Although Velleman says he doesn’t recognize a moral right to die, he indicates that as part of his consequentialist “sorrow of choice” project that he’d be happiest to distinguish between those who would be harmed by the right to die, and those who wouldn’t be harmed, and offer the choice only to those who wouldn’t be harmed by it. (Velleman would leave this discretion in the hands of doctors, who would be acting illegally in the cases in which they offered assisted suicide.) If choice is such an important harm, and

Excerpts from The View From Hell

37

1.

can be a harm in either direction, perhaps it would be best to try to distinguish between four groups: (1) those who would be harmed by having the option to die; (2) those who wouldn’t be harmed by the option to die; (3) those who would be harmed by the option to live; and (4) those who wouldn’t be harmed by the option to live. Group (1) will be forced to remain alive; group (3) will be euthanized without consent; and groups (2) and (4) will be offered appropriate options. (Again, I don’t mean this as a reductio, exactly, nor as a statement of my true thinking—with this argument, just now, we must think of ourselves as playing with philosophical tinker toys, free to see how they might fit together. If it has any purpose other than exploration, this paper is intended as a check on being too sure of our intuitions. Non-suicidal intuitions have been allowed to define the conversation for far too long.) The sorrow-of-choice argument may be fruitfully applied—in a less shocking manner—to pronatalist and antinatalist concerns. In the antinatalist camp, we might see being brought into existence itself as the harmful choice that is forced upon a person to his detriment. Being brought into existence forces all kinds of choices onto a person—not the least of which is the choice to remain alive. If a person would be best off never having existed—and this is certainly true of many people, even if we don’t admit Benatar’s central claim that it applies to everyone—then bringing him into existence, and offering him choices, even the best of which make him worse off than before he was born, is a harm. The argument would look like this: 1. The interest in not existing is important; the interest in coming into existence is minor com-

2.

3. 4.

pared to it. After having come into existence, some people will be worse off, even if they make every decision perfectly, than if they had not been offered choices by being brought into existence. It is wrong to harm people, even by giving them choices. It’s wrong to have babies. ໙

A question related both to philanthropic antinatalism (especially what some see as its apocalyptic implications12) and to suicide rights is the question of whether death is a harm to the person who dies. Objections to death being a harm to the deceased person are that nothing can be a harm unless it is perceived by the harmed person, and that, if there are non-conscious harms, it is difficult to assign the harm to a subject. Thomas Nagel, in his essay “Death,” in Mortal Questions, grounds the special harm of death in the idea of deprivation: the subject is deprived (of future experiences), so to the extent that his life would have been worth continuing, he is harmed by death. But even if death deprives a person of something, what harm is it to him, since he does not suffer by the deprivation? The case that Nagel finds convincing is that of an intelligent adult reduced, through traumatic brain injury, to the mental capacity of an infant. Surely, for Nagel, this person has been harmed, though he does not realize it or perceive it. Nagel, however, 12 Chip Smith, “Initial Harm Part Two: The Antinatalist Logic of Libertarian Nonaggression,” The Hoover Hog 2007.

Nagel, of course, does not find this objection persuasive. He sees the harm as occurring, not to the brain-damaged person, but to the healthy person prior to the injury, in having been reduced to such a state. In other words, Nagel is willing to assign harm backwards in time. But is this so strange? For a long time, I had a hard time intuitively understanding sexual jealousy. It seemed to have about the same objective reality as the cultural tradition of celebrating birthdays or saying “bless you” when someone sneezes. And, as an irrational, ridiculous, harmful social construct, it deserved no respect, and existed only to be eradicated. However, I have since been convinced by evolutionary psychology data that sexual jealousy is very much real, in the sense that it is not “socially constructed” like birthdays, and causes people genuine anguish. Though it is not intuitive to me, it is only proper to recognize that other people feel harmed by it, rather than assume they are making it all up. (Incidentally, the violent sexual jealousy 13 Crawford, Confessions of An Antinatalist, Nine-Banded Books 2010. Emphasis Perry’s.

39

Excerpts from The View From Hell

He does not mind his condition. It is in fact the same condition he was in at the age of three months, except that he is bigger. If we did not pity him then, why pity him now; in any case, who is there to pity? The intelligent adult has disappeared, and for a creature like the one before us, happiness consists in a full stomach and a dry diaper.13

1.

imagines this objection, which I imagine would be Jim [Crawford]’s objection:

suffered by humans, coupled with the sexual exuberance14 that humans also display, seems to function as a very real limitation on human happiness, at least given our current biological make-up.) If harm can never occur unless someone perceives it as a harm, then we must take the position that sexual infidelity does no harm to the cuckolded partner, even where monogamy is promised, unless it is discovered. This presents two problems. First, it conflicts with the widely held intuition that sexual infidelity is a harm to the unaware partner. If you refuse to sleep with your friend’s girl, you say, “I wouldn’t do that to my buddy”—not “I wouldn’t do that because it might get discovered.” Second, and related to this, is that when a person discovers that he has been betrayed sexually, he does not date the harm to the discovery; he dates it, most certainly, to the incident of the infidelity. (He is not sad that he found out; given the infidelity, he will probably say he is glad to have found out. He is sad that the infidelity occurred.) In cases like this, at least, it is common to backwards-date harm; are we forbidden to do this with the harm of death simply because, given our conception of time, causality cannot actually move backwards? I must say that I am not entirely convinced of the rightness of either position; the idea that harm can occur when there is no one to perceive it is intuitively strange to me, but the objections commonly offered do not leave my mind easy, either. (See O.H. Green’s “Fear of Death”15 for a view on how death may be 14 See Lee et al., “An epidemiologic study of paternity after cryptorchidism: Initial results,” European Journal of Pediatrics 1993. 15 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1982.

An important reason that it is unfair to force a being to stay alive is that the being took no voluntary action in order to come into being. Voluntariness is a key element of fairness in much of our legal system. Our law of contract requires that the parties voluntarily enter the contract in order for it to be enforceable. Likewise, marriage must be entered voluntarily, or it is not legally effective. Crimes require a voluntary act before punishment may attach. Given this framework, voluntary procreation (choosing to have children) has two important consequences. One, given that the act of procreation forces existence on others, it may be a moral harm in and of itself. Second, and more relevant to our purposes, procreation is a voluntary act, like signing a contract, that creates a moral obligation for the parent toward the child. A non-parent (or an involuntary parent, such as a rape victim) has given no assent to life, and retains the right to remove himself from the world; the voluntary parent has given his assent to life, and created obligations toward his child. An interesting question is whether there are acts other than voluntary procreation that cement the agent to the world, potentially destroying his moral 41

Excerpts from The View From Hell

໙

1.

wrong—or “evil”—without actually being a harm.) I am persuaded by the arguments, however, and by the obviously conflicting intuitions of others, to the point where I have severe doubts about the goodness of ending life where a person wishes to continue to live, as prescribed in the “apocalyptic imperative” case.

right to suicide. One candidate would be intentionally forming or continuing a close relationship; although of course this does not involve creating an entire new being dependent upon the agent, it does, perhaps, encourage others to become dependent upon the agent. Perhaps potential suicides have a moral obligation not to form or continue close relationships, just as they have a moral obligation to avoid procreation. ໙ In the Experience Machine hypothetical in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, [Robert] Nozick assures us that we would not plug into an Experience Machine that could simulate great experiences for us. This is because experiencing life through this Experience Machine would not be real; it would not entail contact with the deepest reality, and would be limited to the creative power of human beings. It would not provide us with pleasing signals about our true selves, but only fictitious signals about an imaginary self. Of course, contra Nozick, many people (myself included) would be more than happy to enter a nice Experience Machine rather than undergo the allegedly real slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But my contention here is that we all utilize one or more genuine Experience Machines all the time. These real life, friendly neighborhood Experience Machines include, most notably, religions and aesthetics. These are socially created, culturally reproduced information artifacts that provide a framework for our experiences, allowing us to select experiences to some degree and to give meaning to all our experiences, selected or not.

It is often difficult to tell aesthetics from religions—if in fact there is a difference. Both aesthetics and religions are created and maintained socially; they promote intra-tribal bonding in natural and synthetic tribes, and also outsider identification and rejection. Both are experience selection devices that help us produce, select, reject, and interpret particular experiences. They are culturally evolved, and are variable but display observable patterns. The major difference is that aesthetics are much more explicit than religions about pointing to the experience itself, rather than to something higher beyond the experience. Many aesthetics demand that the experience itself be recognized as the ultimate 43

Excerpts from The View From Hell

໙

1.

They are created solely by humans, further selected and shaped by generations of cultural evolution. They seem to suffer from the same problems as Nozick’s hypothetical Experience Machines in terms of connection to deepest reality, offering information about the true self, and limitation by human creativity. To the extent that you buy that this is so, I argue that you must either deny the realness and desirability of experience mediated by these culturally evolved aesthetic and religious frameworks, or on the other hand allow for the choice to utilize other Experience Machines that may be superior to existing ones in the dimensions of effectiveness, voluntariness, and honesty. This manner of viewing human existence has implications for the desirability of suicide and of bringing new humans into existence.

value; food criticism (along with many other aesthetic domains) has a morality of focusing on the eating experience itself, and within that domain, focusing on anything but the experience (such as social signaling) is a shameful sin. Religions, on the other hand, generally claim to point to a higher something, an ultimate value that the experience only evidences and does not subsume. The proper pursuit of this “higher something” leads to meaningful experiences, but the point is not the meaningful experiences but the higher something. Insight porn is an aesthetic; truth-seeking is a religion. ໙ Experience Machines vary along the dimensions of being effective (producing desirable, meaningful experiences and preventing or at least domesticating negative experiences), honest (not hiding the fact that they are cultural artifacts designed to produce experiences), and voluntary (rather than forced upon adherents). These traits are not necessarily independent; I suspect the most effective Experience Machines that have evolved in human societies are probably some of the least honest and least voluntary, and I’d expect honesty and voluntariness to generally correlate negatively with effectiveness. The least voluntary Experience Machines are the jealous ones, described by William Burroughs as the One God Universe16 (though a jealous Experience Machine might just as well be polytheistic or atheistic). These Experience Machines claim not to be Ex16 Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales 1993.

The biological phenomenon of the supernormal stimulus (superstimulus) has a great deal in common with the Experience Machine. An Experience Machine is, in fact, a type of supernormal stimulus. In biology, some bees are tricked into fertilizing flowers because the flower triggers the mating instinct of bees more than even a female bee. The flower is experienced by the bee as better than nature; it is a superstimulus. Of course, a superstimulus (like a parasite) ought not to get too good, such that it disrupts the survival and reproductive patterns of the organism it depends on. An ideal Experience Machine like Nozick imagines would allow the user to jump in and forego survival needs and mating opportunities. Natural Experience Machines, aesthetics and religions, are generally much milder a drag on their hosts’ evolutionary goals than this ideal Experience Machine. Superstimuli in nature, just like parasites and naturally evolving Experience Machines, must achieve an equilibrium in which the 45

Excerpts from The View From Hell

໙

1.

perience Machines at all, but to just be actual objective reality. They frequently require the rejection (and even destruction) of competing Experience Machines, and sometimes even the destruction of their adherents for good measure. They are the sneakiest dualists, for they do not even admit their nature as a meaning layer on top of objective reality. But such denial is obviously a good evolutionary strategy, and probably even makes them more effective in presenting a believable system to adherents.

host species expends enough energy to support its own needs, while also expending plenty of energy supporting the reproduction of the parasite, superstimulus provider, or Experience Machine. (The reproductive needs of the Experience Machine can be substantial. It must not only reproduce by being passed to each successive generation, but must also be defended from new or invasive neighbor Experience Machines.) And so our co-evolved Experience Machines are demanding, but mild. The most effective, intense Experience Machines would likely interfere with our survival and reproductive processes so much that they would never exist stably in nature, any more than an extremely virulent parasitic organism. If we are willing to enter these new (hypothetical), powerful, addictive Experience Machines, we must be willing to abandon the “evolutionary goals” of survival, organism-level status, and reproduction—to declare them not our own goals. Effective Experience Machines may mean the end of our species, as better and better Experience Machines begin to out-compete other humans (including possible offspring) for human attention. However, this need not be the case. A society that could continue to reproduce itself despite the availability of every kind of experience imaginable for its members could come very close to being a just society. Extinction or not, this is the kindest path for humanity.

LIVING IN THE EPILOGUE A self is a machine for making you concerned about your organism. —Antonio Damasio The essence of consciousness, says Antonio Damasio, is the internal narrative—the story one tells oneself about oneself. The ability to create this narrative—to conceive of oneself, to project oneself into the past and the future, to connect events meaningfully—has proven to be a very effective evolutionary strategy to ensure that an organism acts to promote its own ends. Our evolutionary history ensures that we think in stories. They are so central to our thinking that it is hard to think about them. An old fish said to a couple of young fish, “Morning, boys! The water’s fine today!” and swam off. One young fish turned to the other young fish and asked, “What’s water?” Thus it is with humans and stories. Stories are extremely useful; as information-hungry, social creatures, we are as pleased to hear stories as dogs are to sniff the pee stains of other dogs. We love stories. We are stories. We think and remember in the form of stories. As Roger Schank puts it (in Tell Me a

Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory1), “In the end all we have, machine or human, are stories and methods of finding and using those stories.” But stories are not real. They are constructs that we apply to the universe, but there is no story out in the universe. There is no “gist” or “point” to the universe, as stories have gists and points. We construct meaning to serve our evolutionarily determined ends, and this is, I think, the most central of all the cognitive biases.

Living in the Epilogue My name is Sarah. I’m 32 and I live in Los Angeles. Since I was a small child, I have wanted to die. But here I am. I keep two bottles labeled “Poison” on the shelf next to my bed. They are filled with an alcohol extract of several pounds of macerated immature Conium maculatum seed pods, the part of the plant that is highest in toxic alkaloids. I feel much better having it there. My hope is that someday I’ll get drunk and upset and drink it down without even thinking about it. I think it will work; my only worry is a couple of papers that point to extreme pain while dying and possible kidney problems if one survives. (Also, the stuff smells like the Grim Reaper’s boiled turd smeared on a rat with gangrene.) Still, here I am. A few years ago, I wanted to die all the time, every minute. I suffered intensely, and the main project of my life was to get through time. I researched suicide methods, made repeated attempts, but always failed, and was left with the conviction that suicide is extremely 1 Schank, 1990.

Living in the Epilogue

49

2.

difficult without barbiturates, which I could not (and remain unable to) get. At some point, I changed my focus from trying to end my life to trying to make what years I am forced to endure less miserable. In the language of illness, I put myself in hospice and gave myself palliative care. I tried many therapies, including a six-month attempt at alcoholism. Many of my experimental palliative care therapies (including this) failed, but a few were extremely successful at making me not suffer all the time. I stopped trying to be in monogamous relationships. I take a couple of prescription SSRIs. I exercise in a rather extreme fashion. I see a therapist. I smoke marijuana and have riotous group sex with my boyfriends and girlfriends. I go to lectures and watch experimental animation at the independent movie theater. I write essays on my couch with my books all around me and Shehnai music playing. I suspect that I have more fun that most people in the world. Life remains an irritation, but for me, it is not the constant grind of pain and humiliation that it must be for millions of people. In many ways, my very suicidality makes life more pleasant for me, since I utterly lack the fear of death and all the cringing urgency that fear engenders. But there is something missing. Here is the problem, if it is a problem: I am not in a story. Living outside of any story—living without hope for the future, without the belief that one is part of a narrative—is confusing. It’s hard to get anything done when nothing has a point. For any not-immediately-pleasurable action (or inaction) I contemplate— getting up in the morning, vacuuming, answering the

phone, spending an entire day sober—there is no readily available answer to the ever-present question in my mind, “why?” At least, there is no long-term “why.” Do I wish I were in a story again? Ultimately, no. Even if it were possible to imagine myself as a character in some narrative about to unfold, I don’t really want to. This would be sacrificing truth for comfort— and questionable comfort at that. I spoke about this with my closest friend, and he suggested that I have had a story, and now I’m living in the “ever after” part. I am, for all relevant purposes, living in my own epilogue. This is also, I think, the status of people with terminal illness who are about to die: their story is essentially over. This is even true if you believe in magical sky friends and heaven and all that.

There Are No Stories In Heaven There are no stories in heaven; heaven is all epilogue. It functions as a bookend on our stories; we may even call it the “hereafter,” as in “happily ever after.” There can be no conflict in heaven, so there can be no stories, either. Aristotle scholar Martha Nussbaum explores how crappy it is for humans to live outside of a story, even in heaven, in her essay “Transcending Humanity.”2 Here, she considers Odysseus’ choice to give up eternal youth and pleasure with Calypso in order to return to his wife and the certainty of inevitable death. She says, 2 Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature 1990.

We don’t quite know what it would be for this 51

Living in the Epilogue

Odysseus’ choice is perfectly understandable because the alternative is so… boring. Without the possibility of loss, nothing is interesting. Without limitation, there is no possibility for excellence, which is, in the Aristotelian view at least, the purpose of a human being:

2.

What, in the face of the recognized human attachment to transcendence, could justify such a choice? Odysseus has little to say. But what he does say makes it perfectly clear that they key is not any surpassing beauty in Penelope herself. He freely grants that from this point of view Calypso will be found superior. And he points to no superiority in Penelope that could counterbalance Calypso’s divine excellence. So he is not, it seems, choosing a glorious prize in spite of the fact that he has to face death to get it; that is not at all how he sees the issue. He is choosing the whole human package: mortal life, dangerous voyage, imperfect mortal aging woman. He is choosing, quite simply, what is his: his own history, the form of a human life and the possibilities of excellence, love, and achievement that inhabit that form. What, then, can he say to make that choice intelligible, once the alternative of divinity and agelessness is on the scene? And yet, to readers of the poem from ancient to modern times, Odysseus’ choice does seem intelligible, and also admirable—the only choice we would have our hero make.

hero, known for his courage, craft, resourcefulness, and loyal love to enter into a life in which courage would atrophy, in which cunning and resourcefulness would have little point, since the risks with which they grapple would be removed, and in which love, insofar as it appears at all, would be very different in shape from the love that connects man to wife and child in the human world of the poem. And: The Greeks, no less than contemporary Americans, praise outstanding athletic performance as a wonderful instance of human excellence… But clearly, such achievement has point and value only relatively to the context of the human body, which imposes certain species-specific limits and creates certain possibilities of movement rather than others… But if this means that even races or contests between different animal species will usually seem pointless and odd, it means all the more that there will be no athletic excellence at all, and no meaningful concept of athletic excellence, in the life of a being that is, by nature, capable of anything and physically unlimited. […] What would such achievement be, in a being for whom it is all easy? What would be the rules of the game?3 But the real appeal of Penelope, and of the mortal world, compared to heaven, is the possibility of stories. We root for Odysseus to choose Penelope over 3 Emphasis Perry’s.

2.

immortality, says Nussbaum, because of

4 Odyssey, V.226-27, XXIII.300-09, W. Shewring transl.

53

Living in the Epilogue

…this more general uneasiness about the shapelessness of the life Calypso offers: pleasure and kindliness and on and on, with no risks, no possibility of sacrifice, no grief, no children. All we need to do to see this is to compare accounts of lovemaking. Odysseus and Calypso “withdrew, and in a recess of the arching cavern they took their pleasure in love, and did not leave one another’s side.” That’s the end of that; the poet can say no more; for they have nothing to talk about, since they have done nothing and nothing has happened to them. As for the human husband and wife: “The two in their room enjoyed the delights of love, then pleased one another with recounting what had befallen each. The queen told how much she had suffered in these halls, seeing always there the pernicious multitude of suitors who in wooing her had slaughtered so many beasts, fat sheep and oxen, and drawn so much wine from the great jars. The king told of the harm he had done to others and the misery he had endured himself. Penelope listened to him enraptured, and sleep did not fall upon her eyelids till he had told his tale to the end.”4 It’s perfectly plain that the human pair are, at least from the viewpoint of the human reader, more interesting and more erotic. A sexuality divorced from conversation, from storytelling, from risk and adventure and the sharing of risk

and adventure, seems extremely boring; and we feel that it is a great tribute to the goddess’s beauty that Odysseus retains his interest in her, after so much time. Life is quite unbearable, for a human, without the “risk and adventure” of a story-bound life. What we are looking for when we look for the “meaning of life” is the greater story. The unfortunate truth, suggested by science and vehemently denied by religion, is that there is no greater story. We may make up stories and allow them to shape our perceptions, but ultimately there is no story. We are all living in the epilogue of reality, or rather worse, because there never was a story. For many of us, our personal stories have run out—and it’s extremely difficult to push oneself into a new story once you see that all stories are vanity. It is like the difficulty of staying in a dream once one realizes one is dreaming.

The Cheery and the Damned Why are drugs, prostitution, gambling and suicide illegal, when they clearly give so much relief to suffering people? I think it is because, at a societal level, we are deluded into thinking that happiness is possible, maybe even easy or likely, without these things. I have called this cheery social policy.5 The fundamental problem with this sort of cheeriness is the assumption that a good life—a pleasant life—is relatively easy to achieve. Cheery people are able to hold such a belief because they are able to 5 “Cheery Social Policy,” The View From Hell 2008.

6 N=1, Dec. 8 2010. new1.wordpress.com.

55

Living in the Epilogue

Drug use is a tacit admission of a forbidden truth. For most people happiness is beyond reach. Fulfillment is found not in daily life but escaping from it. Since happiness is unavailable, the mass of mankind seeks pleasure. Religious cultures could admit that earthly life was hard, for they promised another in which all tears would be wiped away. Their humanist successors affirm something still more

2.

ignore—and perhaps can’t even conceive of—the suffering of a significant minority of the population. A good life is not easily achieved for many of us. There is a majority belief that we need not use extraordinary means to achieve a happy and meaningful life. Behaviors that deviants engage in, perhaps in pursuit of a tolerable life—weird sex with lots of people, say, or using steroids or marijuana or LSD or benzodiazepines—strike cheery people as perplexing and frightening. For a cheery person, these behaviors are wholly unnecessary—life is perfectly tolerable without them. And they increase the risk of harm! Who wants harm? What the cheery cannot imagine is the importance, the function of these behaviors, and others like them— the pursuit of the interesting, and the temporary suspension of the intolerability of existence, which intolerability (for many) the cheery do not even perceive, and therefore do not properly weight as a problem. Jason Roy’s “Explanations For Drug War”6 makes this point with respect to the drug prohibition. He quotes John Gray’s Straw Dogs:

incredible—that in future, even the near future, everyone can be happy. Societies founded on a faith in progress cannot admit the normal unhappiness of human life. As a result, they are bound to wage war on those who seek an artificial happiness in drugs.7 But it is not necessarily the case that prohibitionists think that life is great. It’s that they think it is meaningful—that we are in a story, and it’s worth participating in, win or lose. The idea that life is inherently worthwhile, and happiness easy to achieve, underlies many social policies, including prohibitions (legal or moral) on suicide, abortion, non-marital sex, drugs, gambling, and even eating fatty food. On the other hand, if life were not inherently worthwhile, suicide would be understandable, and bringing a new life into the world would not be an unqualified good, but an uneasy question mark. Sex, drugs, and fun would be appropriate ways to treat oneself for the unwanted condition of life.

Palliative Care: A Double Standard for People in the Epilogue The terminally ill are at the end of their story. If you’re going to die anyway, what does it matter what you do? Take ecstasy.8 Go skydiving. Fuck a prostitute. Kill yourself. Who cares? There is a sense that, once you’re terminally ill and 7 Gray 2007. 8 “FDA Approves Study of Ecstasy In Some Terminally Ill Patients,” Psychiatric News 2005.

We are all terminally ill. Not one of us is going to survive. And our stories are delusions. Each one of us lives in The Matrix—a story-dream created by our minds. Happiness is not easy; meaning is elusive. Young, healthy people who find themselves miserable, or find that they no longer inhabit a story, have even more need of the kind of “palliative care” that we offer to terminally ill people, simply because young people have so much more time to get through. Eighty years! Ninety years! A hundred years of epilogue ahead of us. It’s crushingly boring to ponder. As Martha Nussbaum says, When Calypso speaks of “calm possession of this domain,” our hearts sink; for there’s no story in that… Stories have shaped and continue to shape the readers’ desires, giving them a preference for onward movement over stasis, for risk over self-sufficiency, for the human form of 9 “Majorities Support Doctor-Assisted Suicide for the Terminal Ill,” Public Agenda 2011.

57

Living in the Epilogue

Toward Social Policy as Palliative Care

2.

an official short-timer in life, what you do ceases to really matter. This is, I think, at the heart of the double standard9 our society imposes with regard to suicide and the other activities mentioned above. If you’re young and healthy, you have an obligation to stay alive and be sober and responsible. But if you’re toast anyway, anything goes. For the dying, we can conceive of allowing them pleasure as mercy. But we are not so eager to offer mercy to healthy people. That is because we mistakenly believe in the concept of health.

time over divine timelessness. They play upon and nourish the emotions—fear, anticipation, grief, hope—that presuppose the form of life of a being both needy and resourceful, both active and finite—and that seem to have their point and function only within the context of such a life. Regarding antinatalism, someone recently asked me if it was my belief that the bad outweighed the good, or whether I thought they weren’t even comparable. I believe the latter. Ray Brassier, in his introduction to Thomas Ligotti’s excellent The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, puts it thus: The optimist fixes the exchange rate between joy and woe, thereby determining the value of life. The pessimist, who refuses the principle of exchange and the injunction to keep investing in the future no matter how worthless life’s currency in the present, is stigmatized as an unreliable investor. This is the view from Hell. Hell is not the state of experiencing a great deal of suffering with no pleasure to “balance it out.” Hell is popping out of the notion of meaning altogether. And this Hell is the metacondition that we are all in, whether we perceive it or not. Memento mori.10

10 See Shonen Knife, “I Wanna Be Sedated,” Burning Farm 1983.

INTERVIEW I: REVIEW THE FUTURE Interview with Ted Kupper and Jon Perry1 of Review the Future, February 20 2015. Used with permission. ໙ Welcome to Review The Future, the podcast that takes an in-depth look at the impact of technology on culture. Should we have control over our consciousness? Our guest today is Sarah Perry, who is a writer who has written a book called Every Cradle is a Grave2 and she also runs an excellent blog at The View From Hell. Sarah, do you want to tell us a little bit about your background and why you write about this stuff? I started writing about suicide after… In law school I was a patient advocate and that means someone who would help people who are locked up in mental hospitals if they wanted to get out, and the state gives them the right to a hearing and I would help them prepare for the hearing and argue their case in front of an administrative law judge right there in the mental hospital. That was my first exposure to some of these issues and I unfortunately a few years later was locked up myself in a mental hospital, and that’s 1 No relation. 2 Nine Banded Books 2014.

having both sides of the experience, both being kind of on the professional side and on the “consumer” side, they call it, when you’re actually a patient. That’s a dark word, yeah. I know, a consumer of services you don’t necessarily want. That makes perfect sense why you would get involved in this research, having had both sides of it. Today I think, since some of our listeners might not even be really familiar with the concepts that we’re going to discuss I want to just go through and quickly give some definitions. We’re gonna talk about control of consciousness and when we talk about that I think a large part is the right to die so basically… The right to have no consciousness. The right to turn it off, basically, hit the off-switch, and then also under that rubric is the right to alter your consciousness, right? Through, say, drugs or other means. We’re going to talk about the rights to control consciousness in a realm of simulation which may be available in the future as well. But let’s jump right into this right-to-die idea because I think a lot of people are just under some misconceptions about where we are today with suicide and what you call “suicide prohibition,” and I think that’s accurate so let’s just talk about the question, is suicide allowed, is it legal? Okay, yeah, I think there is a common misconception that suicide is legal because you can’t really prosecute somebody who is committing suicide, especially if they’re successful. And of course, we don’t consider

Exactly, and changing the role of the doctor, from somebody who’s helping us and providing a service that we want, for us to get better, and it turning them into police which, it’s uncomfortable for me to think of a doctor that way. You mentioned that the best ways to commit suicide aren’t always legal. What are the means that people use and what are the ones that would be preferable to others and which ones 61

Review the Future

Couple of other interesting points like the fact that this prohibition is enforced not by the law enforcement community but by the medical community right, so illegal in the sense that you kind of go to jail but jail looks like a mental ward.

3.

attempted suicide to be a crime anymore. They actually used to hang people for attempting suicide which is a little surprising to people now. So suicide in itself isn’t a crime anymore, as it used to be in the English common law system, but that doesn’t mean that it’s legal in the sense that we usually mean, that it’s something that we’re allowed to do. If people are caught trying to commit suicide they aren’t prosecuted but they’re usually sent to a mental hospital against their will; the methods that are most comfortable for people to use to commit suicide are illegal because of the war on drugs, so the only methods that are used where a limited amount of suicide is allowed, like Oregon, they use drugs that are illegal to to obtain for most people. Also it is illegal to help someone commit suicide, the only act I’m aware of where doing it is technically legal but no one can help you do it. So now, imagine if abortion was legal but no one could help you.

are illegal? So the most effective, I mentioned that one that is used by states and countries that allow assisted suicide are always either barbiturates or synthetic opiates like fentanyl where someone can consume a relatively small amount either injected or swallowed, and it is not going to cause them a lot of pain; they’re not going to potentially survive the attempt and be brain damaged or something. It’s weird to talk about something that’s gonna kill you as being safe but they’re a relatively safe method that’s not gonna cause unwanted effects. To clarify, it’s relatively painless and relatively effective, that’s what we’re saying about it? Yes, and most of the means other than drug overdose that are available are really unpleasant, they’re things like hanging oneself; that’s a fairly common method; things like cutting your arteries, shooting yourself, these are situations where it’s legal to obtain the means for it but they’re very unpleasant methods that we wouldn’t want people we love to have to go through. We don’t want them to die so we certainly don’t want them to to have to do those kinds of things. People talk about well, there’s lots of tall buildings you can jump off of. I don’t know… it’s scary how not effective that is; there’s one study about using a very tall bridge, I think it was 60 meters tall, that had a 3% survival rate of people jumping off of it, so even the really dangerous things, really violent methods still don’t work all the time. A gunshot to the head has less than 80% effectiveness; more than 20% of people

Indeed, the effects of the suicide prohibition are not just on people who want to die, but people around them, situations where people commit suicide by say jumping in front of a train, and the poor train driver basically lives with that for the rest of his life, that he’s been forced to commit this act and it’s just because people involved are desperate and have no other way of doing it. Right, not to mention all the commuters trying to get to work. Even if you successfully hang yourself in your home your loved one still has to find your body. It’s a choice between them not knowing where you are or this horrible scene of suddenly finding your deceased body. I mean, just to hammer this home, if you are mentally competent and you tell your loved one, “I’m going to hang myself later,” then they basically will get you locked up, or they can and they might feel obligated to given the state of our culture, so you’re forced to sneak around. So, moving on from that I guess it’s worth making the argument for a lot of people who are probably listening and thinking well, of course you’re not allowed to commit suicide, suicide sounds bad, you probably shouldn’t do it, so should we have the right to die? Is this something that we can defend? Obviously you spend 63

Review the Future

Not to mention that people who are living around these people in say, a city, where they might be jumping off buildings, would probably prefer not to live in such an environment.

3.

who shoot themselves in the head end up surviving.

a lot of time defending it. I do, I also want to say from the outset, I read a lot of Catholic thinkers, and I do take them very seriously in terms of making sure that all humans have a sort of sacred value, and I have many Catholic friends, there are many people like Friar Aidan Kavanagh,3 who is one of my heroes in terms of writing, and I don’t want to only make the case for the the right to die without saying that encouraging the right to die [may] cause people to feel obligated to die. People who may not want to, but if we had the right… there’s a sort of a slippery slope idea and I take that seriously. One of the philosopher J. David Velleman’s arguments is that having a choice is not necessarily good for us, that often we would prefer not to have choices rather than have those choices.4 I did read your response to Velleman’s argumen, and you basically show that the value proposition of life determines that outcome of the argument, that if you value life then giving 3 1929-2006, author of On Liturgical Theory, Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical style. Kavanagh advocated for a de-emphasis on doctrinal orthodoxy in exchange for a re-emphasis on “right worship.” The Church, to Kavanagh, is “the way a re-created world coheres in constant praise and adoration of the one who is its source”; right worship involves a life that is “festive, ordered, aesthetic, canonical, eschatological and normal.” The structural realities of action take on a greater significance than abstracted belief: “discourse in faith is carried on not by concepts and propositions nearly so much as in the vastly complex vocabulary of experiences had, prayers said, sights seen, smells smelled, words said and heard and responded to, emotions controlled and released, sins committed and repented, children born and loved ones buried, and in many other ways no one can count or always account for.” (On Liturgical Theory) 4 See also “Cooperative Ignorance,” page 254.

Let’s go through some of the more casual anti-suicide arguments that people might make because I don’t think the average person is thinking about a right to die as a good thing necessarily. I think probably everybody understands the extreme euthanasia situations of, you know, you’re in a hospital, you’re never going to have quality of life again, maybe to end it would be the best 65

Review the Future

Velleman also argues that we should set the bar in favor of life because it makes no sense to say that I matter as a person if I’m also going to end my life. That my right to any kind of rights, my right to be treated as a person, is contingent on my existing, and he wants to make the move, which I think is interesting, that if I don’t exist anymore, how can I say that I have rights? What I think the error here is is saying that the length of life is equivalent to the value of life, and that wanting to continue forever in time, or continue as long as possible in time, is the only way to value something. And I think it’s almost as silly as the idea that going as far in space as possible is the ultimate value, or having as many people as possible is the ultimate value, it’s something that there are other ways to think about, valuing human beings than just keeping them alive as long as possible. Including ourselves, that we could easily value ourselves, think that all human beings have sacred value, and yet want to end our lives.

3.

somebody the choice to end their life is the net harm, but if you don’t value life then the opposite is true, and to me that made the argument pretty weak, I have to say. I feel like whenever your position in an argument is “let’s restrict choices,” you’ve got a pretty hard burden of proof to obtain.

thing, and I think probably everybody is on board with that. But when you talk about an otherwise healthy individual who just wants to end their life, suicide looks like such a bad thing I think partially because of the people around them, and how, if somebody commits suicide it affects their friends and their relatives. What do you say to the fact that suicide is a harm to those of us who go on living around that person? Absolutely, the idea that suicide is often selfish because it’s such a harm to the people left behind, people’s relatives and friends, certainly it is a harm. I think that in other contexts, other than suicide, we tend to look at the same harms and say that people have a right to do those harms: things like taking away one’s company [in the sense of social presence] or even cutting off one’s family and not speaking to them again. It’s essentially a similar harm to suicide but is not seen as impermissible. One way to think about the harm of suicide is that everyone dies, and we aren’t immortal; futuristic scenarios haven’t come into play, but everyone dies and what suicide is doing is making that happen sooner. So the harms of death are there anyway; suicide is a way of moving it up in time and so, if you want to be mathematical about it it’s taking away a number of years of company, of knowing they’re alive, even potentially their support, so that is a harm but it’s similar to harms that we ordinarily think are okay. We generally think people have the right to leave a relationship, to move across the country, or even to just not have contact with someone anymore, and those are similar to the harms of suicide. I think the fact that suicide is viewed as especially

…and should be prevented in all cases. Right, both good to prevent and possible to prevent. Isn’t what makes suicide different from moving away from your family the fact that suicide, once committed, is non-reversible? Potentially with these other things people can make bad choices with their life, we all accept that people often do, but there’s always the possibility to reverse it. Usually what we think about when it comes to the harms of suicide are the harms of tragic death, of people knowing with finality they will never see the person again. What we tend not to weigh is the harms of that person continuing to live; that tends to not count because it’s so final, and the more you add up all of those days that a person is suffering without wanting to live, whether it’s medical or psychological or existential, those are a harm and those do count. And almost any decision has some kind of finality to it; if we were not able to make any kind of decision because we might change our mind in the future I think we wouldn’t be able to make contracts, we wouldn’t be able to get married; those are obviously more un-doable than suicide but weighing harms and benefits for the future and being able to make final decisions based on that usually is part of what we’re 67

Review the Future

The view that suicide is preventable in all cases,

3.

tragic is partially because of our cultural attitudes toward suicide, that it’s a failing, the friend somehow should have known, the family should have known and stopped it, rather than being viewed as one of many kinds of death.

able to do. Another thing that I read in your writing is this idea of, is life a gift or a burden. We have culturally an idea that life is a gift to be cherished and certainly I regard my own personal life as a gift but I think it’s totally reasonable and understandable that that’s not everyone’s perspective. And if life is a gift then I think it follows that we’d want to really aggressively intervene to make sure people take as much of that gift as they are going to get, but if it’s not, then all of a sudden it starts to feel like something else. The idea that life is a gift is almost this sacred idea and I don’t believe that pejoratively, I mean it’s probably very adaptive and healthy for us to believe, and especially being grateful for other people’s lives and encouraging them to have that attitude seems kind and humane. “Of course we want you around and we want you in the future,” and people frequently come to me and talk to me about suicide when they’re suicidal and I find myself expressing the same sentiments, I’ll affirm that they have a right to commit suicide but I hope they don’t and I think that’s separate from the moral calculus to some degree, what what we hope for socially, what we believe in a sort of sacred way, is different from the cold analysis of whether it’s morally right or wrong. And even though someone is still valuable in the sense of, we still care about them and want the best for them, they may be experiencing a lot more suffering than they’re getting out of life, than is worth it. Often people think about suicide being selfish as if the suiciding [party] has an obligation to their family, their community, but we don’t talk much about the obligation that the community

I think it’s reasonable evolutionarily that we might react that way, that when terrible things happen we 69

Review the Future

I think some people probably have in their mind one possible narrative which is, suppose a person who otherwise is maybe not a depressed person whose mental health is generally pretty good, whose mood is generally pretty high—this is sort of a contrived example but it’s maybe the model people have—that person who is otherwise going to live a healthy and happy life has a bunch of external disasters, maybe they go bankrupt maybe they lose a spouse and for whatever reason they become very intensely depressed and perhaps suicidal for a period of time where they’re facing this emotional valley and maybe on the other side of that valley there’s this happiness plateau that they could get to if they could just ride it out. I feel like that’s the type of situation people have in mind where, the state could intervene, friends and family could intervene, and help them get through this valley because on the other side is Paradise if they can just find the resolve from society at large to get through it. What do you say to that?

3.

might have to that person and that it might be failing that, and I think physical pain is a big problem but emotional pain might be even worse. The pain of a lack of social belonging is often what’s associated with suicide rather than physical pain or some other kind of pain, so I take that seriously. I take that kind of pain very seriously. And living through that kind of pain, living through emotional suffering as well as physical pain in some cases, can in some cases not be worth it. It may be the case that the expected value is not worth the expected cost in suffering. And I trust individual people more than society at large to make that determination.

may become self-destructive in order to get other people’s help, to get them to get us through this hard time. So it makes sense as a signal that people are sending off. And that their desire to die may not be there forever. So people in that state may not have the best judgment, they may not really understand that things will get better. But I think that the suicide prohibition is not the way to deal with that, I think that suicide prohibition probably causes a lot of suicide attempts by people who haven’t clearly thought about it and don’t necessarily want to die. I think that because we have, I call it sometimes a fantasy of rescue, the suicide prohibition gives us this idea that if we attempt suicide we’ll be rescued and will be a precious victim rather than not. And I think that tempts people who, even if they don’t necessarily want to die, or aren’t one hundred percent sure they want to die, to harm themselves in some way that may or may not be lethal. I’m sure that some people have died that way, hoping they’ll be rescued, and some people are rescued who are glad they were rescued and other people get rescued who didn’t want to be rescued. So I think the suicide prohibition is causing people to harm themselves hoping to be rescued when, if that possibility wasn’t there they would have to think much more seriously, maybe wouldn’t be as tempted if we didn’t have this cultural phenomenon of forcibly rescuing people, and people who genuinely want to die would be able to do that without risking forced hospitalization and things like that. I do think that if a community can get together and help someone who’s in a bad place, that’s somewhat different from the state stepping in and saying, you get to go to the

…then it wouldn’t be a strong signal to make a suicidal gesture. Right, if I were a depressed person who was hoping for help I probably would not go to one of those places because I’d know with reasonable certainty that I would actually die. You couldn’t make a dramatic statement by just going to the suicide clinic and signing some papers and getting handed your barbiturates. And of course what else will people do, maybe people will continue to harm themselves; I don’t necessarily think it would stop suicidal signaling in general (especially if it’s something that’s an evolved characteristic of ways that we deal with suffering and failed belonging) but I think treating people like adults, if they are adults, and dealing with things seriously and rationally is better than… [trails off] and imagining suicide as always a product of mental illness, and always trying to stop it is not necessarily as heroic as the the rescue narrative would like us to think. That brings us into the next thing I want to talk about which is, where are we these days with this issue? As you mention there’re 71

Review the Future

I can imagine if there were ethical suicide parlors a la Vonnegut’s “Welcome to the Monkey House,”

3.

hospital. Things like suicide prevention, like general social belonging and taking care of people, I’m completely on board with that; I think that’s great. But coercive suicide prevention I think probably causes the number of suicides to rise, and prevents the wrong suicides in addition to possibly preventing some suicides that wouldn’t otherwise occur.

some states like Oregon and there’re some countries outside the United States where there are some rights to physician-assisted suicide that do allow some people in certain circumstances to avail themselves of this option. In the United States as you say, there are a few states that will allow physician-assisted suicide for people who have certain kinds of terminal illnesses as certified by a doctor: not available to people in general, not available to people who don’t have the particular kind of illness that their statute wants to see, and not available to residents of most states. To the extent that suicide is legal anywhere it’s generally medicalized; there has to be a medical diagnosis before it’s allowed. How much do you think that medicalization is just getting around the crappy government system? You could say the same thing about recreational drug use, we’ll get into altered states in a minute, but everyone knows that to the extent that recreational drugs have been legalized in America they’ve been medicalized as well. To some extent I think that’s just a workaround of the political system to give people access to something without a politician having to go back on the campaign promise, but also part of the view that there’s a proper time and place to be using these things. In your opinion, is that the same thing here, are we seeing assisted suicide get medicalized because that’s the way it can get done, or are we seeing it because that’s what we really think? If you look at opinions the vast majority of people believe that suicide in general is immoral. It’s only with the small exception of terminally ill people who are still competent but want to die that there’s any support for allowing them to have the right to die, so it’s a way of allowing an exception to the general rule,

In my view having a child is a way of saying “life is basically good; it’s good enough that I’m willing to inflict it on someone else.” I think suicide is going back on that promise. You created a human being and now you’ve decided that life isn’t worth living so what were you doing in the first place? This is my sort of philosophical consistency argument. I don’t necessarily think that that is going to solve all suicidal parents’ problems; I’m sure there are situations where where it would be ethically permissible, but generally that’s one line I try to draw. But your line of course is far more permissive than the average person’s, right? Most people would be generally against all 73

Review the Future

Now I infer obviously you don’t consider suicide as being inherently immoral, although, in at least one case I think you do, right? If I understood your book [Every Cradle] correctly, you mention the case of a parent committing suicide when they have children that they are supposed to be taking care of.

3.

a compassionate exception for the people we can most understand would want to have that right. I think most people can at least empathize that if they were very seriously ill, terminally ill, losing their ability to control their bodily functions and in extreme pain, they would want the right to die. But I don’t think that empathy usually extends or is likely to extend in the future to anybody. I think that’s the sacredness thing I was talking about, that it’s not necessarily a rational moral framework but it’s a real moral framework that life is a sort of sacred and that suicide is a violation of the sanctity of life. I think that’s the normal view of things.

suicide. I would say generally there is a right to suicide with fairly few exceptions. I don’t expect that to be reflected in a legal right in a democracy where things are determined by the values of the majority. Given that this is the current legal status, that we have very limited, highly morally charged access to this medicalized version of suicide for some folks, and that there are legal battles to expand it [that don’t] seem [to be] moving very quickly… There’s not really a constituency. Right, hard to get people who have committed suicide to show up to vote… Maybe in Chicago. Indeed. I was wondering whether, this is something we always talk about on this podcast, whether there might be technological solutions to this problem. Ways that we could provide cheap, decentralized hard-to-ban technologies… Definitely, Bitcoin and Silk Road are the disruptors… Before, the issue was always, how can you supply this particular item when it’s obviously going to be a one-time interaction? So, traditional channels and black markets are not going to work for suicide. In the Sixties, barbiturates were really commonly prescribed, so it was an easier matter at the time, but now the drugs are pretty rare and certainly people aren’t going to be able to do a one-time spill. But very interestingly, just in the past few years that’s changed; it’s

Indeed, and I completely support longevity research, one of my friends [Sam Burnstein] wrote “The AntiDeathist FAQ” (2013) for Carcinisation, our group blog, and definitely I think the necessity of death is one of the harms of life. The one element of death that I want to preserve is the 75

Review the Future

Going forward, I think it might be time, since we’ve covered what the right to die is, how morally complex an issue it is really, to talk about how this might resonate in the future as things get more and more technologically advanced. Now, one reason that I strongly support this [right], being a personal proponent of enhanced longevity, and I intend to live forever or die trying, I… despite the burdens of life… want to keep doing it; that said, it’s absolutely imperative for people like me, who want technology to enhance our ability to live, to support the right to die because it’s logically consistent, it’s two sides to the same coin; if you’re going to artificially enhance your longevity beyond what nature will give you, you ought to be able to cut it short. One extreme version of that is if you have a death prohibition, a suicide prohibition in your society, and you also have excellent nanomedicine, you could create a Hell, a non-ending, open-ended suffering life form that would go on and on.

3.

still not legal, but using the darknet service TOR to access the darknet markets, they call them, such as the now-defunct Silk Road and the many markets that sprung up in Silk Road’s absence, using the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, people can now do a one-time transaction to buy the exact drugs practically if not legally, which I think is a huge change. Which is one of the reasons I dedicated my book to [Silk Road founder] Dread Pirate Roberts.

escape-hatch part of it. The involuntary part is the bad part, but that it’s an escape hatch you always have, should things get bad, is nice, and that’s the thing you’d want to keep in a world where you could live a very long time. It also preserves your autonomy to a certain degree; you can’t be tortured forever because you’ll pass out and die. Indeed, indeed. But that’s not necessarily true in a speculative future where we have really high quality nano-medicine that they could inject into you and it’ll keep you alive. It reminds me of in the Koran, the description of Hell, your skin is constantly regenerated so it can be burned off again over and over. And I don’t think this is an argument—I’m about to make an argument—I don’t think this is an argument against longevity research, but I think it’s important to be aware that we do have life extension technology now, and it is sometimes for people without their consent. Things like vaccines—I’m pro-vaccine, totally; I think that disease is one of the worst parts of being human that we’ve made huge strides against—things like vaccines are life-extension technologies, and certainly babies don’t consent to that; it’s an interesting thing to think about. More importantly, end-of-life care is often imposed on people who are not mentally competent to consent to it, things like feeding tubes and respirators may be given to people who don’t necessarily want it (or where it’s difficult to tell whether they want it or not). So I think it’s reasonable to think there’s precedent for life extension technology being

Not yet. They can prolong suffering but only, say, for twenty years. They can’t do it indefinitely for hundreds or thousands of years. Indeed. Part of the reality of enhanced longevity is we’re going to be experimenting with this for a long time, and there are going to be experiments that don’t work, and we’re going to have bad side effects of certain treatments. So again, if you don’t have that legal right to flick the switch and turn it off, this thing that I think of as an unalloyed good—giving people the option to live longer, healthier lives—can cause all kinds of suffering. And I think as we do that, we have to push for these rights as well. People having the right to change their experiences and also potentially to turn off the experiences. The off button, as you say. Right, and it’s the choice at the end of the day that matters. For me, the reason I think people should have the ability to do radical longevity or cognitive enhancement is the same reason I think they should be able to do self-deletion or self-retardation if you want. There’s a particular lobotomy I can imagine having.

77

Review the Future

Absolutely. The only silver lining on our current situation is that none of those technologies are terribly effective.

3.

forced on people, and our vision of Hellworld is a little more realistic.

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.5 I want to talk about one more thing before we move. How does the argument change, or does it change, if we live in a technological world where dissatisfaction of all kinds is curable? Nowadays, if we keep someone alive and they’re clinically depressed, they have low mood, we are dooming them to suffer. But what about the ideas of David Pearce? He was our guest last time, talking to us about his project to end suffering in the sentient world. The hedonic imperative. Including insects. Yes, he goes all the way down. But starting off with human beings, selecting children for higher hedonic setpoints in the future, medicating ourselves with some future drug, that would cure the dissatisfaction that might be at the heart of all suicide attempts. Does that change the argument? I think that’d be great. There’d be much less of a need for suicide. I think that in that world, the harms of suicide would be much less because everybody would be happy anyway. I think it’d be a lot rarer. I think there’s less of a case to right to die if life is pretty guaranteed to be subjectively great. It’s a little creepy, but I don’t think the argument is as strong in that case, in that world. That’s my gut reaction as well. It does weaken the moral argument to some extent. Now, I want to move on and talk about other kinds of control of your consciousness. Turning it on or off 5 In “Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture” (page 131), Perry advances that the “censorious,” self-monitoring and self-conscious watcher of the mind “likely lives in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.”

That’s interesting to me, because when I read about the experience machine in your book [Every Cradle], I thought, well I’d get in there. We had a podcast recently talking about virtual reality, and our guest described VR tech that’s coming down the pike as being the democratization of experience. They’re not very high quality, they’re just audiovisual, but they are experience machines to some degree. And I find that very compelling. 79

Review the Future

Robert Nozick is famous for the experience machine thought experiment, and the experience machine is, you can enter this virtual reality world and you will have a hallucination within, it will seem completely real, of anything you ever want, any kind of accomplishment or experience that you would want, but it won’t “really” be real. It’ll all be within this virtual reality world. And he assumes people will generally say no, we don’t want to get into that experience machine. Actually, people are on both sides. Many would want to, and many would not. Nozick says people wouldn’t because we care about things being “real,” and not just mental states; I tend to see the idea of realness as basically its own mental state, but people vary a lot on this. On how much something higher than mental states exists or matters. Using things like drugs are basically admitting that we’ll change the mental state directly, outside of what is real. So people who would not get in the experience machine might also not want to use drugs.

3.

is obviously one of the most fundamental controls you can have. But on top of that, I think it’s less controversial to say that you do have some right to control the state of your consciousness, for example through the use of drugs.

Also, in terms of the issue of realness, and hacking our own life and treating our own life like it’s an experience machine that we can turn the dials on with drugs, certainly that’s how people talk about drugs. They talk about drug experiences as if that wasn’t really them. “Oh that wasn’t me, I was just drunk that night. That wasn’t the real me.” So people do preserve this divide, many people I think, of the real and the not-real. That’s because I think our drugs wear off, if we had a 24/7 experience machine I think that changes. You mean Twitter? The other thing is our brain, you mentioned our senses. Our brains, what they’re telling us, our vision and our hearing and our smell, basically our brain is an experience machine. It’s not giving us full access to reality, it’s giving us a hallucination of reality, some amount of contact with some amount of the phenomena that are going on. So I think we’re already in one whether we like it or not, it’s just a matter of what level, how much control we’re going to have over the experiences we have. That seems right to me, and it seems a general good to give people more control rather than less, but I think this is relevant because what you’re talking about plays into the current state of the drug war, which is an issue for right to die but also an issue more generally. If you want to alter your consciousness with drugs there are a couple of culturally approved drugs that are legal, that you’re allowed to use in a lot of contexts, and they’re regulated obviously to minimize harms to society and we all understand why that is, but then there’s a whole class of drugs that are prohibited. Such as the barbiturbates that people need to commit suicide, but also things that are impossible to overdose on like marijuana. So it’s interesting that those things remain such

a difficulty for our political system to deal with, that we can’t acknowledge that people as subjective beings have the right to turn those dials themselves.

3.

Would people say, OK, there’s real experience, which is the sober experience, the non-hallucinatory (and also the present-moment, not a memory)—it seems like what people are really saying is it’s the shared experience, the one where the other sentient beings are all on the same page. If I’m in my private VR situation, or just lying on the street…

Review the Future

It’s not “real” because it’s not social, whereas social VR like Twitter seems more real, or real at least in the way that we care about. Sharing our experience machine with other minds makes it real in a way that everybody can understand. Maybe that’s true of drugs as well. I definitely think we lack good drug rituals, and that’s true of the legal drugs as well as the illegal ones. It’s a human universal, all human groups that’ve been studied have mind-altering chemicals or meditation-type practices, but in no culture is it just a free-for-all, there are always rituals and rules, particular times and places and practices that go into it. I think we’re really lacking that. It’s one of the things I hope for, as marijuana is becoming more legal at least, becoming legal in some states and becoming legal medically, I’d like to see better social rituals for drug use that are happy and fulfilling and not dangerous or… sad. Right, the same thing looking forward to VR. I think society will be very welcoming or accepting of a metaverse where we all participate and have fantasies together, but then the person who has the loner universe where they’re by themselves, dealing with 81

AIs all day in a simulated environment, are going to be seen as sad or stigmatized. That social proof thing is very powerful. I’m gonna quickly mention, I know that it’s not just ritual practices or drugs or meditation that can alter your states. There are all kinds of things. Food can alter your state, risk. Gambling obviously is a major way to alter your state. Exercise. Anyway, we don’t think too much about preventing people from falling in love, or running so far they hallucinate. Moving on to the last section, let’s talk about simulation. If we accept the arguments that we’ve been making, that people do have a right to affect their consciousness either in a VR world coming soon, or a far-future nano-enabled metaverse we can all jack into… Often, one issue, this is sort of tangentially related, that I think about is the ethics of simulating intelligent beings ourselves, ones that we might create. Greg Egan talks about this briefly in Incandescence, the post-humans agree you’re not supposed to simulate sentient beings at too close a grain. That that’s ethically questionable to do. If our universe is a simulation, what does that say about the ethics of the people who created it, and if we’re going to create simulations within us, without our world, what do those look like? What kinds of lives are okay to create? One thing is the ethics of specifically making copies of yourself. Who has the moral authority to first off, make a copy, assuming it’s possible, and then, do you have the moral authority to decide when that copy dies? Does “it” once it starts existing take on that moral authority?

What makes human consciousness special is our self-awareness from the perspective of others. Humans are probably the only ones who imagine themselves from the perspectives of other beings, who simulate other people in their own mind. I imagine what you’re thinking about me, and that’s what I think the special human consciousness is. Philippe Rochat, in his book Others In Mind, talks about this from a developmental perspective: how we come to be human, and partially we’re caused to be human by other people thinking about us and talking about us and forcing us to think of ourselves from their perspective. And so, consciousness is, from the very base, this group, shared thing. And a lot of what we’ve talked about seems like the individual liberty idea, but I think that’s too simplistic, because humans, the proper group of humans to think about is not the individual human. Humans exist as a group before, or in a more important way, than they exist individually. There aren’t any lone humans walking around. Even the hermit is a social role, and exists in reference to some kind of social group. So when we’re thinking 83

Review the Future

I feel like this might be the point in to talk about, Sarah, do you have a personal theory of consciousness? There’s not a lot of agreement about what consciousness is, where it comes from, how to define it.

3.

It seems analogous to the relationship of parents and children. Creating a new life form that has its own consciousness and is made from the same “stuff” as you. I think similar intuitions might apply, though there are obviously differences.

about consciousness we have to be thinking about multiple people at a time rather than just one person.6 So while most of my ethical intuitions come from a pretty libertarian perspective, I do think that’s too reductionist, that what people are is primarily a group and only then individuals in a group. So that’s a social theory of consciousness in humans, that the kind of consciousness we care about only arises in groups. And what you were talking about earlier, about what makes a virtual reality world “real” is if there are real people in it, I think that’s very deeply true. And that would imply something about when we might consider a simulated person to be conscious and deserving of rights. Having something to do with how it’s acting with us, how we’re modeling them and they’re modeling us. It’s a tricky question, I’m not sure I totally agree in the sense that I imagine a person born in total isolation might still have a qualitative experience that we consider to be conscious… I’m not necessarily using that as an exclusion, “nothing that doesn’t have this type of consciousness should have rights,” but that’s what I think is special about human consciousness. Dolphins seem to have a little bit of it. Dolphins seem to have a little bit of a lot of human characteristics. Maybe some day we’ll uplift them and they can tell us what they’ve been thinking. 6 For further discussion, see “The Essence of Peopling,” page 207.

3.

Give them hands.

There’s a game designer, I can’t think of his name right now, but he does sort of art games, he did Cow Clicker I think, and Cookie Clicker. The game was a simulation of being a Kinko’s copy employee. You never level up, you always have the same amount of work coming in, and I think a lot of human life unfortunately represents that… And especially atomized post-industrial life. But I think the Internet is offering people new narrative possibilities, more satisfying life games. The Internet itself seems like a video game a lot of people are playing. Definitely. And a ritual. I think most Internet use is ritual, and not in a bad way. In the sense that we’re engaging in a group hypnosis to change mental states, and do rhythmic rituals such as typing together. There are things like scapegoating on the Internet so… definitely a ritual community. The quote really drives home for me, and I think you intended it to, the issue of “Is life itself valuable?” You can reframe that to, “If your life were a video game, would you choose to play it,” and if the answer is “no” that’s very troubling. But it might upend your assumptions about life being inherently valuable. I think if you were in a lobby, and had a menu of different human 85

Review the Future

If they develop opposable thumbs we’re all in trouble. […] I want to throw a quote at you I pulled from [Every Cradle], which is “If human life were a video game, would anyone play it?” Talk about that and how it relates to simulation.

lives to live, I’m sure you could find one that would be a great game to play. It might not be the one you would first think, you might think this celebrity with a wild life would be a good game but perhaps their mood is terrible all the time. So far the housewife game is the best game that I’ve played. And I wouldn’t have thought that until trying it myself. It sounds like a good game to me, but I’m a homebody. In an ideal world, assuming that a far future metaverse is going to happen, what rights do you think we should have in that world, over our consciousness? What do you think should not be a right, but closer to a product that must be bought or licensed? There’s obviously the possibility in an immersive VR space to create a lot of suffering, and to trap people in the world they’re in, not let them get out to the lobby and pick the next world. I would want people to have the right to experience as much pain as they want. I would even want people to be able to put themselves into a simulation for a number of years and say, I don’t want the right to get out of it. But I think it comes down to writing the contracts well, easier said than done. Things like, what can be experienced, what they want provided, might be up to the person; we might find lots of regularities where one kind of person mostly wants this particular package of things. As you said, what should be provided vs. what must be earned, that has to do with how satisfying a game is, maybe; if everything is easily obtainable, then to a human mind at least, it isn’t any fun. We have the need to engage in certain behaviors and overcome

Social belonging maybe. And that’s another one where maybe if you don’t earn it, it doesn’t feel as satisfying. And it might actually not be possible to provide it without earning it, unless you’re willing to violate the rights of others, because you’d have to potentially force those social peers into the relationship with the subject. This goes back to consciousness, because if consciousness can be separated from the behavioral traits of a sentient being, which is very speculative, then you could create AI friends for somebody that don’t have the ethical implications of conscious beings. They’re already getting pretty good at that. The fourlegged kind especially, those are very satisfying. Pets are arguably conscious, but certainly in the case of dogs, they seem to just enjoy your presence. They’re not very demanding. You don’t have to harm the dog in any significant way to get it to be your pet, and it does seem to fulfill the social belonging, pack-animal needs we have. People do seem to be afraid of the idea that AI might get better than us at being our friends, and people wouldn’t really need each other any more. It’s not 87

Review the Future

It’s interesting for me to think about pleasure and pain as things that could be either provided or not provided; cognition, the ability to think, perception… of course the ability to start or stop the simulation, all of those are potentially things you might make an argument should be provided…

3.

some kind of difficulty in order to feel satisfied. I want people to have the opportunity to do that.

scary to me, because it seems like an ideal situation where all your needs are met. That also feels like the same fears we’ve gone through again and again, like in the early days of the Internet, and very recently even; you have all these opinion pieces and articles that come out talking about how atomized we are, on our phones. People fretting about the possibility that we’re retreating into our own private bubble. But at the same time, it seems not even true, just a recurring fear we have that has more to do with what we value than whether it is the case. It seems to me the phone and computer phenomenon is connecting me to more people, yourself included, than I ever would’ve been connected with before that technology was available… I would personally be loathe to live in a pre-industrial society where the nearest town was a day’s ride away and I only knew twenty people. I definitely feel the same way, I don’t want to have cholera and no WiFi, but at the same time I’m sympathetic to wanting to preserve the best of the preindustrial world, silly things like singing together as a group, doing little group rituals and being together physically. We have to be honest about our social needs; we can’t just engineer them out, in fact, we have to design them in.

ADAPTATION & FLOURISHING Carcinisation 2014

WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE? Intelligence as Awareness and Response The most primordial kind of intelligence is awareness of relevant features in the environment, coupled with responses to relevant information. This environmental awareness-response type of intelligence only makes sense in the light of goals (“relevant” to what?)—from a single-celled organism responding to the presence of food by consuming it, to a human noticing that a plant is dry and watering it. Evolution itself has acquired a great deal of intelligence; DNA is the transmissible record of the information evolution has acquired about the environment, from the perspective of billions of organisms with future existence as a “goal.” Simple organisms are still very viable, but the computational process of evolution has revealed that increasingly complex organisms that extract a great deal of information (and energy) from their surrounding systems are also extremely viable, especially over short time frames. Organisms have evolved increasingly complex neural systems and senses that reach into new domains of relevant information. Humans have created instruments that do the same.

Games vary in the amount of “luck” that is available. A solved game presents no opportunities for randomness, no luck—but even very complex games present different amounts of luck depending on the level of play. One measure of luck available in a game is the distance from the best player to the ideal player; as chess becomes computationally solved, its skill component overtakes its luck component. Games, like awareness-response intelligence, only make sense in the context of goals. Awareness-response intelligence extracts as much information as it can about the world relevant to its goals so that “luck” is as small a factor as possible. Sources of apparent randomness must either be controlled, studied until predictable, or, if these are not possible, responded to with optimal probabilistic strategies. The “intelligence” apparently contained in complex economies (the “invisible hand” of the market, ecosystems) is of the awareness-response type.

Intelligence as Extracting and Communicating Aboutness Human intelligence includes awareness and response to the environment, but adds a new feature— extracting information from other intelligences, and communicating information as well. This type of intelligence also makes no sense apart from the concept of “goals”—and part of the complexity of the problem of communication and aboutness-extraction is that communication partners have some shared and some competing goals. Sometimes people comment that they’re surprised that the problem of computer translation of languages

93

What Is Intelligence?

1 cf. Peter Watts, Blindsight, 2006. 2 Roger Schank, Tell Me A Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory, 1990. 3 St. Rev, “Philosophy of Mathematics is Stupid, Here’s Mine (And Why Math is Storytelling),” Pattern Recognition, 2013.

4.

has not been solved. Extracting the meaning from language—the story or concept communicated by the words—is an extremely hard problem that humans specialize in. It is not inherent to intelligence itself. A self-modifying super-intelligent being with vast computational resources could likely maximize its existence and reproduction goals with only the awareness-response type of intelligence—language and communication might prove to be a hindrance.1 Humans tend to focus only on aboutness-extraction intelligence when evaluating others’ intelligence. What we mostly desire from an AI (or other conversation partner) is that it understand what our stories are “about,” and prove it by responding with a story with similar aboutness.2 This is why the “Turing test” for artificial intelligence is unfortunate. When listening to others, humans mostly listen long enough to extract an “aboutness,” and then search their memories for a story with a similar aboutness—and this aboutness is often a complex relation or “moral” with little relation to the naively construed “topic” of the communication. (I have it on good authority3 that mathematical communication shares this feature.) Only rarely do humans respond to communication by modifying their own stories and models of the world. The aboutness-extraction type of intelligence is a consequence of intelligence in humans being shared across many brains, and even outside of brains, in written language and artifacts. The most important

part of the human environment is other people, and communicating with them is the only source of culturally preserved intelligence that would take individual brains too long to figure out (see Boyd et al. 2013 on the “lost European explorer experiment”4). Note that intelligence can actually be stored in culture, just as it can be stored in DNA, without the organisms involved having any understanding as to why it works. Awareness-response intelligence and aboutness-extraction intelligence work together to form culture. Items of culture encode and contain intelligence relevant to human goals. But they are themselves entities under selection, and as they increase in complexity, they begin to display intelligence of the awareness-response type (non-conscious). Successful institutions evolve mechanisms for their own maintenance, such as awe-inspiring religious music or the hazing rituals used by fraternities. Items of culture rely on humans for reproduction, and their existence and reproduction goals depend on not being destructively detrimental to human carriers—but only in the very long run, as with contagious pathogens. Mathematics is a type of symbol-mediated aboutness extraction and communication. The necessity of communicating suspected patterns to other minds limits the kind of information that can be communicated; minds may experience visual insights, for instance, that are difficult to express in any form of communication. Specialized forms of communication, including mathematics and jargons, trade off 4 Henrich, Boyd, & Richerson, “The Cultural Evolution of Technologies: Facts and Theories,” Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion, 2013. But see also further discussion in Perry, “Why Cultural Evolution is Real,” page 112.

A special type of intelligence is the organization of complexity into a simpler, less resource-intensive form. This is what is called “insight,” and it is pleasurable for humans even when not relevant to survival.5 The complementary tool, humor, offers a pleasant sensation as a reward for weeding one’s model for inconsistencies,6 though as with compression and music, it has many social applications. Compression is likely one of the regularities in subjective aesthetic judgment.7 This type of intelligence makes sense even without reference to goals—but reducing complexity only makes sense given limited processing power and storage space, a feature as important to human intelligence as cognition being localized within many separate minds. An elegant compression is often itself the “aboutness” that is communicated in symbolic systems. Language itself acts as a store of information, again shared among minds, and language tends toward 5 Nicholas J. Hudson, “Musical beauty and information compression: Complex to the ear but simple to the mind?,” BMC Research Notes, 2011. 6 Hurley et al., Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind, 2013. 7 Owain Evans, Project on Computational Theories of Aesthetic Judgments, 2011.

95

What Is Intelligence?

Intelligence as Compression

4.

better compression and understanding within a group for poorer communicability outside that group. The Flynn Effect is likely the result of the recent proliferation of culturally transmitted tools that assist with aboutness extraction from symbolic systems.

compression. As stories and concepts are shared, they become more compressed, until they reach the final stage: a metonym,8 a single word that represents a story or concept that conversation partners are expected to understand.9 A word is the ultimate tl;dr for human communication. As awareness-response intelligence increases through humans acquiring new senses via technology, language grows to fill the space of understanding. New models compress complex, messy observations into cheaper, cleaner, more useful patterns: natural selection, Milankovitch cycles, game theory. But notice that an explosion in awareness-response intelligence without human limitations would not need or perhaps even benefit from language or the compressions expressed in it; a super AI would likely notice natural selection and Milankovitch cycles and game theory without any language at all. Consciousness in the sense of the subjective experience of self-awareness is likely orthogonal to each kind of intelligence.

8 Bill Ellism “When is a Legend? An Essay in Legend Morphology,” in The Questing Beast: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, Vol. IV, 1989. 9 See also Peli Grietzer in Art (That) Works (Not Nothing 2020) on the compression of terms like “Kafkaesque.”

TOWARD A SYNTHESIS OF FLOURISHY FORMS Crabs Are A Process The word “crab” brings to mind a snapshot (or perhaps a scuttling mental video) of the surface appearance of an adult crab. Like most nouns, “crab” is a metonym for a complex system of processes that are concealed by the snapshot-in-time and surface appearance connotations of the word. Some processes are internal to crabs, such as respiration, digestion, and the Krebs cycle. Other processes are impossible to localize in the space and time of a crab snapshot. The adult coconut crab (Birgus latro) is evidence of a complex reproductive process, in which crabs mate and drop their eggs into the ocean on a rocky beach at dusk; the eggs exist as plankton, then as small hermit crabs; eventually some re-emerge on islands to grow into adult coconut crabs. They also interact with human processes, such as fishing, cars, and perhaps occasionally the deceased female aviator process.1 Boxer crabs carry anemones in their claws and use the toxins in the anemones’ tentacles for defense; the anemones feed on the crabs’ scraps. The boxer crab 1 See speculation that coconut crabs may have stolen and hidden Amelia Earhart’s remains.

process is inseparable from the anemone process. Wider processes are relevant to crabs as well, including the weather effects from long-term astronomical processes, ocean currents, asteroids, and evolution itself. Some processes are inseparable; others have limited interaction; some are completely separate, although subtle interdependencies are often hidden. The physical shape of the adult crab represents the successful interaction of many processes. Carcinization is the process by which diverse non-crablike life forms adopt the shape of a crab—indicating that the crab shape is a kind of attractor, a particularly viable form given all the relevant processes within the system.

Christopher Alexander: Fit, Attractors, And Visual Solutions To Complexity Christopher Alexander’s books Notes on the Synthesis of Form (hereafter Notes) and A Pattern Language are the two most insight-dense books about design I’ve ever read. In order to borrow and expand on Alexander’s concepts, I’ll summarize them briefly. “Fit” is a property of good design—a design element or system interacting with humans and other systems to produce a useful, comfortable, stable, or otherwise appropriate result. “Misfit” is the absence of fit—an uncomfortable chair, a teapot too heavy to use, long commute times,2 or a house that falls down in a heavy wind. Fit exists in context—a video game that is predictable exhibits misfit because it is boring, 2 See Stutzer & Frey, “Stress that Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox,” The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2008.

Toward a Synthesis of Flourishy Forms

99

5.

while a restaurant schedule that is predictable exhibits good fit. Misfit is more visible than fit; as noted above, subtle interdependencies are hard to predict. Misfit cries out for a solution, but naive solutions often result in worse misfit.

How can human brains handle such complexity? Noticing and cataloging interdependencies within a system is the first step toward human-brain-accessible good design. When you change something in a large, densely interconnected system, you often change many other things. Luckily, complex systems can often be broken into densely interconnected parts that are not very connected to each other. I reproduce Alexander’s elegant illustration of this process in Notes (pictured previous page). Once systems are divided into relatively independent parts, the third step of the design process occurs: creating visual representations as fit solutions for each sub-part. These sub-parts are then visually fitted together into a whole. Visual insights are often extremely difficult to communicate in words; encouraging and practicing the communication of visual insights is one of my medium-term goals for this blog [Carcinisation]. Visual representations have the power to conceal and render useful complex analytic rigor, as with the concept of shape in Go. Notes is a brief description of a process of design. A Pattern Language, I believe, is an attempt to catalog attractors with the quality of good fit in the human design domain, from the level of the room to the level of the city. Just as a crab represents a successful pattern at the intersection of many processes, so Alexander et al.’s patterns represent forms that achieve or characterize good fit in interaction with complex human processes. (I will note that I came to this conclusion under the influence of hallucinogens, a state in which visual insights that are hard to articulate frequently present themselves.) Though flawed, incomplete, and occasionally

In addition to thinking about things interacting with surrounding systems, we must also think about things over time. The snapshot view of a crab is not as helpful as the view of crabs as a process over time. It may be more useful to sometimes think about peopling, rather than about people. Much of the magic of the excellent TVTropes is its crystallization of narrative processes and changes. It is a Book of Changes for narrative, a hundred times richer and more successful than V. I. Propp’s The Morphology of the Tale. What is needed is nothing less than a TVTropes for human life. Someone once told me that in feng shui, one of the principles is to imagine a dragon moving through a room, to mentally simulate people walking through over time. This is an elegant idea, taking rooms out of the still world of architecture models and placing them in the context of peopling over time. I propose using “dragon” as a metonym for insightful ideas like this: a conceptualization that makes a process over time apparent, especially one that enables easier 101

Toward a Synthesis of Flourishy Forms

Time And Dragons

5.

insane, these patterns and the method by which they are derived are powerful tools for thinking about how human flourishing is accomplished. I would love to see A Pattern Language for religions, for example. D. E. Brown’s list of human universals is a minimalist starting point. Convergent evolution, whether biological (as with carcinization) or cultural, points to the existence of an attractor at the intersection of all the relevant processes.

mental testing of “fit” in Alexander’s sense. There are probably many dragons buried beneath our awareness, in our verbs and process nouns. New dragons are easier to see; I think gene surfing3 is an example of a dragon, though not one with design implications.

3 Klopfstein et al., “The Fate of Mutations Surfing on the Wave of a Range Expansion,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 2006.

BEAUTY IS FIT [E]very design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. In other words, when we speak of design, the real object of discussion is not the form alone, but the ensemble comprising the form and its context. Good fit is a desired property of this ensemble which relates to some particular division of the ensemble into form and context. There is a wide variety of ensembles which we can talk about like this. The biological ensemble made up of a natural organism and its physical environment is the most familiar: in this case we are used to describing the fit between the two as well-adaptedness. But the same kind of objective aptness is to be found in many other situations. The ensemble consisting of a suit and tie is a familiar case in point; one tie goes well with a certain suit, another goes less well. Again, the ensemble may be a game of chess, where at a certain stage of the game some moves are more appropriate than others because they fit the context of the previous moves more aptly. The ensemble may be a musical composition—musical phrases have to fit their contexts too: think of the perfect rightness when Mozart puts just this phrase at a certain point in a sonata. If the ensemble is a truckdriver plus a traffic sign, the

graphic design of the sign must fit the demands made on it by the driver’s eye. An object like a kettle has to fit the context of its use, and the technical context of its production cycle. In the pursuit of urbanism, the ensemble which confronts us is the city and its habits. Here the human background which defines the need for new buildings, and the physical environment provided by the available sites, make a context for the form of the city’s growth. In an extreme case of this kind, we may even speak of a culture itself as an ensemble in which the various fashions and artifacts which develop are slowly fitted to the rest. Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, citations omitted.

The concept of beauty in diverse domains has a unifying, definitive feature: it reflects the detection of fit between parts of a system. Beauty presents to us as a mystical quale; this is because a beautiful form is a solution to many simultaneous complex problems. Beauty in nature, art, music, architecture, mathematics, and even human faces is a response to the detection of fit. Consider botany. There is a major divergence in beauty between plants that must attract the attention of insects and other animals, and those that are pollinated by the wind (or by animals without requiring their attention, such as burrs that stick in passing animals’ fur). Plants that must attract attention of any species must fit themselves to the senses and nervous

Beauty Is Fit

105

6.

systems of these animals, for instance with bright colors and intense fragrances, and there is often a sort of leakage of beauty—nervous systems (such as those of humans) are often moved by the beauty of plants optimized to attract the attention of quite different species. Plants with no need to appeal to the nervous systems of organisms are generally dull in color and form with no appealing fragrance. Intelligence may be represented as the discovery of fit. Fit with the nervous system of appreciating organisms is one type of “fit” that beauty encompasses. This is the beauty of a ripe fruit, a symmetrical young face, a shady spot by a creek. This is similar to the “awareness and response to the environment” type of intelligence. The other type of “fit” that beauty encompasses is the fit of a part within a system, viewed from outside that system; the detection and creation of formal fit within systems is the type of intelligence involved in the useful compression of complexity. Mathematical beauty (see Gian-Carlo Rota, “The Phenomenology of Mathematical Beauty”) is the extreme form of this latter type of fit—forms with no appeal to insect or ordinary mammal nervous systems, with only the most abstract form at all, are experienced as beautiful based on their fit within a complex system. Most human domains are at neither extreme, but balance both types of fit to achieve beauty; ignoring either type of fit leads to poor overall fit. Finally, beauty reflects fit with respect to other forms in the environment (as filtered through the nervous systems of perceiving organisms). Forms are sometimes beautiful because they are novel, or because they are familiar; the contributions of novelty

and familiarity to beauty mean that beauty of form changes depending on the contents of the present culture. Fashion and tradition are poles of this dynamic. Nervous systems change through evolution, but they change very slowly compared to human culture. Forms with “timeless” beauty generally reflect fit with aspects of our system that do not change, such as our visual and auditory systems. Timeless beauty may also represent an elegant encoding of fit within an abstract system; though the text of Archimedes’ Method was lost for centuries, cultures having lost the tools to apprehend its meaning, the fit encoded within it remains beautiful. Ephemeral beauty, on the other hand, reflects fit within an ephemeral system; novel beauty or traditional beauty may be rendered less beautiful by an influx of similar or novel forms, respectively. To experience the beauty of the forms of a lost culture, we must often come to understand the culture in depth. In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter imagines that a record of Bach’s sonata in F Minor for violin and clavier is sent up in a satellite and intercepted by intelligent aliens. The aliens might well be able to locate the “compelling inner logic” of patterns-within- patterns of the Bach piece; it contains beauty in the sense of fit within its own self-enclosed system. However, what if the record contained instead John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape no. 4”—chance music whose structure is chosen by stochastic processes? This “maximally surprising” music contains no patterns at all, and aliens without knowledge of the sociology of 20th century music would be unlikely to find any beauty in it. Maximally surprising music of this type is not beautiful, just as

Beauty Is Fit

107

6.

the beauty of a mathematical result is not reducible to its surprising nature. Rather, in both cases, the type of surprise that creates beauty is the (perhaps sudden) apprehension of usefully organized complexity (see Jeurgen Schmidhuber, “Simple Algorithmic Theory of Subjective Beauty”) within the system—the apprehension, that is, of fit. Cage’s music is an example of the tendency for high-status human domains to ignore fit with human nervous systems in favor of fit with increasingly rarified abstract cultural systems. Human nervous systems are limited. Representation of existing forms, and generating pleasure and poignancy in human minds, are often disdained as solved problems. Domains unhinged from the desires and particularities of human nervous systems and bodies become inhuman; human flourishing, certainly, is not a solved problem. However, human nervous systems themselves create and seek out “fit” of the more abstract sort; the domain of abstract systems is part of the natural human environment, and the forms that exist there interact with humans as symbiotes. Theorems and novels and money and cathedrals rely on humans for reproduction, like parasites, but offer many benefits to humans in exchange. Humans require an environment that fits their nervous systems, but part of the definition of “fit” in this case is the need for humans to feel that they are involved in something greater (and perhaps more abstract) than this “animal” kind of fit. In summary, beauty is not a mystical, irreducible quale, but an ultimately computational feature of detected fit within systems.

My fellow crab1 has suggested that the “difference in creativity that can be generated algorithmically and that which presently can’t is measurable only in ‘frequency of apparent meaning or significance,’ not in vividness, complexity, or novelty.” Fit generated computationally may be even more satisfying than fit generated by human minds alone—and may be even friendlier to human minds.

1 @blue_traveler, Twitter, July 27 2014.

WHY CULTURAL EVOLUTION IS REAL Cultural evolution represents an entire field of study. It has the potential, like biological evolution, to be a mechanism underlying and connecting many fields of study. This short introduction will pull together a few themes and compelling stories from this large field and present some of its concepts, mechanisms, and evidence—hopefully enough to increase the reader’s suspicion of the claim that cultural evolution is a “myth.” John Gray, whose work I admire, unfortunately provides the perfect statement of social evolution denial in a recent essay: Social evolution is just a modern myth. No scientific theory exists about how the process is supposed to work. There’s been much empty chatter about memes—units of information or meaning that supposedly compete with one another in society. But there’s no mechanism for the selection of human concepts similar to that which Darwin believed operated among species and which later scientists showed at work among genes. Bad ideas like racism seem to hang around forever, while the silly idea of social evolution

has shown an awesome power to mutate and survive.1 These claims are very similar to claims he made in a review of Matt Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist over four years ago: Whatever political goals it is used to promote, the idea of cultural evolution is not much more than a misleading metaphor… Memes are just a pseudo-scientific way of talking about ideas, not actually existing physical entities. There is nothing in society that resembles the natural selection of random genetic mutations; even if such a mechanism existed, there is nothing to say its workings would be benign. Bad ideas do not evolve into better ones. They tend to recur, as racist memes are doing at present in parts of the world where economic dis­location is reviving hatred of minorities and immigrants. Knowledge advances, but in ethics and politics the same old rubbish keeps on piling up. The idea of social evolution is rubbish of this kind, a virulent meme that continues to reproduce and spread despite having been refuted time and time again.2 While Gray is correct that cultural evolution does not have human well-being as its goal any more than biological evolution does, he is wrong to deny the existence of cultural evolution, particularly on the grounds that there is “no mechanism” by which 1 John Gray, “Why capitalism hasn’t triumphed,” November 8, 2014. Thanks to xenosystems.net for highlighting this quotation. 2 Gray, “Review of The Rational Optimist,” Aug 2 2010.

Human culture includes language, artifacts, music, stories, rituals, behaviors, and other information stored inside and outside of human brains.

2.

Humans acquire culture through social

3 N=1, “John Gray and cultural evolution,” 2014. 4 Joseph Henrich, “Too Late: Models of Cultural Evolution and Group Selection Have Already Proved Useful,” Centre for Human Evolution, Cognition, and Culture 2012.

111

Why Cultural Evolution is Real

1.

7.

cultural evolution can be demonstrated to occur. (See Jason Roy’s interpretation of Gray’s thinking.3) It seems that Gray did not, in the four years between the two essays, find time to learn more about cultural evolution, such as by reading the paper Matt Ridley linked in his reply to Gray’s review, “Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution” by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson. This (excellent) paper offered by Ridley is a 41-page PDF, written in somewhat technical language; forty-one pages is perhaps asking a lot. But I find it useful to treat cultural evolution as part of my model of reality, and it is discouraging to see such useful concepts discarded without a fair hearing. (Steven Pinker’s take-down of group selection, “The false allure of group selection,” probably did not help matters, even though group selection and cultural evolution are not at all the same thing; see also Joseph Henrich’s response to Pinker.4) My aim here is to provide an introduction to cultural evolution that is somewhat more respectful of my readers’ time than a 41pg paper, but also to provide many seductive jumping-off points for further reading. At the outset, here is an outline of what I mean by cultural evolution:

3.

4.

5.

6.

learning. There are two major pathways of transmission: vertical, from parents to children only, or horizontal, between unrelated people. The mode of transmission is itself a major selective factor, shaping the content of culture. Culture cannot survive and reproduce itself without humans; humans, after long dependence on culture, can no longer survive and reproduce themselves without it. Cultures vary and change, and experience differential “reproductive” success: they spread or fail to spread, and their host populations grow or shrink. Biological organisms only change by selection on random mutations. Culture, on the other hand, varies in part through intentional (non-random) human action. Despite this, it is rarely the case that humans fully understand all the functions of their culture, or predict how any changes they make will affect them and their descendants.5 The relationship between humans and their culture is best modeled as a relationship between host and symbiote or between host and parasite, depending on the fitness cost extracted by culture, with humans as the host.

Humans Eat Culture, Not Food Culture is not a luxury; it is life or death. Culture has likely been the most important part of the human 5 See, e.g., Alex Mesoudi, “Foresight in cultural evolution,” Biology and Philosophy 2008.

Humans rely on culture to survive not only in 6 Boyd, Richerson, & Henrich, “The cultural evolution of technology: Facts and theories” in Cultural Evolution: Society, Language, and Religion 2013. Citations omitted.

113

Why Cultural Evolution is Real

[The Lost European Explorer] experiment has been repeated many times when European explorers were stranded in an unfamiliar habitat. Despite desperate efforts and ample learning time, these hardy men and women suffered or died because they lacked crucial information about how to adapt to the habitat. The Franklin Expedition of 1846 illustrates this point. Sir John Franklin, a Fellow of the Royal Society and an experienced Arctic traveler, set out to find the Northwest Passage, and spent two icebound winters in the Arctic, the second on King William Island. Everyone eventually perished from starvation and scurvy. The Central Inuit have lived around King William Island for at least 700 years. This area is rich in animal resources. Nonetheless, the British explorers starved because they did not have the necessary local knowledge, and despite being endowed with the same cognitive abilities as the Inuit, and having two years to use these abilities, failed to learn the skills necessary to subsist in this habitat.6

7.

selective environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Humans are not adapted to life without culture. Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and Joseph Henrich invite us to consider the “lost European explorer experiment” in order to understand the gravity of our dependence on culture for survival:

marginal environments, but even in environments rich with resources, such as the Australian outback. People rely on culture to obtain sources of food, and also to eat their food safely: In 1860, two intrepid Victorian explorers named Robert Burke and William Wills set out on an expedition to cross the Australian continent from Melbourne in the south to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north—a distance of 2,000 miles. They were successful in reaching the north coast, but on the return journey they both succumbed to starvation. Burke and Wills were educated modern men, but they did not know how to survive in the Outback. They were living on a plentiful supply of freshwater shellfish and a plant known as “nardoo” that the local Aboriginals ate. However, both contain high levels of an enzyme that destroys vitamin B1, which is a vital amine (hence “vitamin”) essential for life. By ignoring the traditional Aboriginal method of roasting the shellfish and wet grinding and then baking the nardoo, which neutralizes the toxic enzyme, Burke and Wills had failed to capitalize on the ancient cultural Aboriginal knowledge. They did not die because of a lack of things to eat, but of beriberi malnutrition. Aborigines did not know about vitamin B1, beriberi or that intense heat destroys enzymes; they just learned from their parents the correct way to prepare these foods as children—no doubt knowledge that was acquired through the trial and error of deceased ancestors. Their cultural

7 Bruce Hood, The Domesticated Brain, 2014.

115

Why Cultural Evolution is Real

Food processing is one of the easiest parts of transmissible, reproducing culture for us to observe. The nixtamalization process, an ancient American method of processing corn, increases the availability of another B vitamin (niacin). Like the shellfish and nardoo of the Outback, corn without its associated cultural processing cannot form the basis of a human diet; where corn traveled without nixtamalization, malnutrition followed. As Hood notes, above, the people using these cultural food processing methods—and these methods, by the way, are memes—did not need to understand their utility in providing essential vitamins, or even need to understand what a vitamin is. Despite a complete lack of modern chemical knowledge, around the world in vastly different environments with different nutritional challenges, people found diets that supplied all the nutrients they needed in a safe way. And there were many casualties along the way. I wonder if KNM-ER 1808, a female Homo erectus from Kenya who lived 1.6 million years ago and may have died of an overdose of vitamin A, was one of these “deceased ancestors” whose “trial and error” eventually produced cultural solutions. Daphne Miller has posited (in The Jungle Effect) that our sudden switch en masse away from our carefully evolved recent ancestral diets

7.

learning had provided them with critical knowledge that Burke and Wills lacked. As the two explorers’ fates show, our intelligence and capacity for survival depends on what we learn from others.7

is behind the most common form of malnutrition in the world today, obesity. Humans change their culture, but cultures also change humans on the genetic level; cultures themselves formed a major part of our selective environments. Lactase persistence, for instance, seems to have evolved only among dairying populations in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The purely cultural availability of milk changed the selective environment, favoring those with the genetic ability to take advantage of this novel source of food.

The Observable Evolution of Artifacts It’s difficult to visualize the evolution of ephemeral cultural items such as behaviors, rituals, and stories. Focusing on durable artifacts, whose properties may be catalogued and compared, makes this process easier to grasp. There is one extremely special kind of artifact whose unusual properties make it the perfect introductory example for illustrating the workings of cultural evolution: the chain letter. The chain letter (whether paper or electronic) consists of discrete units of information, almost like DNA, and causes humans to reproduce it. (Most artifacts, like arrowheads and carpets, do not share these properties.) The brilliant Daniel VanArsdale has assembled hundreds of paper chain letters, dating back to the 1880s; his Chain Letter Evolution8 (which, by the way, is worth spending many leisurely weekend hours immersed in) explains how 8 Dan VanArsdale, Chain Letter Evolution, silcom.com/~barnowl/ chain-letter/evolution.html. See also Perry’s “Boilerplate,” Ribbonfarm Aug 2018, for a continued analysis of the chain letter.

these documents—literal self-replicators—evolved over the centuries, exploiting beneficial mutations that increased replication:

7.

Apocryphal letters claiming divine origin circulated for centuries in Europe. After 1900, shorter more secular letters appeared that promised good luck if copies were distributed and bad luck if not. Billions of these “luck chain letters” circulated in the last century. As these letters were copied through the decades they accumulated changes from copying errors, offhand comments, and calculated innovations that helped them prevail in the competition with other chain letters. For example, complementary testimonials developed, one exploiting perceived good luck, another exploiting perceived bad luck. Using an archive of over 900 dated letters, predominant types are identified and analyzed for their replicative advantage. In 1935 the first money chain letter appeared, the infamous “Send-a-Dime,” which flooded the world within a few months. The motives and insight of its anonymous author are examined. A 1933 luck chain letter is shown to have provided a model for the Send-a-Dime letter, and this letter itself may have brought unexpected money in the mail to some senders in small towns. In the 1970’s a luck chain letter from Latin America that mentioned a lottery winner invaded the US and was combined on one page with a chain letter already circulating. This combination rapidly dominated circulation. In 1979 the postscript “It Works” was added

Why Cultural Evolution is Real

117

to it and within a few years the progeny of this single letter had replaced all the millions of similar letters in circulation without this postscript. By examining hundreds of chain letters in the archive, evolutionary hypotheses are formulated that explain these and other events in chain letter history.9 Within this small subset of artifacts that are made from information and that cause their own replication (given a population of literate hosts), the tracks of evolution are clearly visible. Most artifacts are not made of discrete units of information, and do not cause their own replication directly; rather, they are the result of intensive social learning of the behaviors required to replicate them. But ordinary artifacts too display the hallmarks of evolution. In my outline, I mentioned that there are two (basic) pathways of transmission of culture. First, culture may be transmitted from parent to child only; this is vertical transmission (sometimes called phylogenesis). Second, culture may be transmitted between unrelated individuals; for our purposes (and speaking a bit loosely), this is horizontal transmission (sometimes called ethnogenesis). Exclusively vertical transmission results in a perfect, branching “tree-like” cladistic structure; horizontal transmission makes the phylogenetic tree look more like a tangled bush. Another important distinction is the mechanism of memetic transfer: transmission might either be particulate, “allor-nothing discrete transmission of cultural traits,” or blending, “adopting the average value of a continuous 9 Ibid.

119

Why Cultural Evolution is Real

10 Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences, 2011.

7.

trait from more than one model.”10 The evolution of biological organisms is particulate, in that traits are passed by discrete units of DNA. Biological evolution also mostly relies on vertical transmission, with genes passed from parent to child. However, as Mesoudi notes in Cultural Evolution, horizontal gene transfer is common among bacteria and plants, transmitted between unrelated individuals and even across species by viruses. Biological evolution appears to be more of a “tangled bush” than classical models would predict; cultural evolution, however, appears both more particulate and more tree-like than one might expect—that is, more like biological evolution. In 2002, Tehrani and Collard’s study of Turkmen textiles from the eighteenth century to the present revealed a very tree-like pattern, indicating mostly vertical transmission (“phylogenesis”) and particulate, rather than blending, transmission. The Turkmen textiles were produced in a context ideal for exclusively vertical transmission, especially prior to 1881: women learned weaving from their mothers, rarely traveled to other villages, and tended to marry within their tribes, reducing the chances for horizontal transmission or “ethnogenesis” to tangle up the phylogenetic tree. Is this result representative of other cultural data sets? Mesoudi, summarizing “Branching versus blending in macroscale cultural evolution: A comparative study,” by Collard, Shennan, and Tehrani (2006), says:

[I]f biological and cultural evolution really are fundamentally different processes, the former branching and the latter blending… then there should be a systematic difference in the tree-likeness of the biological and the cultural data sets. To test this prediction, Collard et al. collected twenty-one biological data sets that contained genetic, morphological, and behavioral data from a diverse range of taxa, including lizards, birds, hominids, bees, and primates. They also collected twenty-one cultural data sets, including Tehrani and Collard’s Turkmen rug patterns, O’Brien et al.’s North American projectile points, other material artifacts such as Neolithic pottery decorations, plus nonmaterial data sets regarding food taboos, religious beliefs, and puberty rites. For each data set, Collard et al. calculated the number of homoplasies [changes due to independent invention or diffusion across lineages or groups], this time using the retention index (RI), which controls for differences in the number of species and characters and is particularly useful when comparing data sets, as was done here… [A]n RI of 1 indicates no homoplasies and a perfectly treelike evolutionary pattern, with lower RI values increasingly less treelike. The results showed that the biological data sets and the cultural data sets had remarkably similar average RIs of 0.61 and 0.59, respectively. Assuming that the biological data sets are primarily generated through branching speciation, this analysis suggests that cultural data sets, too, have been

7.

shaped by a similar branching process.11

Attractors in Culture Space Why do cultural data sets reflect evolution as “particulate” as biological evolution, when particulate mechanisms of transmission are extremely rare? Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson argue that the particulate nature is in the traits themselves, rather than the stuff of inheritance: [I]nferential processes often systematically transform mental representations, so that unlike genetic transmission, cultural transmission is highly biased toward particular representations. Following Sperber (1996), we call the representations favored by processes of psychological inference (including storage and retrieval) “cognitive attractors.” [C]ultural transmission does not involve the 11 Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution.

121

Why Cultural Evolution is Real

Cultural evolution, then, shares many traits with biological evolution. But, with the exception of the chain letters, what is the substance of memes? How can cultural evolution appear particulate and tree-like if there are no magical particles that code for each cultural trait? An intriguing solution is presented in that same 41-page PDF that no one is ever going to read: attractors. In this model, “it is the attractors that create quasi-discrete representations for selective forces to act on” in the absence of genuine discrete, DNAlike memestuff.

accurate replication of discrete, gene-like entities. Nonetheless, we also believe that models which assume discrete replicators that evolve under the influence of natural-selection-like forces can be useful. In fact, we think such models are useful because of the action of strong cognitive attractors during the social learning. The reason is simple: cognitive attractors will rapidly concentrate the cultural variation in a population. Instead of a continuum of cultural variants, most people will hold a representation near an attractor. If there is only one attractor, it will dominate. However, if, as seems likely in most cases, attractors are many, other selective forces will then act to increase the frequency of people holding a representation near one attractor over others. Under such conditions, even weak selective forces (“weak” relative to the strength of the attractors) can determine the final distribution of representations in the population.12 A major feature of cognitive attractors is that particulate cognitive information is less costly to hold and transmit than blended information—for example, it’s easier to model the moon as either purely a rock in space or purely a conscious entity than some combination of the two.13 Attractors are forms that frequently appear to be the targets of convergence; they are indications of strong constraints in the spaces in which they appear. 12 Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson. “Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution,” 2008. 13 Henrich & Boyd, “On modeling cultural evolution: why replicators are not necessary for cultural evolution,” 2002

It is easy to see the processes of cultural evolution in the small scale, in projectile points, language, and 14 See, e.g., Lawrence V. Mott, “The development of the rudder, A.D. 100-1600: A technological tale.”.

123

Why Cultural Evolution is Real

The Cultural Evolution of Massive Institutions

7.

Donald E. Brown’s list of human universals (from his excellent 1991 book, Human Universals) provides a list of likely “attractors” in human space—products of cognitive, physical, and social constraints. When a feature is common to all human societies ever studied, such convergence is a strong indication of the presence of constraints. The human poetic line tends to be just around three seconds long—about the length of a human breath. The pentatonic scale is found all over the world and is encoded in 40,000-year-old flutes found in European caves made from the bones of vultures. The ship’s rudder is another attractor; it has convergently evolved many times. As ships became larger and more complex, the rudder also changed; major advances in rudder technology were not able to be widely used, however, until all pieces of the puzzle were present.14 It is not difficult to see biological analogies to this process. Human universals are far from a comprehensive list of attractors. Many stable attractors exist only at a very complex level of development that not all human groups have attained, for instance. But the particulate nature of the space of possible cultural solutions can explain the particulate nature of cultural evolution even in the absence of particulate “meme DNA.”

carpets; but evolutionary processes are also visible in the macroscale. Peter Turchin has proposed that the unprecedented mega-empires beginning around 3000 B.C. were the products of cultural evolutionary constraints. “A theory for formation of large empires”15 presents a model in which large empires are constrained into existence by warfare and competition between nomadic herders and settled agrarian societies; as with agriculture crowding out hunting and gathering as a viable way of life, smaller-scale societies simply could not exist. It is not safety that created these giant engines of “cooperation,” but danger and necessity. He says: Nomads are hard to tax, because they are skilled at fighting and can move themselves and their wealth much more easily than farmers can. Moreover, their chief product—livestock—cannot be stored easily, unlike the grain produced by agrarian economies. Thus, political organizations among nomads had to draw resources from the agrarian societies, by robbing the farmers, by extorting tribute from agrarian states, or by controlling trade routes… This argument suggests a reason why the sizes of agrarian states and nomadic confederations are correlated. As agrarian states in East Asia grew, nomads needed to cooperate on an increased scale to continue successful raiding, to present a credible threat to extort the tribute, or to impose favourable terms of trade. Additionally, larger and richer sedentary states possessed greater wealth that nomads 15 Peter Turchin, Journal of Global History, 2009.

16 Ibid. 17 Abrutyn & Anderson, Comparative Sociology, 2014.

125

Why Cultural Evolution is Real

Thus, Barfield and Kradin suggest that the appearance of agrarian mega-empires explains the rise of nomadic imperial confederations. This is probably correct. However, if the presence of a large agrarian state produced larger nomadic confederations, should not the presence of a large nomadic confederation have similar effects on farmer societies? The religions of the Axial Age, on a scale much larger than the Dunbar-sized tribe, also reflect this process. Seth Abrutyn presents a cultural evolution theory of the evolution of large-scale religions, recognizing holiness and piety as a shared resource and “religious entrepreneurs” as memetic carriers, in one of my favorite papers, “Religious autonomy and religious entrepreneurship: An evolutionary-instutitionalist’s take on the Axial Age.”17 The evolution of religion is one of the most interesting and ignored areas of cultural evolution. We tend to exaggerate the degree of rationality and conscious thought in human life, ignoring the enormous and influential contribution of magical thinking. Just as there are vital amines (vitamins) that human cultures must figure out how to supply us with, there are social and cognitive equivalents; modernity may do as poor a job supplying us with social belonging and ritual as it does supplying us with proper nutrition.

7.

could extract, thus enabling larger nomadic polities. Consequently, Barfield calls the nomadic confederations the “shadow empires,” their size mirroring that of agrarian states.16

How Transmission Pathways Matter In my outline, I mentioned that the transmission pathway—vertical or horizontal—matters a great deal for the content and friendliness of transmitted cultural items. In biology, there is already support for this model. Parasitic entities like bacteria that are limited to vertical transmission—transmission from parent to child only—quickly evolve into benign symbiosis with the host, because their own fitness is dependent on the fitness of the host entity. But parasitic entities that may accomplish horizontal transmission are not so constrained, and may be much more virulent, extracting high fitness costs from the host.18 As indicated in an earlier section, ancient cultural data is very tree-like, indicating that the role of horizontal transmission has been minimal. However, the memetic technologies of modernity—from book printing to the Internet—increased the role of horizontal transmission. I have previously written that the modern limited fertility pattern was likely transmitted horizontally, through Western-style education and status competition by limiting fertility.19 The transmission of this new “memeplex” was only sustainable by horizontal transmission; while it increases the individual well-being of “infected carriers,” it certainly decreases their evolutionary fitness. 18 See, e.g., Stewart et al.,, “An empirical study of the evolution of virulence under both horizontal and vertical transmission,” Evolution 2005, for experimental evidence involving corn and a corn pathogen. 19 Perry, “The history of fertility transitions and the new memeplex,” The View From Hell Yes 2014

While unselfconscious evolution with limited foresight can no longer be relied upon to produce solutions of good fit, an understanding of evolutionary processes is essential to producing such fit. In particular, the constraints that have not changed for humans—nutritional, social, and cognitive—must be recognized, and old, hard-won solutions to these constraints must be 20 Alexander 1964.

127

Why Cultural Evolution is Real

[T]he culture that once was slow-moving, and allowed ample time for adaptation, now changes so rapidly that adaptation cannot keep up with it. No sooner is adjustment of one kind begun than the culture takes a further turn and forces the adjustment in a new direction. No adjustment is ever finished. And the essential condition on the process—that it should in fact have time to reach its equilibrium—is violated.20

7.

Parent-child transmission plays an increasingly limited role in cultural evolution. Horizontal transmission allows for the spread of cultural items that are very harmful to the fitness of host organisms, though they may (or may not) benefit the host organism in the hedonic sense. Indeed, the carefully evolved packages of culture transmitted for hundreds of thousands of years from parents to children are almost certainly too simple to solve the complex problems that moderns face. Unselfconscious evolution is no longer up to the challenges of the fast changes of culture. As my hero Christopher Alexander says in Notes on the Synthesis of Form,

seriously considered as essential building blocks of synthetic, selfconsciously designed solutions to human flourishing.

THE SACRED & MODERNITY Ribbonfarm 2014-2018

RITUAL & THE CONSCIOUSNESS MONOCULTURE A selective sweep occurs when a new, beneficial gene mutation appears and quickly sweeps across a population, erasing the genetic diversity that existed prior to the sweep. Similarly, languages have “swept” across continents as the cultures they belonged to gained unbeatable advantages (often agricultural or military), resulting in losses of language diversity from earliest human history to the present day. Today, half the population of the world speaks one of only thirteen languages. These are not controversial claims. More controversial is the idea that human prehistory (and even history) hosted a wide variety of human consciousness, not just languages, and that these disparate kinds of subjective consciousness were destroyed upon contact with new forms of consciousness. Most dramatically, Julian Jaynes famously argued (in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) that human consciousness changed drastically in the past few thousand years, from an archaic bicameral form in which one side of the brain shouted orders and the other obeyed, to a modern, introspective form. My

claim is not so extreme: I simply argue that there are and have been many forms of human consciousness, varying in particular ways, that we retain the “hardware” capability for many forms of consciousness, and that humans are constrained into particular mental states by their cultures, especially through group ritual (or lack thereof). In order to explore this claim, it is helpful to think about our own form of consciousness in detail—a form of consciousness that is novel, contagious, and perhaps detrimental to human flourishing compared with more evolutionarily tested forms of consciousness running on the same hardware.

Scholastic-Industrial Consciousness The form of consciousness that you and I share (if you are reading this) was likely not the only one to sweep across new territory, erasing previous variation. But it is the most recent such sweep, and it has been a dramatic one. It provides particular ways of subjectively experiencing time, identity, the self, other people, external reality, and the divine. (E. Richard Sorenson lists the consciousness variants as sense-ofname, sense-of-space, sense-of-number, sense-of-truth, and sense-of-emotion.) Ours is a literate kind of consciousness, gathering momentum with the advent of printing and achieving its ultimate realization (though with some subversion) in the form of the Internet. Since it appears to be transmitted by schooling and since it is the form of consciousness most conducive to industrialization, it may be thought of as scholastic-industrial consciousness.

8.

Axes of Variation of Consciousness

Time Nick Szabo writes that the time-rate wage—selling one’s time as a measure of sacrifice, as opposed to serfdom or piece work—accelerated around the fourteenth century in Europe, as “mechanical clocks, bell towers, and sandglasses provided the world’s first fair and fungible” measure of time.1 Increasingly reliable, precise, and accessible measurement of time increased productivity and material well-being in Europe even prior to the printing press. But submitting to the new form of time was itself a sacrifice. Coordinated punctuality comes at the cost of each person living most of his hours aware of the wider world’s standard time, which is a novel way of being human. In fourteenth-century France and for many centuries after, when human labor was irreplaceably valuable and there were many gains available from increased coordination, the trade-off made sense. Now that human labor is becoming less valuable and more replaceable, forcing people to live bound by world standard time 1 Nick Szabo, “A Measure of Sacrifice,” 2002.

133

Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture

Here I will explore a few of the most dramatic variations in the determinants of human experience. They are difficult to notice because they form the unquestioned background of our experience; our present senses of time, identity, and the self seem to be immutable aspects of human experience, but historical and cross-cultural study reveals that they do vary significantly.

might be becoming harder to justify.

Identity In the scholastic-industrial world, each person is assigned a legal name at birth, and carries that same name and identity until death. A modern government identity accumulates reams of information, now easily attached to it via electronic databases. From preschool to college, educational information becomes attached to one’s identity, and this process does not stop at employment; information about experience, taxes, consumption, credit, medical involvement, and more accumulates on one’s “permanent record.” Maintenance of reputation is not novel; it is a key element of human nature, common to all societies. But not all societies even have fixed names; those outside the reach of complex governments experience more flexible identities. Sorenson says: In these preconquest regions of New Guinea names were rarely binding. What one was called varied according to time, place, mood, and setting. Names were improvised, not formally bestowed, and naming (much like local language flexibility) was often a kind of humorous exploratory play. New names could be quickly coined, often whimsically from events and situations, with a new one coming up at any time… One girl was called “Aidpost” following her excitement about the first one in the region; another was called “Sleepgood” by a new friend who

8.

liked sleeping with her.2

The Self Mirrors only became common in the nineteenth century; before, they were luxury items owned only by the rich. Access to mirrors is a novelty, and likely a harmful one. In Others In Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness, Philippe Rochat describes an essential and tragic feature of our experience as humans: an irreconcilable gap between the beloved, special self as experienced in the first person, and the neutrally evaluated self as experienced in the third person, imagined through the eyes of others. One’s first-person self image tends to be inflated and idealized, whereas the third-person self image tends to be deflated; reminders of this distance are demoralizing. 2 E. Richard Sorenson, “Preconquest Consciousness,” Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology 1998. 3 Daniel Everett, Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, 2008.

135

Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture

Daniel Everett reports a similar laxity toward identity among the Pirahã (hunter-gatherers in the Amazon), and notes that the Pirahã often trade names with spirits that they meet in the jungle.3 Certainly, the volume of information attached to a modern identity is novel. The Internet at first seemed to provide escape from invasive surveillance through anonymous or at least pseudonymic identities; unfortunately, privacy is inimical to the interests of government and consumer product distributors, and is rapidly being eroded.

When people without access to mirrors (or clear water in which to view their reflections) are first exposed to them, their reaction tends to be very negative. Rochat quotes the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter’s description of showing mirrors to the Biamis of Papua New Guinea for the first time, a phenomenon Carpenter calls “the tribal terror of self-recognition”: After a first frightening reaction, they became paralyzed, covering their mouths and hiding their heads—they stood transfixed looking at their own images, only their stomach muscles betraying great tension. Why is their reaction negative, and not positive? It is that the first-person perspective of the self tends to be idealized compared to accurate, objective information; the more of this kind of information that becomes available (or unavoidable), the more each person will feel the shame and embarrassment from awareness of the irreconcilable gap between his first-person specialness and his third-person averageness. There are many “mirrors”—novel sources of accurate information about the self—in our twenty-first century world. School is one such mirror; grades and test scores measure one’s intelligence and capacity for self-inhibition, but just as importantly, peers determine one’s “erotic ranking” in the social hierarchy, as the sociologist Randall Collins terms it. Of the school sexual scene “mirror,” he says: [A]lthough the proportion of the population whose sex lives are highly active is small, this

4 Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, 2004. Emphasis Perry’s.

137

Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture

There are many more “mirrors” available to us today; photography in all its forms is a mirror, and Internet social networks are mirrors. Our modern selves are very exposed to third-person, deflating information about the idealized self. At the same time, says Rochat, “Rich contemporary cultures promote individual development, the individual expression and management of self-presentation. They foster self-idealization.” Roy Baumeister (Meanings of Life, chapters five and six) traces the modern obsession with self to the erosion of other sources of value and meaning in life, such as religion, shared morality, and tradition:

8.

prestige hierarchy nevertheless has an effect on persons ranked throughout. Particularly among young persons living in public sexual negotiation scenes, there is a high level of attention paid to erotic stratification criteria, and acute awareness of who occupies what rank in the community’s ratings… The popular crowd is the sexual elite. Being in the center of attention gives greater solidarity, closer identification with the symbols of the group, and greater self-confidence. Conversely, those on the outskirts of the group, or who are excluded from it, manifest just the opposite qualities. Being part of the sociable/erotic elite produces an attitude of arrogance; the elite know who they are, and the enclosed, high-information structure of the scene makes visible the ranking of those lower down as well.4

When people say they need to find themselves, often what they really mean is that they want a meaningful life… People have always had selves, but selves have not always had to carry the burden of supplying meaning to life in such a far-reaching fashion. The reason for the modern fascination with the self, then, is that the self has been made into a fundamental and powerful source of value in modern life. Since sources of meaning and value are now so rare, the self has had to take on the novel burden of providing value and fulfillment (an idealized future state that justifies unpleasantness in the present), as in the novel modern idea of the “career.” The assumption is that your work will elevate you to a position of eminence that will elicit respect, admiration, and acclaim from others, as well as allowing you to feel self-respect and self-esteem. Many people hold some mythical view of career success that promises personal fulfillment. They imagine that reaching certain goals will be automatically accompanied by living happily ever after.5 The novel function of the self as the primary locus of meaning, especially in an environment offering increasing amounts of accurate (which is to say painful) information about the self, is hard on modern humans. One popular option is self-deception; normal, healthy people tend to have an unrealistically positive 5 Baumeister, Meanings of Life, 1992.

Human consciousness is not one singular experience shared by all; there are varieties of human consciousness. Entering altered states of consciousness demonstrates that there are many possible states, and the ordinary, everyday consciousness of different people also varies. Many animals experience consciousness in the form of awareness of the outside world and of self. The form of consciousness unique to and universal among humans, as explained in Philippe Rochat’s Others In Mind (mentioned above), is the awareness of 6 Ibid, Escaping The Self: Alcoholism, Spirituality, Masochism, Other Flights From Burden Of Selfhood, 1991.

139

Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture

Constrained Toward Consciousness

8.

self image, to exaggerate or overestimate the control they have over their lives, and to be unreasonably optimistic. “Illusions, distortions, and self-deception appear to be integral to the way normal, well-adjusted people perceive the world,” says Baumeister. “Seeing things as they really are is associated with depression and low self-esteem.” Where self-deception fails, there are other routes to escape the painful self. Elsewhere, Baumeister argues6 that behaviors such as alcoholism, binge eating, sexual masochism, charismatic religion, spirituality, and even suicide function as escapes from the overburdened, embarrassed, shameful modern self. In the rest of this essay I will propose a rudimentary sketch of a more salubrious escape plan from the novel modern self and the hardships that scholastic-industrial consciousness imposes upon us.

oneself from the imagined perspective of other minds. During development, we are constrained toward this form of consciousness by the words and behavior of others: we are forced, by others, to be aware of ourselves from their perspective—to have others in mind. Others influence our mental states down to the existence of human consciousness itself. We may expect that groups have great power to affect our mental states. Indeed, group presence, group awareness, and group expectations are necessary ingredients for the induction of certain ritual mental states. As scholastic-industrial consciousness has made our selves more weighty and painful, increasing the need for the loss of self through ritual, the opportunity for such rituals has decreased. As we have become more literate and rational, a process begun during the Enlightenment and accelerating throughout the twentieth century, group rituals and the mental states that they induce have been lost. Those rituals that are left tend to be of the spectacle variety rather than participatory—listening to music rather than making it, watching rather than dancing. It is a great loss. Rituals function, on the one hand, as “social vitamins”— necessary ingredients for human flourishing that are provided by ancestral social “diets” but frequently left out of modern lives. On the other hand, rituals are necessary social glue, connecting small communities and helping their members to cooperate and feel a sense of social belonging.

Hiving and Rhythmic Entrainment One proponent of the theory that group ritual is a

141

Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture

7 Haidt, Seder, & Kesebir, “Hive Psychology, Happiness, and Public Policy,” Journal of Legal Studies 2008. 8 “Religion, Politics, and Self-Suppression,” Melting Asphalt. 9 W. Tecumseh Fitch, “Rhythmic cognition in humans and animals: distinguishing meter and pulse perception,” Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 2013. 10 See the Grand Mass Gymnastics and Artistic Performance Airang, a.k.a. Airang Festival. 11 Cohen, et al., “Rowers’ high: behavioural synchrony is correlated with elevated pain thresholds,” Biology Letters 2010.

8.

necessary ingredient for achieving desirable states of consciousness is the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt refers to this as “the hive hypothesis,” explored in his essential book The Righteous Mind as well as a recent paper.7 (Also see the excellent exploration of hiving through the loss of self in religion and politics by fellow Ribbonfarm guest blogger Kevin Simler.8) The hive hypothesis states that “people need to lose themselves occasionally by becoming part of an emergent social organism in order to reach the highest levels of human flourishing.” The joy of synchronized motion, and the loss of self in something greater, he argues, lead to stronger social cohesion and greater personal well-being for participants. Humans are some of the only animals capable of rhythmic entrainment, synchronized motion to a musical beat.9 It has a special place in human culture, from dancing to military drilling, from children’s rhythm games to North Korea’s Mass Games.10 Synchronized, rhythmic motion eases the pain of strenuous effort,11 facilitates cooperation, makes people braver in the face of formidable opposition, and (on a darker note) makes them more willing to engage in aggression

against a perceived out-group.12 Rhythmic entrainment is a powerful hack that allows the painful self (and self-interest) to be put aside in favor of the joy of solidarity. And, to our detriment, we have ever fewer opportunities to engage in rhythmic rituals today. Donald Brown’s celebrated list of human universals, a list of characteristics proposed to be common to all human groups ever studied, includes many entries on music, including “music related in part to dance” and “music related in part to religion.” The Pirahã use several kinds of language, including regular speech, a whistling language, and a musical, sung language. The musical language, importantly, is used for dancing and contacting spirits. The Pirahã, Everett says, often dance for three days at a time without stopping. They achieve a different consciousness by performing rituals calibrated to evoke mental states that must remain opaque to those not affected. There is something important in rhythmic rituals that cannot be fully captured in scholastic-industrial rational thought; it must be experienced to be understood. Nonetheless, it is not magical in the sense of being supernatural or outside the bounds of scholastic-industrial-style inquiry.

Authenticity, Sincerity, and the Suspicion of Ritual When we identify something as a ritual, it is often to say that it is just a ritual, an empty behavior with no meaning. The performance of a ritual tells us nothing about the sincere feelings of the person 12 Scott S. Wiltermuth, “Synchronous activity boosts compliance with requests to aggress” and “Synchrony and destructive obedience,” 2012.

Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture

143

8.

performing it; rituals strike us as inauthentic. Shaking hands or saying “bless you” when someone sneezes are performed automatically, and in that way inauthentically. Randall Collins, cited above (in Interaction Ritual Chains), notes that hugging as a greeting did not emerge in the United States until the 1970s; this “more sincere” ritual has started edging out handshakes as the demonstrative greeting of choice. I have noticed the emergence of a new and even more conspicuously sincere ritual, the 20-second hug—which can be a very pleasant ritual, but imposes a great deal of intimacy (sincerity) within the space of a greeting. Adam Seligman and Robert Weller, in their books Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008) and Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity (2012), propose that the elevation of the sincere and authentic, and the distrust of ritual, is an important feature of modern consciousness. They trace the focus on personal intent (as opposed to ritual performance) to Immanuel Kant, for example. To be an atomized individual self, whose actions are under one’s rational control, and express one’s sincere, authentic intent at all times is a peculiar, modern way to be human. Ritual is the normal way to be human. Our disdain for “empty rituals” is our loss: rituals are what help us navigate the necessary ambiguities of social life, into which rational codification can never fully penetrate. So imagine “ritual,” but with a positive connotation. Rather than dismissing these behaviors as meaningless, look instead at how they elaborate meaning. And, perhaps more importantly, enjoy them without the sneaking suspicion that you’re not being

authentic enough when you perform them.

Distracting the Watcher at the Gates of the Mind Keith Johnstone describes a process of mental censorship that arises from an excessive cultural focus on the individual self as the locus of meaning. I apologize for the length of the quotation, but I promise it is necessary: Suppose an eight-year-old writes a story about being chased down a mouse-hole by a monstrous spider. It’ll be perceived as “childish” and no one will worry. If he writes the same story when he’s fourteen it may be taken as a sign of mental abnormality. Creating a story, or painting a picture, or making up a poem lay an adolescent wide open to criticism. He therefore has to fake everything so that he appears “sensitive” or “witty” or “tough” or “intelligent” according to the image he’s trying to establish in the eyes of other people. If he believed he was a transmitter, rather than a creator, then we’d be able to see what his talents really were. We have an idea that art is self-expression— which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God. Maybe a mask-maker would have fasted and prayed for a week before he had a vision of the Mask he was to carve, because no one wanted to see his Mask, they wanted to see the God’s. When Eskimos believed that each piece of bone only

Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture

145

8.

had one shape inside it, then the artist didn’t have to “think up” an idea. He had to wait until he knew what was in there—and this is crucial. When he’d finished carving his friends couldn’t say “I’m a bit worried about that Nanook at the third igloo,” but only, “He made a mess getting that out!” or “There are some very odd bits of bone about these days.” These days of course the Eskimos get booklets giving illustrations of what will sell, but before we infected them, they were in contact with a source of inspiration that we are not. It’s no wonder that our artists are aberrant characters. It’s not surprising that great African sculptors end up carving coffee tables, or that the talent of our children dies the moment we expect them to become adults. Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is. Schiller wrote of a “watcher at the gates of the mind,” who examines ideas too closely. He said that in the case of the creative mind “the intellect has withdrawn its watcher from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.” He said that uncreative people “are ashamed of the momentary passing madness which is found in all real creators… regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, and venturesome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance from an idea that follows it; perhaps in collation with other ideas which seem equally absurd, it may be

capable of furnishing a very serviceable link.”13 What is this “watcher at the gates of the mind” that crushes spontaneity, originality, and fun? A small study recently concluded that an explanation will be perceived as more satisfying if it has a neuroscience angle, even if the neuroscience angle is completely non-probative of its claims.14 So I am happy to say that I have a neuroscience explanation to offer: the censorious “watcher” likely lives in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. An even smaller study, for example, studied the brains of rappers, both reciting memorized verses and “freestyling”—inventing new lyrics on the fly. Under fMRI, subjects freestyling showed decreased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).15 Another study, measuring jazz musicians either playing previously memorized music and improvising new music, demonstrated the same pattern of activation: decreased DLPFC activity in improvising musicians.16 So we have a candidate for the watcher at the gates of the mind. Arne Dietrich named this the “transient hypofrontality hypothesis,” proposing that what altered states such as “dreaming, endurance running, meditation, daydreaming, hypnosis, and various drug-induced states” have in common is a pattern of 13 Johnstone, Impro, 1979. 14 Weisberg et al., “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2008. 15 Liu, Chow, Xu, et al., “Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap,” Scientific Reports 2012. 16 Limb and Braun, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation,” PLoS ONE 2008.

8. 17 “Functional neuroanatomy of altered states of consciousness: the transient hypofrontality hypothesis,” Consciousness and Cognition 2003. 18 Fenn, Newman, et al., “The effect of nonprobative photographs on truthiness persists over time,” Acta psychologica 2013.

147

Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture

inhibition in the prefrontal cortex.17 Group rituals, especially rhythmic rituals (like endurance running), have the power to inhibit ordinary self-conscious social rumination and provide pleasurable ego-loss as well as social connection and bonding. Finally, if that is not convincing enough, another line of research has suggested that any picture whatsoever—even one that is not probative of any fact—increases people’s confidence in facts when they are presented alongside them.18 I therefore present the most convincing argument in the world (pictured).

The Institutional Power of Rhythmic Ritual: Evidence from Self-Flagellation In sixteenth century France, a new form of Catholic worship was rising in popularity. Penitential confraternities, brotherhoods of Catholic laymen, began to spread throughout France; by the end of the seventeenth century, every tiny village had its own chapter. But by the mid-eighteenth century, the penitential societies were beginning to lose social cohesion and break down. What made these societies so popular, and why did they decay after 1750? At first, the penitential societies were based around a very strong and powerful ritual: that of self-flagellation. In the early days, members performed the rite of self-flagellation every week, and three times per week during Lent. By the early eighteenth century, however, the focus of the confraternities had shifted to emphasize meditation and community service; they dropped the rite of self-flagellation in favor of contemplation and charitable acts. Andrew Barnes explains: Research on altered states of consciousness suggests that the performance of rituals generates a different psychological experience from that of practice of meditation. Ritual performance generates experiences of communitas. It rewards corporate religious activity in ways that meditation does not. It can be argued that the rituals performed by confraternities early in their existence were crucial for the maintenance of group

8.

and organizational cohesion.19

Some Words of Caution I have analogized ritual to vitamins: we have need of them, our ancestral cultures provided them for us, and we suffer a kind of malnutrition without them. But even vitamins are dangerous in the wrong doses and under the wrong conditions. Ritual is very powerful, and should be regarded with the same respect as powerful psychoactive drugs. In our hypermobile age, in which few people live 19 Andrew Barnes, “From Ritual to Meditative Piety: Devotional Change in French Penitential Confraternities from the 16th to the 18th Century.” Journal of Ritual Studies 1:2:1-26, Summer 1987.

149

Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture

Toward the end, around 1731, the brothers perceived their problem as being one of internal discord and strife; their solutions were more regulation and more intricate statutes, rather than a return to rhythmic ritual. “The one trend in confraternal statutes more eye-catching than the decrease in ritual devotions is the increase in procedures to regulate and reduce internal discord,” says Barnes. “Internal discord was not a main concern in the statutes of earlier confraternities.” Self-flagellation, in our scholastic-industrial society, is mostly mentioned as a punch line, if at all. That, I think, is scholastic-industrial consciousness undermining the power of other modes of consciousness that it can’t readily explain or understand. It is the kind of group rhythmic ritual that has the power to help us lose ourselves in something greater, and to bind us to each other more deeply—if that is what we want.

among committed, long-term community members, we experience a chicken-egg problem: ritual is required to support community, but a community is required to support ritual (see diagram, elaborated from an analogy suggested by my husband). The subjective experience of ritual, divorced from a real community, may be pleasurable but ultimately unfulfilling. Another danger is that the old rituals may not survive contact with us hungry ritual zombies. The Oaxacan shamaness María Sabina shared her hallucinogenic mushroom ritual with the ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, and shortly after (during the 1960s and 70s) her village was overrun with tripping hippies running through the village naked with live turkeys dangling from their mouths. In María Sabina’s words, the mushrooms began to lose their power after the coming of the foreigners. Rituals are complex things, and their efficacy depends not only on chemical disinhibition, but on the beliefs and practices of the community within which they are performed. Finally, ritual mental states sneak up on you; mere

151

Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture

Not even the ethnographer is immune. In one of my first conversations with the minister in Utzpak, he said that of course he would like me to receive the blessing and the promise of the Holy Spirit while I was in Utzpak; he would pray for me when I was ready. “However,” he continued, “the Spirit may come to you without either one of us actually asking for it.” And he was right. …The last conscious memory I have of the episode to follow is that of thinking, “At home when I was a child, we were taught a little prayer to say before we sat down in church.” Then someplace in the church, I do not remember where, I leaned against something, I do not know what. I saw light, but then I was surrounded by light, or perhaps not, because the light was in me, and I was the light. In this light I saw words in black outline—or were they just letters?—descending upside down as if on a waterfall of light… Never before had I felt this kind of luminous, ethereal, delightful happiness. …I think I was obeying a cultural expectation: I had seen demonstrated many times how people went into dissociation. I was in the proper place at the proper time, thinking of prayer, and then it happened to me quite spontaneously and

8.

demonstration is often enough to transmit them. The anthropologist Felicitas Goodman, in her book Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia, describes being overtaken by an intense ritual mental state herself:

without any conscious effort on my part. It did not happen again because I intentionally blocked subsequent occurrences. I needed at all times to be in complete control of my faculties. Most of the time, in most cultures, not just our own, we do need to be in complete control of our faculties. But we also need, sometimes, to dissolve into our groups, which presupposes the existence of such a group. While I think we are socially and emotionally starving without participatory group rituals, especially rhythmic rituals, I also think we must be very cautious in adding new or old rituals to our diet. The rebirth of ritual is the most deadly serious play.

WHAT IS RITUAL? If we should inquire for the essence of “government,” for example, one man might tell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a conception equally complex? William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience What is ritual? The religious studies scholar Ronald R. Grimes presents six pages of short definitions of ritual as an appendix to his The Craft of Ritual Studies; they make for fun reading, but also suggest a hopeless confusion surrounding a tempting and fascinating topic. William James, in his 500-page Varieties of Religious

Experience, provides for us, instead of a single essence of religion, what he calls an “apperceiving mass”— plentiful examples through which the nuances of the matter will gradually reveal themselves. Since a blog post is hardly the place for such an “apperceiving mass,” I will attempt instead to define ritual within a tidy framework, keeping in mind that any such reduction will necessarily miss some of the important aspects of a major human domain. Nonetheless, I do think my simple model provides insight into the nature of ritual, and helps us to make sense of the seemingly irrational behaviors of other cultures, as well as the ways in which modern Western culture is itself a strange, ritual order.

Costly Signaling and the Ritual Mental State: Oxygen and Fuel The first essence of my model of ritual is sacrifice: a costly signal made by participants to the group or to some sacred object of the group. As my colleague Will Newsome put it, All rituals have a sacrifice. The default one is time.1 That a behavior is “ritual” is a hypothesis presented when the behavior appears irrational—for example, when resources are sacrificed or behaviors are performed for no visible gain. This may range from the sacrifice of animals or even people, to the potlatch ceremony of giving away (or destroying) gifts on a grand scale, to sacrificing time in prayer or even athletic practice. And with this in mind, a great deal of human behavior comes to look like ritual; it is far 1 @willnewsome, Twitter, Aug 28 2012.

2 Sosis & Bressler, “Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion,” Cross-Cultural Research: The Journal of Comparative Social Science 2003.

155

What Is Ritual?

What is important for the argument presented

9.

from the exceptional case. Indeed, the human order is a ritual order, not a rational one. Language is not our only mode of signaling; much of human behavior, and especially that which is called ritual, is signaling. Costly signaling is a framework within which the “irrational” sacrifices and acts of ritual can be made sense of. Costly signaling comes from evolutionary biology, and posits that a signal that is very costly to produce is especially likely to be honest. A peacock’s tail is the classic example: only a very healthy and fit bird could get away with growing such a ridiculously impractical tail. Similarly, sacrificing a great deal for one’s group is a costly signal of loyalty, and therefore more likely honest than mere “lip service.” In my view, this “costly signaling” theory takes us only halfway to understanding ritual effectiveness. Richard Sosis and Eric Bressler’s study of the longevity of communes2 found that costly signals in the form of behavioral sacrifice (for example, food prohibitions and sexual restrictions) were correlated with the longevity of religious communes—but not secular communes. More demanding religious communes lasted much longer than less demanding communes. And, importantly, non-religious communes had poor survival no matter how much they demanded from their members. The other half of the secret to ritual is the mental states evoked by ritual. A ritual that does not produce the proper mental states will not be effective at facilitating cooperation:

here is that those who experience this numinous sensation perceive the incident to be undeniably true. Because secular rituals do not generate this feeling of numinosity, and the ideology that provides meaning to secular rituals can be evaluated through experience, the ability of these rituals to promote trust and cooperation is ephemeral.3 To someone who has experienced ritual possession by his god, the question of whether his god “exists” is a silly one, not even worth contemplating. And so, the second essence of my model of ritual is the evocation of specific mental states. If cooperation and the solution of coordination problems is the “fire” of ritual, then costly signaling is its fuel, and the ritual mental state is its oxygen. Here is my model of ritual: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Traditional behaviors are performed, often including speech acts; Time and other things are sacrificed; Mental states are evoked and emotional display is constrained; Certain aspects (purpose, mechanism, history) are opaque or concealed; and A sacred or otherwise “higher” purpose is understood;

With the function of: 1. 2. 3. 3 Ibid.

Changing the social status of some member or members; Strengthening the group; and Solving coordination problems.

1.

3.

Ritual is fundamentally social; Roy Rappaport describes ritual as “the basic social act.”4 The pair bond is a microcosm of the ritual community, a locus of costly signaling and the evocation of mental states to promote the most fundamental human cooperation. Consider Seligman and Weller’s description of the pragmatic effectiveness of ritual, compared to mere speech, within pair bonds: Anti-ritualist attitudes deny the value to this subjunctive of play, convention, and illusion. They seek to root interaction in some attestation to the sincerity or truth-value of all categories or interlocuters. Yet… “the map is not the territory.” If, for example, our love for each other registers only through our words (“I love you”), then we are caught in the perennial chasm between the words (of love) and the love itself. Words are only signifiers, arbitrary and by necessity at one remove from the event they signify. Hence the attempt to express love (or any other truth-value) 4 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, 1999.

157

What Is Ritual?

2.

“ends in themselves” (sacred or “higher” objects generally representing the group or some aspect of it necessary for smooth social functioning) are affirmed in value by conspicuous sacrifice and evoked mental states, and the social status of members is affirmed or changed in a way that is expected to have effects beyond the context of the ritual.

9.

To put it another way, ritual is the process by which:

in words is endless, as it can never finally prove its own sincerity or truth—its “unalloyed” nature. Ritual, by contrast, is repeated and unchanging. It avoids the problems of notation and sincerity because its visible performance itself constitutes an acceptance of its conventions. Unobservable inner states are irrelevant.5 Performance, beyond personal attestation or “lip service,” is what evidences and even creates belief. Sex (the original rhythmic ritual), food preparation and sharing, kind behavior, and gazing into each other’s eyes are the behaviors that power pair-bond coordination, with its peculiar mental state of love. Different, but analogous, ritual acts and mental states underwrite cooperation at larger scales.

Ritual Sacrifice of Time and Other Valuable Things Time is the default sacrifice. It is the measure of sacrifice that underlies our complex economic order, so it is no surprise that it also underlies our ritual order. In religions that have a Sabbath, an entire day of productivity is sacrificed to God every week. Every ceremony involves the sacrifice of the time of participants; often, ceremonies involve the sacrifice of time by high-status persons. An arraignment is a ceremony in which the legitimacy of a person’s incarceration is established; not much information is exchanged, but the ceremony requires sacrifice in the form of a grand courtroom built for the purpose, as well as the time of grand personages such as the judge and two attorneys. 5 Seligman & Weller, Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity, 2012.

159

What Is Ritual?

6 Nick Szabo, “Shelling Out: The Origins of Money,” 2002. 7 Espay et al., “Placebo effect of medication cost in Parkinson disease,” Neurology 2015.

9.

Ritual attendants such as court reporters and bailiffs are required as well. The sacred value of “justice” is understood to be the target of these sacrifices. Money is a phenomenon with roots deep in human prehistory,6 allowing for coordination on an international scale. Modern wonders such as vaccines, hot running water, and iPads are possible only because of the organization made possible by money. However, money is, at root, a ritual order. It is only rational to sacrifice valuable goods and services in exchange for pieces of paper, numbers in a bank ledger, or bits on the blockchain because of the group hallucination that such things are, and will continue to be, valuable. The ritual power of money as a sacrifice is seen in a recent study on treatment for Parkinson’s disease, which found that a placebo that participants were told cost $1500 was more effective at reducing symptoms than a placebo that participants were told cost only $100.7 When effectiveness is difficult to evaluate, money as a measure of sacrifice (whether by the individual or his collective) has real-world effects. Expensive placebos are perceived as more effective than cheap placebos in the magical domain as well as the medical (and of course the two are inseparable); penis enlargement pills and anti-aging serum are often very expensive despite a lack of proven efficacy precisely because the measure of sacrifice in money terms is the only measure of their value available to the consumer. Note, however, how often ritual sacrifices “for

charity” come in forms other than money. Charity runs, walks, and bike rides allow participants to do “useless” activity—to sacrifice time and comfort— directed toward the sacred object of the charity. This sacrifice allows them to feel less shame at collecting money for the charity, and gives those who would donate, and themselves, a visceral sense of their commitment. Consider the recent popularity of the “ice bucket challenge.” People desire to prove their bravery and sacrifice their comfort for higher purposes, and this viral ritual gave people the opportunity to do that. The opportunity to simply donate money to a charity is not nearly as motivating. The signaling theory of education posits that education has little effect on intelligence or aptitude, but functions almost entirely as a costly signal (of diligence, intelligence, low time preference, and perhaps faith in the ritual order of our society). In a similar manner to expensive placebos, the high cost of education may act as a signal to participants of its own value. People are willing to pay enormous amounts of money just for the opportunity to invest years of their lives in attempting to become more valuable to their groups. That others are also willing to do so, and that the opportunity is so very expensive, support the belief that education is very valuable. Another kind of sacrifice is food restriction; many religions enforce dietary restrictions, with taboo foods and prescribed (and proscribed) methods of food preparation. While ritual dietary laws often have health benefits (see the food examples in “Why Cultural Evolution Is Real”8), it seems that people 8 page 109.

161

What Is Ritual?

9 “Art and Sacredness,” The Sublemon 2015.

9.

have a desire to engage with food in a ritual way that has nothing to do with measurable health. Vegans are often highly empathetic people who desire to sacrifice their own pleasure and health for the sake of the “higher purpose” of reducing animal suffering. Others take a different route, excluding highly processed foods and eating a “primal” diet in order to connect ritually with the humans of the past. The popularity of fasting and “cleanses” (e.g. drinking nothing but lemon juice mixed with chili powder) suggests that people have a desire to engage with food in a religious way, and that food restrictions as costly sacrifices are desirable for their own sake. I mentioned in my definition of ritual that some aspects of ritual, such as purpose, mechanism, or history, are concealed or otherwise opaque. Not taking a skeptical view of sacred stories and sacred objects may be seen as a form of sacrifice. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, famously says of the sacred, “The fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of motivated ignorance.” Haidt notices that politics is a domain of the sacred, and that the way sacredness functions is to “bind us” (to each other) and “blind us” (to information threatening the sacred value). My co-guest-blogger The Sublemon defines sacredness in terms of this opaque, concealed quality: “a thing you think is so important that in order to preserve it, you’re willing, consciously or unconsciously, to not examine it.”9 Maintaining the sanctity of sacred stories and objects is a kind of sacrifice—often taking the form of “mental

gymnastics”—symbolically protecting sacred things from profanation, if only by the mind. Sacred, protected things also invoke a special mental state when brought to mind. The next section considers the special varieties of consciousness—mental states—that are the second chief ingredient of ritual.

Ritual Mental States and Group Proprioception Ritual mental states are not all pleasant. In many rituals, what Harvey Whitehouse calls “dysphoric rituals,”10 what is sacrificed is comfort: extreme fear, pain, and even humiliation are inflicted on participants. Dysphoric rituals have a particular feature: they help small groups become tightly knit in what Whitehouse calls “identity fusion.” (It is difficult to separate the costly signaling aspect of ritual from the mental states thereby evoked.) Tribal initiation rituals and modern boot camps are examples of this type of ritual. Whitehouse says: [W]e think dysphoric rituals are a bit like coming under fire in a warzone, except that they are more powerfully bonding, partly because they cannot be explained in any simple causal way. The range of interpretations that one can place on a painful or unpleasant ritual is inexhaustible: it sucks you into an interpretive vortex. In fact, our lab experiments suggest that one’s sense of a ritual’s significance actually increases over time, rather than decaying. In communal ceremonies it is usual to witness others undergoing the 10 Whitehouse, “Human rites,” Aeon 2012.

One day, deep within the forest, Agaso, then about 13 years of age, found himself with a rare good shot at a cuscus in a nearby tree. But he only had inferior arrows. Without the slightest comment or solicitation, the straightest, sharpest arrow of the group moved so swiftly and so stealthily straight into his hand, I could not see from whence it came. 11 Ibid. 12 Lipset & Silverman. “Dialogics of the Body: The Moral and the Grotesque in Two Sepik River Societies,” Journal of Ritual Studies, 2005.

163

What Is Ritual?

Ritual is play, but it is not all fun; it is frequently painful or humiliating. For examples of dysphoric rituals other than initiation rites, see the rituals of naven and noganoga’sarii in Papua New Guinea.12 (I have been advised by a reliable source that the fun-sounding Hindu ritual of Holi is actually a pretty unpleasant ritual. This also makes sense of giant stadium concerts.) The unpleasantness is not a side effect to be eliminated, but precisely the source of the rituals’ power. One way of thinking about this “identity fusion” is as group proprioception: the perception of one’s small group as an extension of one’s own body. Consider this description of a hunting party in New Guinea by E. Richard Sorenson, recording group proprioception from the outside:

9.

same experience, and to imagine them sharing the same rich interpretive process. The forces shaping one’s own sense of self are recognised in a special cohort of others, causing members to “fuse.”11

At that same moment, Karako, seeing that the shot would be improved by pulling on a twig to gently move an obstructing branch, was without a word already doing so, in perfect synchrony with Agaso’s drawing of the bow, i.e., just fast enough to fully clear Agaso’s aim by millimeters at the moment his bow was fully drawn, just slow enough not to spook the cuscus. Agaso, knowing this would be the case made no effort to lean to side for an unobstructed shot, or to even slightly shift his stance. Usumu similarly synchronized into the action stream, without even watching Agaso draw his bow, began moving up the tree a fraction of a second before the bowstring twanged.13 This sense often extends to the sacred objects of a group. A trick of drill instructors in Marine Corps boot camp, in the middle of screaming at a worthless group of recruits in their first few weeks, is to casually allow the flag representing the unit to fall; in almost all cases, one of the recruits will dive to save the flag from touching the ground, even though the recruits have not been told that this is expected of them. Rituals such as drilling together and suffering together make the recruits perceive the sacred objects of their group as in need of protection, almost like a precious body part. Here is how the Benedictine monk Aidan Kavanagh speaks of group proprioception, in the Catholic tradition: 13 E. Richard Sorenson, “Preconquest Consciousness,” Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology 1998.

14 Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 1981. 15 Emma Brandt, “Cameras and Incense: Negotiating Religious Dance on Tourist Bali,” ISP Collection 2013.

165

What Is Ritual?

Some ritual mental states, of course, are extremely pleasant, activating subjective experiences not obtainable in mundane life. A Balinese dancer describes the trance state: “the feeling of a flow, no mind, everything is under control by the other realm.”15

9.

Neurologists point out that a human being, so far from being born with innate coordination of its senses, must grow itself into a sort of envelope of sensation which then forms for the individual his or her own peculiar physical and emotional self-image… Analogously, a corporate entity such as a church might perhaps be said to grow itself into a sort of envelope of sensation which then forms its own peculiar self-image, its own real awareness of corporate identity which is its own fundamental principle of operation. The stimulation process which is most responsible for a church’s growth into its own identity-envelope, and which is therefore responsible as well for how that church functions in the real order, is its life of constant and increasingly complex worship. For in worship alone is the church gathered in the closest obvious proximity to its fundamental values, values which are always assuming stimulative form in time, space, image, word, and repeated act. The richer this stimulation is, under the criteria of the Gospel, it follows that the more conscious, aware, self-possessed, and vigorously operational the given church will be.14

The altered mental states achieved in such rituals as Balinese dance, glossolalia, ritual possession, and less exotic forms of worship are crucial to the efficacy of the rituals, in terms of facilitating group harmony and cooperation. As I noted in the previous essay in this series, “Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture,”16 cues such as synchronized motion and rhythmic entrainment can produce mental states that facilitate cooperation and bonding, even allowing groups to be braver (and perhaps violent) toward other, threatening groups. How can groups cooperate and trade despite humans’ violent tendencies? The next section explores a major class of rituals that channels violence into harmless ritual: ritual combat.

Ritual Combat Ritual combat includes athletics, games, and even some actual combat; we might even view combat occurring within the rules of the Geneva Convention, for example, as a form of semi-ritualized combat. My sport, fencing, is a highly ritualized form of athletic competition that descends directly from lethal forms of combat. Many hours of practice are sacrificed before presenting oneself to compete in a collegiate bout. A very particular uniform is worn, and as with group sports, cheers may be performed prior to a match between teams. Combat is limited to the “piste,” a precisely measured strip of ground, often covered in metal to facilitate electronic score keeping. Before combat, each participant’s weapon is examined and measured; participants salute each 16 page 131.

167

What Is Ritual?

17 See “The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth,” Appendix page 606.

9.

other, the scorekeeper, and the officiant in a ritualized manner practiced thousands of times in practice bouts. The signal to be ready and to begin is given, and when a point has been scored, the action is halted. In my essay on children’s ritual culture,17 I noted that children often have a “respite word” to call a “time out” when play gets too dangerous; the only analogy in adult culture exists in games, and in fencing, this is accomplished by stamping one’s back foot repeatedly on the piste while raising the non-weapon hand (such as when you discover your shoe is untied). Strong emotion is evoked in athletic ritual, but the range of emotions that may be expressed is also constrained, in different ways depending on the sport and the era. In fencing as in many sports, it is poor sportsmanship to celebrate a victory too raucously, or to fall on the piste in sorrow when one loses. (I have seen it happen, but it is rare and considered shameful.) Participants must solemnly shake (non-weapon) hands at the beginning and end of bouts. This ritual control of emotional display—in the service of “sportsmanship”—is one of the most important features of athletic ritual. I have also had the good fortune to experience an altered mental state during a fencing tournament, what is often described as “flow”—a narrowing of vision and perception, combined with what seemed to be the ability to slow down time, to reach in and touch my opponent with the point of my weapon wherever I wanted, and protect my own target effortlessly. Perhaps those who have experience with team sports can advise me as to whether “group

proprioception” or other altered states occur in that form of ritualized combat. Restricting emotional display is a sacrifice, both in the aforementioned courtroom, in ritual combat, and in other ceremonies—it is difficult to rein in one’s emotions! But restricting the display of emotion (as well as engaging in ritual display of emotion, such as weeping, tearing clothes, or cutting hair in mourning) can also help evoke the proper ritual mental states. Again, the sacrifice is often inseparable from the evocation of mental states. Clifford Geertz’s excellent Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight provides a model of ritual combat in which “irrational” amounts of money are bet in proportion to the status and reputation of the owners of the roosters, which in turn is proportional to the quality of the roosters themselves. This ritual violence, while perhaps shocking to Western sensibilities, provides a satisfying and effective substitute for human-on-human violence: Fighting cocks, almost every Balinese I have ever discussed the subject with has said, is like playing with fire only not getting burned. You activate village and kingroup rivalries and hostilities, but in “play” form, coming dangerously and entrancingly close to the expression of open and direct interpersonal and intergroup aggression (something which, again, almost never happens in the normal course of ordinary life), but not quite, because, after all, it is “only a cockfight.” Ingroup formation and conflict with the outgroup

Our species’ nearest relatives solidify social bonds mostly through one-on-one fur grooming. Grooming takes time—it is a costly sacrifice—and also, presumably, creates a mental state in the participants that helps the sacrifice achieve its cooperative ends (think about how pleasant it is to be cuddled or massaged). Robin Dunbar’s theory of grooming and gossip posits that for groups too large and complex for one-on-one grooming to organize, language, especially social gossip, takes over the role of grooming.18 Having explored the nature and power of ritual, it seems likely to me that ritual—including music, rhythmic entrainment, dance, singing, and the like—form a more general candidate for “what replaced grooming” in our own complex social species. Human-specific behaviors include not only language, but also tears and laughter. Kevin Simler has argued that the human-specific phenomenon of tears acts as a costly signal to conspecifics, sacrificing status and evoking a mental state of pity, offering “friendship at a discount.”19 Laughter is a social phenomenon, occurring much more often when people are together than when they are alone, and often in response to 18 Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, 1998. 19 Simler, “Tears,” Melting Asphalt.

169

What Is Ritual?

From Grooming to Ritual

9.

are human universals; channeling this tendency into cooperation is a major challenge (see, e.g., Muzafer Sharif ’s Robbers Cave Experiment). The play of ritual, including ritual combat, allows our dangerous “murder ape” tendencies to be subverted.

social cues rather than a genuinely mirthful stimulus. The field of evolutionary musicology is a relatively new field in an early stage of development and rigor, but offering at least hypotheses about the origin of music. I suggest that music is a part of the ritual order that builds on and replaces grooming, and that language may originate in this new rhythmic ritual order, with ritual preceding language. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, possess some of the capabilities underlying rhythmic ritual,20 although among primates only humans have elaborated this capacity into music, dance, and ritual. Perhaps ritual found us first, and the words only discovered us later.

Anti-Ritual What is the opposite of ritual? Defecation, an act shared with all animals, does not seem like a ritual; rituals are social, and defecation is performed in private; rituals involve the sacred, and defecation is the epitome of the profane. However, the act involves many behavioral sacrifices for the community; it must only be performed in particular locations, and hygienic rituals such as wiping with toilet paper or washing oneself with the left hand (and tabooing its use in other contexts) are required. Hand-washing after defecation is a sacrifice to the health of the group that is more likely to be performed if others witness one’s performance. We have a rational reason for hand-washing—the prevention of infectious disease— but the practice precedes the germ theory of disease, 20 Hattori et al., “Spontaneous synchronized tapping to an auditory rhythm in a chimpanzee,” Scientific Reports 2013.

171

What Is Ritual?

21 Brockman and Shirky, “Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus,” Edge 2008.

9.

and many hand-washing ritual performances today are not actually effective at preventing the spread of disease. Interestingly, the very privacy expected during defecation is subverted toward ritual ends by the historical (and perhaps contemporary) practice of boot camp “heads” (bathrooms) not having walls separating the toilets. Perhaps the extreme destruction of privacy facilitates group “identity fusion.” While there is probably no domain of human activity that ritual does not invade, watching television must score very low on the ritual spectrum. It involves the sacrifice of time, in a sense: perhaps some people watch television in order to participate in social gossip with other people, a sacrifice of time for community. But there is another perspective that probably accounts for more viewer hours: perhaps television absorbs time that the community has no other use for, ritual or economic. Advanced industrialization has left us with cognitive surplus—spare time that our groups have no demands on.21 Spare time that is of little value to our groups may also be of little, or even negative, value to us; television offers a way to get through time. It does not offer us much in terms of opportunities to be valuable to each other. The Internet, under the definition presented here, holds much more promise than television as a ritual domain. Our sacrifice of time to the Internet, our mutual evocation of mental states, and our display and constraint of emotional response, are much more likely to be directed toward others, or toward sacred objects of our groups, than time sacrificed to

television. New groups are forming and changing, offering new sacred objects and new rituals, including new forms of ritual combat. Social status is negotiated, affirmed, and changed within the ritual order of the Internet. Perhaps seeing Internet rituals for what they are will helps us select the best ones, and elaborate new ones to participate in.

RITUAL EPISTEMOLOGY If you are reading this, you are probably aware of the existence of the rationalist community.1 The community is characterized (broadly) by a scientific worldview, skepticism of religion and paranormal claims, atheism, and an almost fanatical devotion to Bayes’ rule. The skeptic wing of rationalism devotes itself to debunking “woo”—paranormal phenomena, energy healing, psychics, spoon benders, and the like. The wing known as “effective altruism” devotes itself to doing good in the most rational ways possible: donating money to charities that save the most lives per dollar, for instance. (My personal observation is that many self-identified effective altruists are vegans, evidencing their concern for not only human but animal lives as well.) Overall, the rationalist community is concerned with having correct beliefs; a troll might even call this their sacred value. Frequent topics of discussion include artificial intelligence, game theory, and optimizing effectiveness in personal goals. You may or may not be aware that there is such a thing as post-rationalism (see, e.g., “Postrationality Table of Contents” at Yearly Cider, 1 Not to be confused with philosophic rationalism; see preface for more information.

and “Postrationalism” at The Future Primaeval). Postrationalists tend to value true beliefs, but have more sympathy for religion, ritual, and tradition (including monogamy) than the rationalist community. They are skeptical of the ability of science (as it is practiced) to solve humanity’s problems and provide a sense of meaning or happiness.2 I am sympathetic to both groups. I view post-rationality as a kind of hyper-rationality: a concern with truth, efficacy, meaning, and human experience that is willing to be skeptical of even the foundational beliefs of the rationalist worldview. An acquaintance of mine, as a graduate student in religious studies, attended the services of several Central American Pentecostal churches in the Los Angeles area. Pentecostal churches are known for the ritual of speaking in tongues (glossolalia), with members often being possessed by the Holy Spirit during ritual services. My friend’s theory was that the members of these churches had, through behavior and ritual rather than dialectic, worked out a satisfying solution the Problem of Evil (the question as to why a benevolent, all-powerful God would allow evil to exist): good things were attributed to God, whereas bad things were attributed to possession by Satan and his demons. The subjective experience of being visited and inhabited by God provided plausibility to the possibility of evil spirits doing the same. I have previously written that belief is not necessary for glossolalia to occur, citing the example of the anthropologist Felicitas Goodman subjectively experiencing this kind of “possession” during her research, 2 See David Chapman, “Ritual vs. Mentalism,” Vividness 2015.

The domain of law is a ritual domain that has the feature of making its epistemological claims explicit. Both English (and American) common law and Talmudic law are ritual systems regulating human life that make plain both their own truth claims and their system for resolving truth claims. I will focus here on American law, as it is my field of expertise, but my slim knowledge of Talmud suggests that it is an even more coherent, beautiful, and internally consistent system (example: if your husband forbids you from ornamenting yourself and wearing perfume, you legally have to divorce him, because that’s obviously cruel). About fifteen years ago, I read an essay that I can no longer find. It was likely published in a law review, but years of searching have not recovered it. (Perhaps a reader can point me to it.) My recollection is this. There are two neighboring tribes, one a tribe of fish 3 See also the final section of “Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture,” “Some Words of Caution,” on page 149.

175

Ritual Epistemology

Legal Ritual

10.

despite her appropriate scientific detachment.3 In fact, practice generally precedes belief. Ritual is more powerful than arguments and facts. The Pentecostal church members are a prime example of ritual epistemology: working out truth and meaning not through argument, papers, and conferences, as in analytic philosophy, but through ritual, practice, and experience. (Of course, one might argue that arguments, papers, and conferences are, in fact, analytic philosophy’s rituals.)

people, one a tribe of reptile people. They have frequent contact with one another. Often, disputes arise and must be resolved. Fish people cannot be relied on to be fair to reptiles, and vice versa. However, at any time one or more people with characteristics of both fish and reptile is born. This person is given the ceremonial title of the Grand Amphibian (it might be Grand Hermaphrodite, don’t Google that). This person is charged with resolving disputes in a special ceremony. The Grand Amphibian is often quite insane, but as long as he resolves the disputes in a reasonable manner, the two tribes are happy. When a Grand Amphibian is so insane that his resolutions are regularly unacceptable to the tribes, he might be found to quietly disappear, to be replaced by a less unreasonable successor. Two features of dispute resolution are apparent: the resolution must be unambiguous and final, and it must be approximately reasonable most of the time. The author compares these tribes with the mythical Usa people. The Usa resolve their disputes by means of a black-robed figure, who sits on a throne and wields a ceremonial gavel. The point is that our own justice system is not so much a system for establishing truth as for resolving disputes in a manner that people regard as final and fair. Legal ritual is apparent from the early stages of the justice system. In the criminal justice system, thousands of pages of case law have been written regarding when, exactly, a person is “in custody,” a ritual state of separateness from the community in which one is in police control and not free to leave. Peter Winn

10. Ritual Epistemology (in “Legal Ritual,” Law and Critique 1991) regards the Miranda warnings as a new legal ritual that, even if it has no effect on confession rates, is regarded as important by suspects and onlookers as a transition into the state of custody. An older legal ritual is placing a suspect in handcuffs. Handcuffs are useful for protecting police from potentially violent and uncooperative suspects, but they are also useful as a spectacle: one author says “Bring on the handcuffs!” in regard to white-collar financial criminals, most of whom probably pose little risk of immediate flight or danger to police officers. “[I]t’s still a small satisfaction to see someone, anyone offering financial smoke and mirrors do a perp walk these days,” says the author. The ritual of handcuffing a suspect, memorialized in photographs, is socially useful in making people feel that even the rich and powerful are subject to the same justice as the poor and weak. Handcuffs are evocative as props in a morality display or scapegoating spectacle. The courthouse follows a universal pattern of “sacred space” identified by Christopher Alexander 177

in A Pattern Language: successive entrances and chambers of increasing privacy and effort to enter (see figure). The courthouse itself is accessible by a main entrance, these days often guarded by a metal detector and attendants. Then, rather than accessing the courtrooms directly, there are usually hallways, elevators, or both. Courtrooms are guarded by bailiffs, and governed by special codes of ritual conduct (no chewing gum or using phones, and special attention must be paid and quiet observed if the judge enters). Within the courtroom, an area (often demarcated by a gate) is reserved for attorneys and litigants. Finally, and most private and inaccessible, is the judge’s area, the bench and “chambers,” open only to the judge, his attendants, and sometimes litigants by invitation. The behaviors, architecture, and costumes create a sense of gravity that is quite distinct from a purely rational attention to the apprehension of the truth. I am not suggesting that these ritual embellishments are silly or unnecessary to the functioning of the justice system; rather, they are likely crucial to it. They help people involved in a civil dispute feel that their problems are taken seriously, and add to the plausibility structure by which they will regard any decision as final. And they encourage people accused of a crime and their relatives to accept and adjust to the ritual transition from citizen to criminal. The vast majority of poker hands do not reach “showdown,” when all the community cards are on the board and participants’ hands are revealed. Rather, the possibility of the ceremony of “showdown” informs the actions of the players, most of whom choose to fold based on the information provided by

The central ritual of the trial is the presentation of evidence, almost always in the form of, or connected to, testimony. The rules of evidence in particular are a fascinating case study in ceremonial epistemology: a large group of people working through notions of truth in a practical and explicit manner. One of the most interesting rules of evidence is the “hearsay rule”—a statement made out of court must not be testified to in court in order to prove the truth of the matter asserted. The heart of the rule is the idea that in order to trust any statement, the maker of the statement must be before the court, so that judge and/or jurors may observe the witness, and his credibility may be called into question by cross-examination. Furthermore, a witness testifying in court is ceremonially sworn to tell the truth, ritually assuring his credibility (under penalty of handcuffs, jail cells, and all that). I like to explain the “truth of the matter asserted” part of the hearsay rule with a story about the Sufi mystic Nasrudin. Nasrudin had a neighbor with the 179

Ritual Epistemology

Evidence

10.

their cards and the actions of other players. Similarly, the vast majority of both criminal and civil cases (in excess of 97%) do not reach trial; participants evaluate the strength of their “hands” (cases) and reach a settlement or plea bargain. But even the settlement process is highly ceremonialized and formal, with arcane rules and procedures at each phase. And the possibility of the ceremony of trial (and its hypothesized outcome) inform all phases of the proceeding.

irritating habit of borrowing things and not returning them; the neighbor borrowed pots, pans, tools, lawn mowers, and who knows what else, never bothering to return them. One day the neighbor visited Nasrudin and asked to borrow his donkey. Not wishing to lend it out, Nasrudin said “oh I would totally lend him to you but he’s not here, I just lent him to someone else.” Just as the neighbor was walking away, the donkey, who was out back, brayed loudly. The neighbor said, “I thought you said your donkey was out, but I just heard him!” To which Nasrudin replied, “You would take a donkey’s word over mine?!” The joke, of course, is that we don’t need to take the donkey’s “word”—the donkey’s bray was not an assertion, and his braying has no truth value. We don’t need to trust the donkey to know that he’s there—his credibility is not in question. The donkey’s bray would be admissible as non-hearsay evidence; the neighbor or Nasrudin might testify to it, without the necessity of swearing in the donkey himself. Human speech can function the same way. If Alice hears Bob say “The light was red,” Alice may not testify to this to prove that the light was actually red (unless it falls within one of the many exceptions to the hearsay rule). Bob himself must be called to the stand. But she may testify to Bob’s statement in order to prove that Bob speaks English, or that Bob was present, or that Bob was alive at the time. Similar to the donkey braying, speech conveys truths other than its factual assertions. Along the lines of the donkey bray, one category of nonhearsay speech is known as a “speech act.” This is speech that has a legal effect, rather than a

Ritual Epistemology

181

10.

truth value—much like magic words or incantations. If someone says “I do!” at his wedding, makes or accepts an offer for a contract, or gives an order to a subordinate, this speech is not “true” or “false” in the declarative sense, but it has an effect on the world. Laws themselves are speech acts (including the hearsay rule), but there are many verbalizations that are agreed to have a particular effect on the world aside from truth value. Another epistemologically interesting aspect of evidence rules is the process called laying a foundation. All evidence—even DNA and other physical evidence— must be presented by a witness who is testifying as to what it means. And in order to present evidence, a witness must be asked a question by the examining attorney. It is a form of telling a story by asking questions. In order to have the right to ask a question free from objections, an attorney must establish that the witness has a basis from which to answer the question. He cannot simply ask, “was the light red or green?” He must first establish that the witness was at the relevant intersection at the time of the accident, that the witness had an unobstructed view of the light, etc. These arcane rules and ceremonies are very different from everyday conversation. A person not trained in the rules of evidence may have difficulty even asking a single question that cannot be successfully objected to. But this is a system that people have worked out to come to terms with uncertainty, to symbolically tame it through ritual. Objectively, our modern justice system may be no better at arriving at truth and justice than the Grand Amphibian system. But that is not its true purpose.

The point is to resolve disputes in a manner that is generally recognized as final, such that its decisions have the reasonable support and respect of the community. A purely rational system that dispenses with ceremony in favor of accuracy would likely not serve this purpose at all. “Bring on the handcuffs,” perhaps—and the black robes, imposing architecture, and arcane rules. This is the post-rationalist critique: that irrational-seeming systems often serve the interests of people better than purely rational systems that attempt to dispense with ceremony.

Truth and Ritual In everyday life, arriving at true beliefs is often less important for a person’s values and goals than behaviors, institutional participation, and rituals. Kevin Simler says: “Is America ‘true’ or ‘false’? Makes no sense. But when we insist on treating religions as empirical propositions, it’s almost as silly.”4 What is the truth value of ritual? Presumably, a ritual is an act (or speech act) that does not have a truth value. Rather, it is expected to act on the world in some way, often in a manner whose causality is opaque. But as with the example of the Pentecostal churches, our rituals are part of what constitute our beliefs. They inform our beliefs and what we regard as plausible—and, more importantly, they inform our actions. Technologies are not adopted because they are “true”—rather, they are adopted because they offer attractive ways of behaving and interacting with 4 @KevinSimler, Twitter, Nov. 4 2015.

183

Ritual Epistemology

5 Mitchell, Lee, et al., “Living the Good Life? Mortality and Hospital Utilization Patterns in the Old Order Amish,” PLOS One 2012.

10.

the world and each other. The time to worry about a ritual order is not when it appears irrational, but when it is so costly (in monetary terms or in terms of suffering or human life) that its costs outweigh its benefits. This can be difficult to evaluate; the War on Drugs is currently being evaluated in terms of costs and benefits, for instance. It is the same for the ritual orders of our modern education and medical systems. Our medical system is extremely costly and a source of major suffering, but it has traditionally been viewed as the wellspring of increases in lifespan over the past century. However, a natural experiment calls its benefits into question: the Old Order Amish, a group that uses very little medical care, has the same (or greater) life expectancy as other American Caucasians.5 The ritual order of medicine, with its priests (doctors) and rituals (tests and treatments), may be too costly to justify its benefits compared with cheaper ritual systems. It is the same for the education system: the “signaling theory of education” calls into question whether education significantly increases intelligence or ability, and suggests that it instead serves as a very costly mechanism for students to signal their already-existing intelligence to potential employers. If it were a cheap system, this irrationality would be no problem; but since it is so expensive, equally effective mechanisms must be considered. Ritual orders have a life of their own, however. The “plausibility structures” of law, medicine, and education as they currently exist are powerful in our

culture. Shredding a functioning ritual order, even one that imposes significant costs, is not without risk. It is impossible to replace a functioning system from scratch. The Amish mentioned above, for example, function in a different ritual order, not in a vacuum. Driving out every vestige of irrationality and silly ceremony is not the right approach: ceremonies are effective and useful, often in unexpected ways, and help us coordinate and figure out reality together. But neither should we exempt our “rational” systems of medicine, education, and law from skepticism. Religion and “woo” are not the only repositories of harm, and incorrect beliefs are not the only kind of harm.

AN ECOLOGY OF BEAUTY & STRONG DRINK According to the theory of cultural evolution, rituals and other cultural elements evolve in the context of human beings. They depend on us for their reproduction, and sometimes help us feel good and accomplish our goals, reproductive and otherwise. Ritual performances, like uses of language, exhibit a high degree of variation; ritual performances change over time, and some changes are copied, some are not. As with genetic mutation, ritual novelty is constantly emerging. The following presents several ecological metaphors for ritual adaptation: sexual selection, the isolated island, and the clearcut forest. Once these metaphors are established, I will explain how they apply to ritual, and suggest some policy recommendations based on this speculation.

Signal and Beauty A well-known aspect of sexual selection, in evolutionary biology, is the theory that characteristics like the tail of a peacock evolved as direct signals of some trait important for natural selection. The handicap principle suggests that cumbersome secondary sexual

characteristics evolved as costly signals of mate quality: they are hard-to-fake, hence reliable, signals of traits such as the ability to survive while encumbered, or low parasite load, or being the correct species, or some other auspicious trait. A less well-known possibility, surprising in its arbitrariness, is the sensory exploitation or sensory bias hypothesis: that traits evolved to capitalize on some pre-existing sensory capacity for pleasure and beauty.1 Under this framework, animals have built-in sensory and discriminatory capacity—that is, aesthetic capacity. This capacity is then exploited in sexual selection, directing the color, sound, shape, and other features of sexual displays. Frog calls evolve not to signal any particular adaptive trait, but to optimally stimulate frog hearing organs; guppies get orange spots because the fruit they like is orange.2 Female wolf spiders like leg tufts on male wolf spiders because they look cool, even if their species hasn’t yet evolved them.3 Very similar to sexual selection is the communication between plants and their animal pollinators or seed distributors. Plants provide a signal—the color or scent of flowers or fruit, for example—and animals choose whether to respond. Did animal visual systems evolve to exploit plants (to detect flowers or ripe fruit), or did plant coloration evolve to attract animals to spread their genetic material? Since animal 1 Ryan & Rand, “The Sensory Basis of Sexual Selection For Complex Calls in the Tungara Frog,” Evolution 1990. 2 Rodd et al., “A possible non-sexual origin of mate preference: are male guppies mimicking fruit?,” Proc. of Biological Sciences 2002. 3 McClintock & Uetz, “Female choice and pre-existing bias: visual cues during courtship in two Schizocosa wolf spiders,” Animal Behaviour 1996.

Why are island animals and plants so beautiful? 4 “What Is Ritual?” page 153.

187

An Ecology of Beauty & Strong Drink

Island Hacks

11.

color vision is extremely conservative and does not vary much with the animal’s ecological situation, it appears that the latter is true. Insects have had the same color vision since before flowering plants existed, and neither bird nor primate color vision varies much depending on the colors in the animal’s environment. The sensory capacity precedes the existence of the signal (although the perception might be later honed in the brain). Bee orchids mimic the pre-existing preference of their pollinating species for the appearance of their conspecifics, in a dizzying reversal of the orange guppy situation noted above. Either of these frameworks—costly signals or arbitrary beauty—can theoretically be the basis for runaway sexual selection. They are not mutually exclusive. Memetic selection, like sexual selection and the interactions of plants and pollinating animals, relies on communication of signals and the stimulation of brains outside the signaling organism. I have previously4 described ritual in terms of the costly signaling theory: people engage in ritual in order to signal such desirable traits as cooperativeness, peacefulness, and industriousness. Rituals that optimally signal these traits are reproduced. This explanation ignores the sensory exploitation hypothesis: that people engage in rituals because they feel good for essentially arbitrary reasons. Again, the two are not mutually exclusive.

The birds of paradise evolved on islands and are some of the most varied and beautiful birds, showing off extreme secondary sexual characteristics. Cichlids in isolated lakes in Africa—islands of water—evolved bright and varied colors. Even the lowly fruit fly, when it migrated to Hawaii, evolved into beautiful forms, perhaps a thousand species, including the colorful “picture-wing” flies sometimes called the birds of paradise of the insect kingdom.5 The males use visual, auditory, and even tactile signals to establish their mating suitability. In biological evolution, the maintenance of arbitrary aesthetic preferences is possible as long as the costs are not too high.6 In virgin environments, such as islands or isolated lakes, lucky immigrants find that their co-evolved parasites and predators are not present; the costs of maintaining some arbitrary preference for beauty in mating may therefore be decreased. The fewer parasites and predators you have to contend with, the more you can focus on within-species competition, often expressed in complex (and beautiful) adaptations for mating display. In differential sexual selection theory, animals (such as fruit flies) display genetic variation in female choosiness: some females are aesthetes and will only mate with ideal males; others are philistines and will mate with any vaguely suitable male.7 When a species lands in a pristine, unexploited environment for the first 5 H. L. Carson, “Sexual Selection: A Driver of Genetic Change in Hawaiian Drosophila,” Journal of Heredity 1996. 6 Kuijper et al., A Guide to Sexual Selection Theory, 2012. 7 Kenneth Kaneshiro, “Dynamics of Sexual Selection in the Hawaiian Drosophilidae: A Paradigm for Evolutionary Change,” Proc. of the Hawaiian Entomological Society 2006.

When a mature natural ecosystem is destroyed by fire, clearcutting, or plowing, a particular process of succession follows. First, plants with a short life history that specialize in colonization emerge; these first-stage plants are often called weeds, or “weedy ephemerals,” and make up a large number of agricultural pest 189

An Ecology of Beauty & Strong Drink

Clearcuts

11.

time, the population is small; choosiness is a hindrance and will be selected against. Only promiscuous philistine females will get a chance to mate. As a side effect, combinations of genes that would never take place under choosiness occur; as the population increases, so does genetic and phenotypic variation. This provides ample variation for aesthetic selection to work on, and aesthete females then have room to reemerge. In biology as well as economics, any empty niche is crying out to be filled, and will be filled by the best thing available, in context. Australia made wolves out of marsupials. Islands make land predators out of crabs, grazers out of parrots, and tree dwellers out of kangaroos and skinks. Whoever shows up gets a job, regardless of whether they are well-suited to it by millions of years of evolution. In the case of fruit flies, they get many jobs, taking over insect duties at many elevations and environments that would, on the mainland, be performed by insects with a longer niche-specific adaptation history. The isolated island is distinguished from the mainland by its original pristine state, a low diversity in founding species, and a high level of sexual (and therefore possibly sensory-biased) selection.

species. But these initial colonizers specialize in colonization at the expense of long-term competitiveness for light. Second, a wave of plants that are not as good at spreading their seed, but a little better at monopolizing light, gain dominance. These are followed by plants that are even better at long-term competition; eventually, absent human interference, the original weeds become rare. Sometimes, however, the landscape is frozen at the first stage of succession; this is known as agriculture. Second-wave competitive plants are prevented from growing; the land is cleared again and again, and the seeds of a single species are planted, providing an optimal environment for short-life-history weeds. Since the survival of humans and their livestock depends on only a few species of plants, other plants that would eventually out-compete the weeds must not be permitted to grow. Instead, herbicides are applied, resulting in selection for better and better weeds. This is not an indictment of agriculture. Again, without these methods, most humans on earth would die. But the precariousness of the situation is a result of evolutionary processes. Perverse results are common in naive pest management strategies; Kaneshiro suggests that eradication efforts for the Mediterranean fruit fly in California in the 1980s, despite temporarily reducing the population size substantially, paradoxically resulted in the adaptation of the fruit fly to winter conditions and subsequent population explosions.8 Pesticide resistance in plants, animals, and even diseases frequently follows a similarly perverse course. 8 Ibid.

11.

Ritual Ecology

9 Ann Senghas et al., “Children Creating Core Properties of Language: Evidence from an Emerging Sign Language in Nicaragua,” Science 2004.

191

An Ecology of Beauty & Strong Drink

Ecosystems are made up of “selfish” organisms that display variation, and undergo natural and sexual selection. Ecosystems seem to self-repair because any temporarily empty niche will quickly be filled by any organism that shows up to do the job, no matter how ill-suited it may be at first. Economies self-repair in the same manner: a product or service that is not being supplied is an opportunity. Language appears to be remarkably self-repairing: deaf school children in Nicaragua, provided only with lipreading training of dubious effectiveness, developed their own language, which within two generations acquired the core expressive characteristics of any human language.9 While inherited ritual traditions may be extremely useful and highly adapted to their contexts, ritual may exhibit a high degree of self-repair as well. And since the context of human existence has changed so rapidly since the Industrial Revolution, ancestral traditions may be poorly adapted to new contexts; self-repair for new contexts may be a necessity. The human being himself has not changed much, but his environment, duties, modes of subsistence, and social interdependencies have changed dramatically. Memetic selection is like sexual selection, in that it is based on signal reception by a perceiving organism (another human or group of humans). Rituals are transmitted by preferential copying (with variation); even novel rituals, like the rock concert, the desert art

festival, the school shooting, or the Twitter shaming, must be attended to and copied in order to survive and spread. Some rituals are useful, providing group cohesion and bonding, the opportunity for costly signaling, free-rider detection and exclusion,10 and similar benefits. Some rituals have aesthetic or affective benefits, providing desirable mental states; these need not be happy, as one of the most popular affective states provided by songs is poignant sadness. Rituals vary in their usefulness, communication efficiency, pleasurability, and prestige; they will be selected for all these qualities. Ritual is not a single, fungible substance. Rather, an entire human culture has many ritual niches, just like an ecosystem: rituals specialized for cohesion and bonding may display adaptations entirely distinct from rituals that are specialized for psychological self-control or pleasurable feelings. Marriage rituals are different from dispute resolution rituals; healing rituals are distinct from criminal justice rituals. Humans have many signaling and affective needs, and at any time many rituals are in competition to supply them.

Cultural Clearcutting: Ritual Shocks Ordinarily, rituals evolve slowly and regularly, reflecting random chance as well as changes in context and technology. From time to time, there are shocks to the system, and an entire ritual ecosystem is destroyed and must be repaired out of sticks and twigs. 10 See Michael McBride, “Club Mormon: Free-Riders, Monitoring, and Exclusion in the LDS Church,” Rationality and Society 2007.

193

An Ecology of Beauty & Strong Drink

11 Patrick Abbott, “American Indian and Alaska Native Aboriginal Use of Alcohol in the United States,” American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research 1996. 12 Fred Beauvais, “American Indians and Alcohol,” Alcohol Health & Research World 1998.

11.

Recall that in literal clearcutting, short-life-history plants flourish. They specialize in spreading quickly, with little regard for long-term survival and zero regard for participating in relationships within a permanent ecosystem. After a cultural clearcutting occurs, short-life-history rituals such as drug abuse flourish. To take a very extreme example, the Native American genocide destroyed many cultures at one blow. Many peoples who had safely used alcohol in ceremonial contexts for centuries experienced chronic alcohol abuse as their cultures were erased and they were massacred and forcibly moved across the country to the most marginal lands.11 There is some recent evidence of ritual repair, however; among many Native American groups, alcohol use is lower than among whites, and the ratio of Native American to white alcohol deaths has been decreasing for decades.12 Crack cocaine did not spread among healthy, ritually intact communities. It spread among communities that had been “clearcut” by economic problems (including loss of manufacturing jobs), sadistic urban planning practices, and tragic social changes in family structure. Methamphetamine has followed similar patterns. Alcohol prohibition in the United States constituted both a ritual destruction and a pesticide-style management policy. Relatively healthy ritual environments for alcohol consumption, resulting in substantial social capital, were destroyed, including fine restaurants.

American cuisine was set back decades as the legitimate fine restaurants could not survive economically without selling a bottle of wine with dinner. In their place, short-life-history ritual environments, such as the speakeasy, sprung up; they contributed little to social capital, and had no ritual standards for decorum. During (alcohol) Prohibition, when grain and fruit alcohol was not available, poisonous wood alcohols or other toxic alcohol substitutes were commonly consumed, often (but not always) unknowingly. (It’s surprising that there are drugs more toxic than alcohol, but there you go.) The consumption of poisoned (denatured) or wood alcohol may be the ultimate short-life-history ritual; it contributed nothing to social capital, provided but a brief experience of palliation, and often resulted in death or serious medical consequences. Morgues filled with bodies. The modern-day policy of poisoning prescription opiates with acetaminophen has the same effect as the Prohibition-era policy of “denaturing” alcohol: death and suffering to those in too much pain to pay attention to long-term incentives. Early 20th century and modern prohibitions clearly don’t eradicate short-life-history drug rituals; rather, they concentrate them in their most harmful forms, and at the same time create a permanent economic niche for distributors. As the recently deceased economist Douglass North said in his Nobel lecture, The organizations that come into existence will reflect the opportunities provided by the institutional matrix. That is, if the institutional

195

An Ecology of Beauty & Strong Drink

If the ritual ecology within a category of ritual provides attractive niches for short-life-history rituals, and the economic ecology provides niches for drug cartels, then these will come into existence and prosper; but if a ritual context is allowed to evolve to encapsulate mind-altering substances, as it has for most human societies in the history of the world, and to direct the use of these substances in specific times, manners, and places, then these longer-life-history rituals specialized for competition rather than short-term palliation will flourish. Prohibition is a pesticide with perverse effects; ritual reforestation is a long-term solution. Some groups are able to negotiate voluntary prohibition at a smaller scale: Mormons, the Amish, Muslims, and adherents of Alcoholics Anonymous voluntarily abstain from intoxicating substances, but this abstention is replaced by intense participation in religious ritual. Even so, there is substantial attrition from these groups. Attrition may be a feature from the perspective of the group—only those most committed to the group’s policies and capable of abiding by them remain. But from the perspective of the larger society, especially those leaving these groups, the question arises of what to do when strict ancestral religious observance is inadequate to meet present needs. (Even devout Mormons complain of excessive boring meetings, instead of peaceful rest on the Sabbath and

11.

framework rewards piracy then piratical organizations will come into existence; and if the institutional framework rewards productive activities then organizations—firms—will come into existence to engage in productive activities.

poignant or fun ritual participation.) I focus on drugs because drugs are interesting, and they provide a tidy example of the processes in ritual ecology. But the same selective effects are present in many domains: music, drama, exercise, food, and the new ritual domain of the Internet.

Policy Recommendations 1. Do Nothing In the important essay “In Praise of Passivity,” beloved by my occasional collaborator St. Rev, Michael Huemer suggests that the best course of action, politically, is usually to do nothing. “Even experts have little understanding of the working of society and little ability to predict future outcomes,” he says. “As a result, the best advice for political actors is very often to simply stop trying to solve social problems, since interventions not based on precise understanding are likely to do more harm than good.”13 An ecological model of culture underscores this advice: do nothing, because top-down interventions are generally harmful, and in their absence, attractive substitutes often evolve naturally. Almost the only rituals available to government bureaucracy are paperwork and sitting in offices (most of the criminal justice system is composed of these). In the absence of these weakly effective, often destructive, non-negotiable rituals, better rituals might evolve to solve various social problems. Doing nothing has never yet resulted in cane toads eating the entire world. 13 Huemer, Studia Humana 2012.

11.

2. Ritual Reforestation

197

An Ecology of Beauty & Strong Drink

This is a lemma to “Do Nothing.” Rather than cracking down on ritual practices, allow them to continue; there is a good chance they will evolve into more useful, socially beneficial forms. All rituals look to have been “clearcut” in the modern world, because few rituals are well-adapted to the new technological human reality. But this new reality may also be seen as an island: a pristine space, unoccupied by past rituals and very leisurely by historical standards, where sensory exploitation selection may flourish: rituals may serve the emotional and aesthetic needs of humans more than ever before, because they are under fewer constraints. Only a tiny percentage of the population is now needed for the production of food, fuel, and other necessities; selection for collective action in unpleasant areas has been dramatically relaxed. There is more room for arbitrary beauty.

CRINGE & THE DESIGN OF SACRED EXPERIENCES When I first started writing about religion for Ribbonfarm, I argued that humans have the capacity for interesting mental states that have become harder to access during the transition to modernity.1 Here, I focus on the core mental state at the heart of religion, the sacred experience. When I first read William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, I was disappointed by his focus on “personal religion” (the subjective experience of conversion or of the divine), rather than on ritual, tradition, and organized religion. After many years, I now think his focus on subjective experience is exactly correct. Rituals vary and evolve because the sacred experience is itself the success criterion for the ritual, and as the context changes, the form of rituals must change to continue to produce sacred experience. I define the sacred experience as follows: Sacred experience: a subjective experience of unusual emotional arousal, especially in a social ritual context, potentially including negative 1 See “Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture,” page 131.

In practice, it will never be as natural to speak of good fit as the simultaneous satisfaction of a number of requirements, as it will be to call it the simultaneous nonoccurrence of the same number of corresponding misfits. The failure of an attempted sacred experience often results in the subjective experience of cringe. Cringe means that, for the cringing party, there is a misfit between the ritual and the context of his own self. He is embarrassed on behalf of the ritual leader, who has tried and failed to induce a sacred experience because of some failure of charisma, ritual, architectural context, or some interaction between these and other variables. Cringe is enhanced when it is shared—when it’s obvious to all that the evocation of sacred experience has failed, as opposed to one lone non-experiencer. In Susan Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on Camp,” coincidentally also published in 1964, she defines the essence of camp as failed seriousness: seriousness is sincerely attempted (i.e., seriousness is the success criterion for the design), and the attempt fails. Camp is enjoyable as its own aesthetic, but it cannot produce 199

Cringe & the Design of Sacred Experiences

In Christopher Alexander’s model of the design process (Notes on the Synthesis of Form, 1964), the success of a design is the absence of “misfit” between an object’s form and its context. He says,

12.

emotions such as terror, guilt, or hopelessness, followed by unusual calm or euphoria, in the presence of a sensed metaphysically problematic entity or principle.

emotions like gravitas. Cringe, in the sense of embarrassment on behalf of another, is also its own aesthetic, but it cannot produce the emotion of sacredness. At its most general, cringe is the experience of witnessing failed emotional manipulation: a theater production’s failure to induce suspension of disbelief, a joke followed by silence, a grandiose boast that fails to impress. In the specific sense here, it is the attempt and failure to induce a sacred experience. But the sacred experience, unlike, say, mirth or admiration, is a rare emotion. Many people never experience it, and most who do experience it only rarely. Those who would learn to induce sacred experience must accept that cringe and embarrassment are part of the learning process.

Religious Experiment While I mostly sit around theorizing, a lot of people are actively involved in getting people together to try out new and adapted rituals. Frequently, these are described as “cringey.” It is not at all my intention to criticize religious experimenters: religious experimentation is great, and we should expect most early experiments to fail, for the reasons suggested above. Creating sacred experiences is a complex and difficult problem; even very old, established religions can allow their rituals to veer in cringey directions. The Benedictine monk Aidan Kavanagh, for example, wrote a guide to Catholic rite2 in which he criticizes many of the cringiest aspects of post-Vatican II liturgy: dance performances in church, wall-to-wall 2 Elements of Rite 1982.

This is not to suggest that all failures to evoke sacred experience result in cringe. In fact, mere boredom may be a more common failure mode, and probably results in the absence of a brave (but failed) attempt to evoke sacred experience. A strong cringe reaction may be a good sign, compared to mere boredom: at least the attempt to evoke the sacred experience was recognizable in the case of cringe. Because humans are involved, there is even a self-reflexive backwards effect. It is widely accepted that weird and outlandish beliefs function better as tribal signifiers than plausible beliefs, because weird beliefs function as a stronger signal of loyalty to the group. Similarly, cringey ritual (or at least ritual that appears cringey to outsiders, even if it succeeds in evoking sacred experience for in-group members) might be more successful in some cases than ritual that looks serious and normal. I am told that some very successful religious congregations get away with 201

Cringe & the Design of Sacred Experiences

Cringe and Success

12.

carpeting, rambling homilies that get “too relevant.” Kavanagh focuses on common failures of the induction of sacred experience, and we can often recognize them as cringe-inducing, although he does not use that word. Cringiness is not a static property of a particular text or ritual form. Things that once had gravitas can become cringe-inducing with the passage of time. Cringe indicates a misfit between form and context; it is a property of the whole system. This is also true of sacred experience.

electric guitar rock praise songs and low-rent infrastructure. Rather than turn our noses up, it would be interesting to know why these liturgical methods and aesthetic limitations are often surmountable, producing sacred experience in some contexts but not others. The design of the ritual (and ritual space), and the charisma of the ritual leader, are important elements; but the energy and performance of the congregation are just as important. (Presumably, there are “tough crowds” for sacred as well humorous experiences.) The energy, experiences, and beliefs that ritual participants bring to the encounter form a part of the context, and by performing rituals, the participants adapt both ritual and context. It need not be degrading or sacrilegious to optimize ritual. Ideally, optimizing ritual is part of what religious participants do as they practice. Kavanagh says: The act [of religious ritual] both changes and outstrips the assembly in which it occurs. The assembly adjusts to that change, becoming different from what it was before the act happened. This adjustment means that subsequent acts of liturgy can never touch the assembly in exactly the same way as the previous act did. And it is in the constant adjustment to such change that an assembly increments its own awareness of its distinctive nature, that it shakes out and tests its own public and private norms of life and faith, that it works out its sustained response to the phenomenon of its own existence.3 3 On Liturgical Theology 1984.

Rituals are successful if they produce sacred experience. With this in mind, we can analyze existing ritual, 4 Carcinisation 2014.

203

Cringe & the Design of Sacred Experiences

When a work is labeled “experimental” it ought not to produce either disdain or admiration: it should only make us demand some rigor in the experiment. I think the reason we get so much bad experimental art is because no one understands how to make a good artistic experiment. We act like because something is “experimental” that somehow absolves it from having any standards at all. Bullshit. Just because a scientific experiment is an “experiment” doesn’t mean that scientists can do whatever they want. We apply rules to them so that the answers the experiment provides are answers we can use. Optimize experimental art for a certain result, rigorously. Know you’re experimenting. Avoid pretense. Then you’ll be able to say whether or in which realms you’ve failed or succeeded. You can use that information to make better art. Shitting on a canvas and calling it experimental so it will mean something gives us some nice information about people, but no useful information about art.4

12.

I think there’s a benefit to having clear (if subjective) criteria for success, and to thinking analytically about the design of experiences. Haley Thurston (in “How We Frame the Value of Experimental Art Badly”) argues that experimental art should actually gather information (as a scientific experiment would) by having goals and success criteria. She says:

successful and failed, to generate hypotheses about what factors produce sacred experience, cringe, or boredom. Designed rituals, not essays, are the form that hypotheses in this space must eventually take, if they are to affect the world. Those who experiment are brave, for the road to sacred experience is paved with cringe.

SOCIAL COGNITION & POSTRATIONALITY Ribbonfarm 2015-2018

THE ESSENCE OF PEOPLING Nouns for human beings—“people” or “person”— conjure in the mind a snapshot of the surface appearance of humans. Using nouns like “people” subtly encourages thinking about people as frozen in time, doing nothing in particular. “People” is an anchor for thinking about human bodies separate from their environment, from the buildings and streets and farms and parks that they build and use to go about their business. I prefer to think about “peopling”—the process of human beings going about their business, whatever that is. I take this usage from the 1971 movie Bedknobs & Broomsticks, in which the main characters visit a magical animal kingdom, where a sign reading “No peopling allowed” warns them away. Much of the modern built environment seems to bear this message as well, presenting a hostile face to ordinary human activity, and preventing all but an impoverished subset of peopling from occurring at all. The verb “peopling” is usually used to refer to the process of populating a region, but reproduction and migration are only two aspects of the highly varied, but patterned, activities of human beings throughout time. Peopling includes construction, dance,

commerce, old age, drunkenness, conversation, worship, play, war, fashion, sleep, stories, and a thousand other things (though maybe there are not so very many, after all). What is at the center of it all? If we look deep into the core of peopling, at the essential nature of our special human cognition, descriptively, then we can get a perspective on what outward manifestations of peopling are good for us, normatively. The first part of this essay is an account of innermost peopling—the social, self-conscious nature of human cognition. The second part of this essay moves outward, connecting cognition to the rituals and social information flows that make up the most important parts of our environment.

Identity Maintenance & Cooperative Nature of the Self In Others in Mind: The Social Origins of Self-Consciousness (one of my favorite books of all time), Philippe Rochat

Rochat, in contrast, models human cognition as fundamentally social in nature. Each person learns to be

209

The Essence of Peopling

With Descartes, consciousness becomes an individualistic, more private and solipsistic state of the mind that is opaque, not transparent, accessible to itself through self-reflection. The rationalist tradition launched by Descartes introduces a transition from cogitamus, ergo sum (we think, therefore I am) to Descartes’s famous cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).

13.

presents a social model of human cognition, from a developmental psychology perspective, in contrast to the “solipsistic” Cartesian model of consciousness, which, he says, still dominates the modern study of psychology and neuroscience. The Cartesian model contrasts with the more social, external, knowledge-in-common model of consciousness that predominated prior to the 17th century:

aware of himself—is constrained toward self-consciousness—by other people being aware of him. He learns to manage his image in the minds of others, and finds himself reflected, as in a mirror, through the interface of language and non-verbal communication. This structure hints at infinite recursion, but cognitive resources are limited, and in practice only the first couple of levels of mutual simulation are salient. Thomas Nagel finds this structure at the heart of “non-perverse” sexual desire in his 1969 paper on sexual perversion: Sexual desire involves a kind of perception, but not merely a single perception of its object, for in the paradigm case of mutual desire there is a complex system of superimposed mutual perceptions—not only perceptions of the sexual object, but perceptions of oneself. Moreover, sexual awareness of another involves considerable self-awareness to begin with—more than is involved in ordinary sensory perception.1 The self is not unitary and separate from others; peopling occurs in the context of mutual-mental-modeling relationships, which continue to affect each person when he is alone. Each person’s self is spread out among many people, simulated in all their brains at varying levels of granularity. And each person has a different “self ” for each one of the people he knows, and a different self for every social context. A teenager has a very different way of behaving, speaking, and thinking around 1 Thomas Nagel, “Sexual Perversion,” 1969.

13. The Essence of Peopling his friends from the way he behaves, speaks, and thinks around his grandparents. The self at work is different from the self at home with close friends, or in bed with a spouse. And none of these are the “true self ”— rather, the self exists in all these, and in the transitions between them. There can never be one single, public self; to collapse all these multiple selves together would be akin to social death. (That is one reason that Facebook and Google+ are wrong to require a single government-name identity for each user.) Mentally maintaining one’s identity in relation to others, including one’s accurate social status and relationships in each case, is the core task of being human. This can be inferred from the most dramatic breakdowns or failure modes of peopling: delusions and thought disorders. The monothematic delusions are a class of delusions characterized by being limited to a single theme. Usually caused by stroke, brain injury, or neurological 211

illness, they all represent failures of the most central task of peopling: modeling one’s own, or others’, identities. Because of this, they are sometimes are grouped together as delusional misidentification syndrome. You have probably heard of some of them. The Cotard delusion is the belief that one is dead, or does not exist. The Capgras delusion is the belief that a close family member or spouse has been replaced by an imposter. Somatoparaphrenia is the belief that a limb or side of the body is not one’s own. Mirroredself misidentification is the belief that the person appearing in the mirror is not oneself. The syndrome of delusional companions is the belief that inanimate objects are sentient beings. Clonal pluralization is the belief that one exists in multiple, physical copies.2 The theme of misperception of identity pervades not only these exotic monothematic delusions, but also the content of the most common delusions. Grandeur and persecution are misperceptions of status and relationships, exaggerating the importance of the self in a positive or negative way. “Ideas of reference” is a pattern of seeing reference to the self everywhere, in traffic lights and television advertisements. All this is to say that a huge portion of our internal cognitive machinery, of which we are not normally aware, is concerned with the ordinary function of maintaining one’s own identity and that of others. We can see this function from the ways in which it breaks. Baumeister and Masicampo posit that interfacing between identities—both within a single mind, and 2 Nagy et al., “Clonal pluralization, as an interpretative delusion after a hallucinatory form of autoscopy,” 2009.

3 Baumeister & Masicampo, “Conscious Thought Is for Facilitating Social and Cultural Interactions: How Mental Simulations Serve the Animal–Culture Interface” 2010. 4 Kevin Simler, “Personhood: A Game For Two or More Players,” Melting Asphalt. 5 page 131.

213

The Essence of Peopling

There is a profound irreconcilability or dissonance between first-and third-person perspectives on the self once objectified and valued. This dissonance shapes behaviors in crucial ways, as individuals try to reconcile their own and others’ putative representations about them. These two representational systems are always at some odds or in conflict, always in need of readjustment. It is so because these systems are open, and they do not share the same informational resources: direct, permanent, and embodied for the first-person perspective on the self; indirect,

13.

between minds—is the purpose of conscious thought.3 And just as Rochat proposes that we are “constrained toward consciousness” by others, Kevin Simler says that we “infect” each other with personhood.4 This special human form of self-consciousness has a troublesome feature, as I explained in “Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture.”5 Information about the self from the first-person perspective tends to be inflated and self-aggrandizing; information about the self from the third-person perspective, projected into the minds of others, tends to be deflated and self-deprecatory. Deep down, each person feels himself to be special and important, but also realizes that from the perspective of others he is quite ordinary and unimportant. Rochat says:

more fleeting, and disembodied for the third-person perspective on the self. A main property of this dissonance is that it tends to feed into itself and can reach overwhelming proportions in the life of individuals. More often than not, this dissonance is a major struggle, expressed in the nuisance of self-conscious behaviors that hinder creativity and the smooth “flow” of interpersonal exchanges. Having others in mind is the essential nature of peopling, but it is often quite painful, manifesting in self-conscious rumination. People are able to accomplish this feat of mutual simulation by use of two tools: language and ritual. Ritual allows for the communication of information that language can’t convey—hard-to-fake costly signals of commitment, dependability, harmoniousness, and cooperative intent. Most pre-modern human environments would have provided a constant flow of social information in the form of ritual as well as language. If humans are somehow calibrated to expect a constant flow of social information, then the sparseness of ritual and social participation in modern environments might trigger a cascade of rumination. On the other hand, experiencing a great deal of positive (even if quite mundane) social information might be protective against some of the modern forms of social pain that torture the meaning-heavy modern self. A very simple example is greetings. “Greeting everyone you see” is a candidate for a ritual universal, a part of the ritual atmosphere that displays good fit

215

The Essence of Peopling

Walking around in South Pacific island traditional villages, during the day or in the pitch dark of moonless nights, it is almost impossible to cross paths with someone, young or old, woman or man, familiar or absolute stranger, without some greeting, without some acknowledgment of your existence, either called by your name or being asked what you are doing and where you are going, even if the response is very obvious. For individuals like me who grew up in rich postindustrial regions of the world, who struggle for their career and place in society, constantly under the spell of a panic fear of failure, of having failed, or of being an impostor, such simple, yet constant social acknowledgment amounts to the experience of tremendous relief. Finally one experiences the peace of being effortlessly recognized by others, the absolute sense of being socially substantial, as opposed to socially transparent. This kind of small village experience lifts the curse of social transparency… [T]his kind of intimacy and bonding with others that is the wealth of small traditional society is what we all strive for, regardless of where we live and where we grew up. It is the force that leads us toward self-consciousness, probably more forcefully if we grow up in an industrial region of the world. If there is such a thing as a universal criterion for “the good life,” a comfort we would all aspire to,

13.

with peopling (with some caveats). Rochat concludes Others in Mind by saying:

then it must be the sense of social proximity. It must be the sense of being acknowledged and recognized, of being included and intimate with others, no matter what. It is being safe, the ultimate prize and the ultimate refuge.6 How many other patterns are there in addition to this simple one of greeting, perhaps lost for now, but discoverable in their hidden obviousness? Sunshine might be one7—and what might motivate us to spend time outside in the sunshine, perhaps even exercising, more than group ritual? Greeting, sunshine, dancing, singing, touch, face-to-face talking, fire, laughing, stories—we likely have special brain adaptations for all of these, indicating that they are good for us and core to our existence, but how well do our present cultural patterns make them available to us? The social groups that used to provide these things have gradually faded from existence, because they are not economically viable, and because the economic, architectural, and media patterns that dominate our lives do not support them. The individual is not the appropriate unit of peopling, but it is the only unit that the tiling systems understand.8 If there are kinds of groups that can help us provide these valuable things for each other in our modern context, without strain or embarrassment, they probably don’t exist yet. Most “cults” and “intentional communities” fail. 6 Rochat, Others in Mind: The Social Origins of Self-Consciousness, 2009. 7 American Academy of Opthalmology, “Evidence Mounts That Outdoor Recess Time Can Reduce the Risk of Nearsightedness in Children,” News Release 2013. 8 See the section in “Gardens Need Walls” on tiling structures, page 492.

217

The Essence of Peopling

9 See Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, pattern 132, “Short Passages.”

13.

The human institutions that will rediscover the ritual pattern languages and implement them in the context of post-industrial peopling have yet to be discovered. There is another aspect to this special peopling interface: time. Since the interface is performed using simulations when social information is not available, we are spread out in time, living both in the past and the future as well as the present. Aspects of the built as well as the social environment can cause us to turn outward toward the environment and others, or to turn inward toward our own (often painful) simulations. A freeway is useful for getting from place to place, but it’s not a place to merely exist in the moment. So it is allowed to be ugly. More and more utilitarian, interstitial places are excused from beauty—parking lots, shopping areas, waiting rooms, hallways,9 and eventually even the rooms we live in. A utilitarian “housing unit” is a box for storing people; it doesn’t have to be beautiful, just cheap. And ugliness causes us to turn inward. The same thing happens to time. More and more moments are interstitial, in between the allegedly “real” moments of living. We don’t interact with each other, because we are just getting from place to place, perhaps simulating past and future moments in our imagination. And gradually these not-really-living moments can come to occupy the majority of our lives. Perhaps many of us who identify as introverts are just especially sensitive to the ugliness and awkwardness of modern built and social environments. We might be very happy with a quiet, pleasant,

constant flow of positive social information (especially if plenty of privacy were still available). Christopher Alexander says: If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again. Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend’s house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more. There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me. Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.10 This is an instantiation of the spiritual advice, so universal as to be a cliché, to “live in the moment.” What helps us live in the moment, rather than in our 10 Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, 1979.

simulations of past and present?11 It is not only our mindset, but also to a great extent those people and things around us, and how we interact with them.

13.

Celebrities, Gods, and Bureaucracy

The Essence of Peopling

Which others, exactly, do we tend to have in mind? And what kind of thoughts do they engender? The most important people to have in mind are those near to us and relevant to our social belonging—our peers are relevant, but so are our social superiors, those with power over us. In human psychology, bad is stronger than good,12 so subtle signals of potential enmity or ostracism are processed more than signals of acceptance. Our possible enemies occupy a large part of our mindshare. High status people also claim a great deal of processing power, but those just below us on the status hierarchy who may be jockeying for position must also be simulated in detail. In very complex societies, there are some people who are so high in status that it is obligatory to mentally model them, even though they do not reciprocate by mentally modeling their social inferiors. This one-way modeling process usually occurs with the intermediation of media (which is not to say modern media, as this dynamic is thousands of years old). When evaluating a patient for dementia, a doctor often asks: who is the President of the United States? If a person does not know the answer to this question, it can usually be inferred that his mind is not functioning normally. This neurological practice is not 11 See also “After Temporality” and “Feeling the Future,” page 436 and page 447, respectively. 12 cf. Baumeister et al., “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” 2001.

219

itself the reason that it is obligatory to know who the President is; rather, because it is already socially obligatory to know who the President is, this question is an effective heuristic to gauge memory function. The late mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota, in his role as professor of phenomenology, used to say that in the West, once atheism became common, the nature of belief in God fundamentally changed even for believers. Before, belief in God was something like belief in the President: so socially fundamental and obvious that failure to mentally model God would

221

The Essence of Peopling

13 Norenzayan, Gervais, Trzesniewski, “Mentalizing Deficits Constrain Belief in a Personal God,” 2012.

13.

be a sign of mental illness. After atheism came to be understood as a possibility, belief in God changed into a positive phenomenon, no less profound or sincere, but epistemically different. Belief in God is a function of mental modeling; but the relationship with God looks more similar to the relationship with the President than to the relationship between face-to-face humans.13 In systems with a “personal God,” each person’s mental model of God contains a projected image of God’s model of the person—so inside each

[individual’s] circle, another circle representing the “self-in-relation-to-God” would fit inside. By “religious institutions” here I do not merely mean churches, but also the rules and behaviors that shape religious life, including group worship, prayer, and other ritual. The mental modeling of kings, politicians, and celebrities takes the form of a much older kind of cognition. The kind of “religious institutions” that shape religious belief involve a great deal of rich, unmediated human-to-human interaction, whereas most of the construction of celebrity is performed in a one-way, mediated manner. I think that gods display better “fit” with peopling than celebrities, in part for this reason. A Christian friend pointed me to the concept of an egregore—“an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people.”14 If we grant that this kind of entity—a god or demon (or perhaps even a celebrity or politician, for in this case the actual person matters little)—can exist in a psychological sense, then we must ask which kinds of these structures are fit for humans, which are most beautiful and lead to the most human flourishing. To me, these are more interesting questions than whether the egregoric entities have real-world referents. We will have gods or pseudo-gods no matter what; that is part of our inherent psychology. The only thing that varies is the nature of these entities. One of the worst fates that can befall us in the Internet age is to inadvertently become one of these celebrity entities—to be publicly shamed, to have a 14 Discussed at greater length in “Weaponized Sacredness” beginning page 239.

223

The Essence of Peopling

Here is where cults of personality come in handy. The dictator wants a credible signal of your support; merely staying silent and not saying anything negative won’t cut it. In order to be credible, the signal has to be costly: you have to be willing to say that the dictator is not merely ok, but a superhuman being, and you have to be willing to take some concrete actions showing your undying love for the leader. (You may have

13.

piece of our writing or behavior modeled as a public self by masses of people. If we are publicly shamed, we are obligated to suffer by modeling the masses of people with enmity toward us, even though they do not think of us as full human beings. They do not see us face to face, they are not aware of the ritual performances of our entire lives, but our public self is accessible to them through this very destructive kind of fame. It is a constant danger. Victims of public shaming, fortunately, make up only a small subset of celebrities. Most of the people with a public self have chosen to have this kind of self, in order to pursue their interests in control, money, or status. And these kings, politicians, and celebrities face a challenge. They are being mentally modeled by a number of people orders of magnitude too large to be modeled symmetrically. But in the aggregate, the crowd’s behavior toward the high-status person matters a great deal. How can he monitor them for the kind of information he needs? Political science scholar Xavier Marquez’s model of “cults of personality” suggests that ritual, in its “game theory” aspect as costly signaling, can solve the information problem:

had this experience: you are served some food, and you must provide a credible signal that you like it so that the host will not be offended; merely saying that you like it will not cut it. So you will need to go for seconds and layer on the praise). Here the concrete action required of you is typically a willingness to denounce others when they fail to say the same thing, but it may also involve bizarre pilgrimages, ostentatious displays of the dictator’s image, etc.15 This is the darkest example of ritual that we have seen: ritual performed toward a top-down “tiling system” government of the kind that killed tens of millions of people by famine, and thousands more by murder. This kind of interface does not seem to be a good way for people to express their agency. It demonstrates in the extreme, however, the power of ritual, and one way that ritual connects to mental modeling. In a less destructive form, it is directly analogous to the social and ritual information provided to each individual in the form of greetings, explained above. What makes the ritual signaling toward Mao and Stalin so harmful, compared to ordinary face-to-face ritual signaling? Marquez says: When everybody lies about how wonderful the dictator is, there is no common knowledge: you do not know how much of this “support” is genuine and how much is not, which makes it hard to organize against the dictator and exposes one to risks, sometimes enormous risks, if one so much 15 Xavier Marquez, “A Simple Model of Cults of Personality,” Abandoned Footnotes. Emphasis included in original.

16 Ibid.

225

The Essence of Peopling

Signaling toward an entity in a one-way manner, and entity who is not reciprocating by modeling its subjects, with control exerted form the top down, results in degenerate patterns, even when the ritual forms superficially resemble traditional forms. Gods, even when worshipped in the context of powerful hierarchical organizations, do not seem to cause the same problems. The excesses of Mao and Stalin are rarely observed in pre-20th-century religious contexts. The difference is that gods and spirits, saints and

13.

as tries to share one’s true views, since others can signal their commitment to the dictator by denouncing you. This is true of all mechanisms that induce preference falsification, however: they prevent coordination.16

bodhisattvas, are worshipped in a ground-up context, with each local group entity adapting the rituals to its particular needs. The pattern languages are maintained and not destroyed. Top-down control destroys the peopling interface in which pattern languages are used, and by which people together express their agency. Gods can be excellent tools for group coordination; dictators that try to coercively manage all aspects of human life are not. Consider a much less extreme example: interacting with a bureaucracy, whether corporate or government. What does the mental modeling interface look like between a person and a government agency or a telephone company? Usually the bureaucracy has human avatars to interact with each person it communicates with. But the normal person-to-person mental modeling is not governing the interaction. The bureaucrat, police officer, teacher, judge, or cable television company representative functions as a skinsuit that the corporation or government agency wears, not as a co-modeling and fully interacting person. His behaviors are governed by top-down rules and scripts, with human discretion eliminated as much as possible. The human being acting as a skinsuit does not and cannot model each customer or citizen individually in the course of their interaction. Even if he did, it would not make a difference to the outcome of the interaction; that is up to the scripts. Instead of having each other in mind, each participant has something else in mind—a script, or an image of the bureaucratic organization. This kind of cognitive interface does not display good “fit” with the ordinary human social cognition

The Essence of Peopling

227

13.

we have been talking about. The avatars of bureaucracies do not have the practical ability to respond to the genuine needs and desires of the people who interact with them; they are only empowered to implement procedures. While this kind of structure is probably necessary in some aspects of human life, it would seem that humans would want to limit their exposure to non-mutual-modeling, bureaucratic-type interfaces. But instead, this type of interface is growing, infecting more and more domains of human life. In education, national curriculum standards mandate that tests be the scripts that are in teachers’ heads, so that children must interact with a script rather than a mutually modeling person, day after day for years. In medicine, the same trend toward mandatory scriptedness is evident. Almost all regulation leads to more interactions being scripted in this sense—less fit for peopling. Even aesthetic domains have become top-down and mediated. Music is downloaded and listened to, often privately, not sung and produced together. Dance is for professional celebrities on television shows, not performed by everyone. Sports are for professional athletes and perhaps children, at least those children who are unusually good at them. Even when food and clothing do not come from factories, and are produced by hand, they are produced by recipes and patterns, not ground-up expressions of creativity from the fluent use of a shared pattern language. Earlier I said that we accomplish the feat of peopling by using ritual and language. In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander argues that what he calls “pattern languages” are the basis for creating and maintaining the physical, architectural forms

in which we people. The loss of the shared languages, through the expansion of top-down tiling systems, is the reason that our built environments are less and less suitable for peopling. [I]n Japan, even fifty years ago, every child learned how to lay out a house, just as children learn football or tennis today. People laid out their houses for themselves, and then asked the local carpenter to build it for them. When the language is shared, the individual patterns in the language are profound. The patterns are always simple. Nothing which is not simple and direct can survive the slow transmission from person to person. There is nothing in these languages so complex that someone cannot understand it… Just because every detail has to make sense to every man and woman, the patterns are heartfelt and profound. The more the process of production is distanced by mediation from the use of the product, the worse it will fit. A concrete example: If I build a fireplace for myself, it is natural for me to make a place to put the wood, a corner to sit in, a mantel wide enough to put things on, an opening which lets the fire draw. But, if I design fireplaces for other people— not for myself—then I never have to build a fire in the fireplaces I design. Gradually my ideas become more and more influenced by style, and shape, and crazy notions—my feeling for the simple business of making fire leaves the fireplace

17 Alexander 1979.

229

The Essence of Peopling

This is as true for ritual (which as we have seen is a very broad category) as it is for houses and fireplaces. When the languages break down, and our built environments and social contexts no longer make sense, the response is usually to try to exert ever more control from the top down: to control larger chunks of the environment, to control more parts of the environment, and to control behavior directly through regulation. All of these fail, because in all human systems, not just economies, top-down control cannot replace the rich complexity generated by peopling with a shared language. Exerting more top-down control is exactly the wrong response. With living pattern languages, towns and buildings are not made once and then forgotten about, static things existing in the same forms forever. Rather, they are rebuilt and maintained constantly, changing as the needs of people change. It is the same for ritual. Rituals are not static things handed down without alteration from one generation to the next; they are constantly altered, but continue to make sense because of the shared pattern languages that people use to construct and perform them. Rediscovering ritual contexts that fit modern peopling will be a process of rediscovering our lost pattern languages.

13.

altogether. So, it is inevitable that as the work of building passes into the hands of specialists, the patterns which they use become more and more banal, more willful, and less anchored in reality.17

Peopling and Meaning In his book Meanings of Life, Roy Baumeister offers what he calls an “existential shopping list” of four types of meaning that humans tend to need, and will seek if not provided. The first is purpose—a kind of future-oriented meaning that provides a reason to do things, reflecting our nature as spread out in time. Goals are one kind of purpose; their weakness is that they are often realizable, so that we constantly need new goals to replace those that have been accomplished. Another kind of purpose exists in the far future, a mythical, often illusory “fulfillment state” such as heaven, fame, high status, or career success. The second is justification, the deepest basis or value, the final “because” for the endless hierarchy of “why”s. The search for this kind of justification is what is meant by Camus’s statement that the only really serious philosophical problem is that of suicide: why exist at all? Third, we need a sense of efficacy, of having some degree of control over our life and world. Fourth, we need self-worth, to feel valuable and important to others.18 Ritual is particularly well-suited to supply all of these meanings. Ritual makes mythical fulfillment states more plausible, even providing regular tastes of transcendental beauty and calm contentment that these future states are based on. Ritual supports the belief in ultimate value, as belief arises from our own behavior and the beliefs of those around us (as demonstrated day after day through their behavior). Perhaps most importantly, ritual provides a sense of 18 Baumeister, Meanings of Life, 1991.

The Essence of Peopling

231

13.

efficacy and self-worth. This is especially true for those who are unable to contribute economically, such as the very old. A little old lady may not be able to do much “useful” work, but she can pray, and offer ritual performances that create a deeper, psychological value both for her and for the group she is part of. (My grandmother is very insistent about people throwing salt over their shoulder if they should happen to spill it, which I think injects a bit of fun and mystery into a recurrent, boring failure in life.) Ritual also means there is always something we can do to affect our circumstances and the universe at large, even if the results of the ritual are not immediately apparent. In all of these domains, traditional sources of these four kinds of meaning have weakened over the past few centuries and decades. In Baumeister’s view, traditional sources of meaning (group-based morality, religion, etc.) have been replaced with emphasis on the self. Our goals tend to be individual goals; our fulfillment state is not heaven, but fame and career success, even as we see that this is unlikely and does not actually produce sustained contentment for those who achieve it. Efficacy and self-worth are expressed in work and personal performance, athletic or academic achievement, rather than in selfless group identity and the sacred. Kurt Vonnegut famously stated his view of the meaning of life: “we’re here to fart around.” Based on his examples—greeting people and dogs, looking at pretty girls, having brief conversations—it seems fair to expand this into “we’re here to fart around together.” The peopling interface (not to mention the effects of solitary confinement) suggests a fifth, or

even underlying fundamental, need for meaning: the need to interact with others, to simulate them and be simulated by them in positive ways, no matter how mundane. In conclusion, drink tea, together with your friends; pay attention to the tea, and to your friends, and pay attention to your friends paying attention to the tea. Therein lies the meaning of life.

WEAPONIZED SACREDNESS Author’s note: The thinking that gave rise to this essay was committed in collaboration with St. Rev. Errors, suspicious implications, and dubious conclusions are my own. ໙ On March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam, just north of Los Angeles, California, failed catastrophically and sent a wave of water through the valley that caused the gruesome deaths of hundreds of people. No one had predicted the disaster, but after an investigation, it was decided that the dam was built on inadequate soil; the disaster was, in theory, predictable—after the fact. People thought they had control over a massive force (the water), but their control turned out to be illusory. Considering political and social disasters like the famines of the Great Leap Forward in China or the French Revolution, a similar explanation for the resulting piles of bodies seems apt: social forces over which humans thought they had control (in the sense of being able to coordinate with each other for well-being and sustenance) turned out not to be under their control. No one ever sees it coming, but after the

fact everyone is anxious to demonstrate how inevitable it was. If mass violence and destruction seem impossible in our time, consider that everyone who was about to experience revolution felt pretty much the same way. Even the revolutionaries themselves often think they have little chance of success until the revolution is already underway. Why the surprise? Why does a phenomenon so seemingly inevitable in hindsight go unforeseen? Just as the water in the St. Francis Dam was slowly, imperceptibly undermining the stability of the dam in the weeks preceding the catastrophic failure, the private opinion upon which the success of a revolution depends goes unobserved. It is difficult for anyone to gauge the true popularity of either an incumbent government or the revolutionary opposition, because of a phenomenon Timur Kuran calls preference falsification (in his book Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification—a concept briefly mentioned in “The Essence of Peopling”1). Preference falsification is an information theory term for the tendency for people to express a public preference that is different from their private, interior preference. For various reasons, certain preferences may not be publicly acceptable to express; they may be punished by execution, or labor camps, or exile, or social exclusion, or at the very least suspicion and a risk of some of these things. When people do not express their true preferences, they are deprived of the opportunity to coordinate with each other to create a more preferable outcome for both. Preference falsification is not just a political phenomenon, but a 1 page 207.

Weaponized Sacredness

235

14.

product of our dual nature, experiencing ourselves on the one hand from the privileged first-person perspective, and on the other hand from the imagined perspective of others. Pretending to have different preferences than one really does may be necessary to maintain a sense of safety, social belonging, and status. People’s expressed, public preferences are a function of both their interior preferences and the perceived acceptability of revealing them; other people’s expressed preferences serve as a guide for measuring acceptability. So people’s expressed preferences are in part a function of other people’s expressed preferences. Under certain circumstances, when the distribution of preferences is right, a domino effect may be begun by a single dissenter, toppling the status quo of preference falsification. One dissenter may embolden others, and then together with them give the impression that it is acceptable for others to express their true preferences. On the other hand, people whose preferences are satisfied by the status quo may find it wise to begin to falsify their preferences when a revolution begins to look imminent. Kuran’s primary examples of the preference falsification dynamic are revolutions and counter-revolutions, revolutionaries unseating the old order, then the revolutionaries themselves being unseated, as in Russia, Iran, and Eastern Europe. One repeating feature of regime change is that even as an old preference falsification equilibrium collapses, a new one is erected in its place. For a nearer and fresher example, consider the case of gay marriage in the United States. Gay marriage is a very new issue; there was little support for it in the 1990s, and it was almost

unthinkable in the 1980s. Until 2003, it was constitutional for states to criminally prohibit gay sex. Gays experienced the opposite of legal protection, and their social status was poor. Many gay people engaged in preference falsification by hiding their sexuality (i.e., stayed in the closet), and many straight people felt socially obligated to denigrate gays even though they might have secretly preferred not to. But then the balance of opinion shifted very quickly. The debate on gay marriage is now over, and a new preference falsification regime is in place. Just as there used to be serious social consequences for being openly gay or supporting gay rights, there are now serious social consequences for expressing an opinion against gay marriage (and this applies retroactively to opinions expressed in the time before the current preference falsification equilibrium was in place, as Brendan Eich found out2). Defenders of this new order argue that expressing a preference against gay marriage is harmful, and that the moral and social harms vastly outweigh any restriction on expression, especially since no good people really want to express that anyway. This may be true. The important point is that it functions as a new sacredness, something that is so important that we agree not to examine it too closely, and to only speak of it in respectful, ideologically correct terms. But it is disturbing to watch a new sacredness be born, no matter how benign it seems, because like the water locked up for now in a dam, 2 Editor’s note: Eich, appointed CEO of Mozilla in 2014, had in 2008 made donations to political causes in support of banning gay marriage. Within weeks of accepting the position, he was forced under pressure to resign, following protests and boycotting of Mozilla products.

2.

“Sacredness binds and blinds.” This is Jonathan Haidt’s mantra from The Righteous Mind, suggesting that sacredness has an emotional component that encourages social bonding and protective outrage, as well as a cognitive component that induces “blindness”—to counterarguments, or to the humanity of heretics. Sacredness implies an in-group and an 237

Weaponized Sacredness

1.

14.

the path it might take in the future is inscrutable and hard to control. Social forces can have powerful, dangerous, unforeseen effects. The social force that I have been calling sacredness is one of the most powerful. As indicated in the title, it can be weaponized and turned against humans. It can be an engine of cooperation, or a destructive plague, and often displays both natures at once. It travels through many channels, via all forms of speech or human communication, and it operates at many scales. Its language is symbol, entangling map with territory, fusing the word spoken with the thing signified. Preference falsification is a mechanism by which sacredness can operate. But sacredness is not limited to causing people to lie; it can actually change their underlying, interior, private preferences. We might call the process of weeding and shaping individual preferences “preference husbandry.” This can be performed either by the individual himself, or by social forces acting on him. How does sacredness operate, and what are its tendencies? Here I will outline thirteen observations about sacredness warfare:

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

out-group. In-group members are perceivers of the sacredness (or competent pretenders); out-group members are non-perceivers, heretics, enemies of the group. Sacredness offers belonging to the in-group, but threatens exile for violations of sacredness or insufficient piety. Sacred values must be signaled as valuable in a sufficiently costly manner that sincerity is assured (or a believable public demonstration of sincerity, which anyway has the same effect on both members and outsiders). Ritual energizes the maintenance of sacredness and its power, a costly signal displayed to all (sincere believers or otherwise). Attacking rival sacrednesses or heretics provides evidence of sincerity or commitment to the sacredness. Attacking other believers for insufficient piety will do if heretics are not available. A sacredness battle is won when expressing contradictory or disrespectful thoughts is effectively prohibited by a preference falsification equilibrium; people must either learn to feel the new sacredness, or pretend to. But even as individual battles may be won, new challengers will appear; something that remains sacred for a long time has likely happened upon (evolved, that is to say) defenses against potential rival sacrednesses. Genuinely perceiving sacredness is probably the most reliable, believable way to signal respect for the sacredness and stay in the

Sacredness may perhaps be best understood, by our peculiarly constructed human minds, with reference to egregores—autonomous psychic entities made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. Egregoric entities, whether gods or demons or dictators at the center of a cult of personality,3 are powerful entities, even as they are imaginary—wholly created by and consisting of thoughts, speech, and behaviors. The human mind is a powerful entity, and becomes more powerful in coordination with others. To say that 3 Xavier Marquez, “A Simple Model of Cults of Personality,” Abandoned Footnotes 2011.

239

Weaponized Sacredness

The Egregore

14.

in-group. 10. Most people are capable, to a limited degree, of altering their perception of sacredness based on social cues; that is, something that is sincerely experienced as sacred, may years later be come to be experienced as silly or mundane, or, more commonly, as evil or vile. 11. Irony and sincerity are not mutually exclusive; it is difficult to measure the components of each in an action. 12. Anything attacking or threatening a preference falsification equilibrium usually wants to replace it with a different preference falsification equilibrium. 13. The new order brought about by a change in sacredness may make everyone worse off than before, and it is impossible to predict its effects before the fact.

an “imaginary” entity, existing only in human minds, has agency, is not much stranger than suggesting that humans themselves, inscrutable piles of preferences that we are, have agency. Agency is no more than “a quick and dirty way of contextualizing the temporal activities of entropy climbers,” as St. Rev puts it. Multiplying entities in this way helps make salient how unknowable these entities are—how little we know about the outcomes of social policy and change ahead of time, and how little we can know about them even after the fact. Here be dragons. These entities vary in how demanding they are— how much they terrorize their component humans. They also vary in terms of what they are able to get out of their humans in terms of productivity. Productivity (measured in harvests, cathedrals, moon landings, pyramids, and the like) can be modeled as an inverted U-shaped function of terror. A smart entity would keep its component humans in the zone of maximum productivity, not demanding too much from them, nor allowing them to slack off (producing nothing for the glory and amusement of the egregore and anyway perhaps feeling bored and useless). Old entities often have a sabbath attached to them, a frequent, repeating time for rest. The sacralization of this time places a hard-to-erode boundary around the demands that can be placed on constituent humans. This may be a way of keeping “demands” (terror) within the productive zone, and not triggering the entity’s own demise by demanding too much. Holiness signaling by conspicuous loafing does not seem to be the kind of thing that would trigger a preference falsification spiral through the mechanism of

14. Weaponized Sacredness sacredness, though it might be fun to try. A smart entity would alter its demands to maximize productivity, just as a smart virus wouldn’t kill its host quickly. But many viruses do kill quickly (especially newly evolved ones), and many governments do massacre their own people. Just as newly mutated viruses are not “smart” in the sense of having virulence-moderating features, social entities have not all had time to evolve features to moderate their demands. Oldness is not a guarantee of friendliness, but it is a filter for certain kinds of unfriendliness. Timur Kuran emphasizes how complex and inscrutable the workings of public policy are. Within a hierarchical bureaucracy, carrying out directives from above resembles a game of “telephone.” The dayto-day actions of its functionaries may bear scarcely any relation to its supposed mission. Consider also 241

the fact that, as an ordinary and regular aspect of the legislative process, ambiguity is intentionally and knowingly written into legislation, because any of the more specific versions of the law would not be able to pass a vote. Legislators decide that a decision should be made, but fail to actually make the pointed-at decision, instead delegating it to an entity only very indirectly touched by public or private opinion, or by democratic representation. The concrete and cubicles of bureaucracy are the physical signs of a powerful entity at work in the human world, but not precisely directed by any coherent, recognizable sort of human agency. If we posit the missing agency as a kind of group-psychological entity, not acting through supernatural processes but wholly through natural ones, composed of but not a simple function of human minds, we might hope to understand some of these entities, our evolutionary partners, in a characteristically human way, one that we are especially good at thinking about. Sometimes a sacred entity is personified, as with gods or demons or the centers of cults of personality. At other times, the sacred entity is composed only of abstract ideas, refusing to personify itself. Why might it benefit such an entity to hide its nature? The Devil traditionally has to obey his contracts. In legend, demons tend to be crafty lawyers, because the words of contracts seem to exert some kind of power over them. In the late 18th century, a peculiar kind of demon was raised. Since it called itself “government,” or “democracy,” the people who raised it contracted with it based on the assumption that it was, in fact, a vehicle for the streamlined manifestation of the will

To review, the preference falsification model posits that people have two sets of preferences, one public, and one private. There is a preference falsification equilibrium on the one hand, and an escape from that equilibrium on the other. Perhaps it seems that people’s natural state ought to be one free of such preference-falsification spirals. However, when a preference-falsification equilibrium collapses, it tends to be replaced (and may even be directly displaced) by a new preference-falsification equilibrium. Before the revolution, it is unwise to speak against the King; after the revolution, it is unwise to speak against the revolutionary party. And when the revolutionary party is displaced in turn, it becomes unwise to speak against the counter-revolution. People reel from the shifting 243

Weaponized Sacredness

Preference Falsification as Coordination Mechanism and Anti-Coordination Mechanism

14.

of the people. But the demon was tricky; its functions were not well-characterized by its description, and it almost immediately started to encase its contract (exemplified by the United States Constitution) in a layer of itself, giving itself say over when the contract might be violated, and what the words meant. The entity cloaked its contract in such powers as judicial review, appointing priests based on an arcane status competition to interpret its meaning. It noticed words that could increase its power, such as the Commerce Clause, and leaped out of its bottle wherever and however possible to exert more control over the processes of people and the world. No one can predict what it will do next.

social reality, but each time they settle into a new regime, and the next revolution usually comes as a surprise to everyone, even the revolutionaries themselves. Preference falsification prevents cooperation: if people cannot communicate what they want, they cannot coordinate to achieve it. But consider how much coordination (cooperation) is done exactly on the dimension of preference falsification. Social politeness often takes the form of preference falsification; expressing enthusiasm, approbation, or concern when it is not sincerely felt is a basic social skill. The natural state of humans may be to exist in the thrall of many preference falsification equilibria of various ages and origins. It is likely that the thing most likely to cause the unseating of a previous egregoric entity is another egregoric entity, rather than nothing. To the extent that these entities evolve, some reproducing themselves (using humans and tapping into their resource streams, from money to labor to sacredness) and others dying, then we may expect surviving entities to have evolved defenses to the breakdown of preference-falsification equilibria. This may include features for moderating the demands placed on component humans (friendliness, mentioned above), or features for preventing the initial defections that might cause the equilibria to collapse, or features for making such initial defections less likely to trigger a collapse. These are immune responses, and may be either psychologically internalized or socially imposed, or both. They may fit themselves toward human flourishing, or adapt human preferences to fit themselves, and attempt to keep them from demanding alternative conditions.

Weaponized Sacredness

245

14.

We might model people as having not just two sets of preferences, but two natures. (Recall that dichotomies are particularly gratifying ways for humans to organize the world.) Expanding from Kuran’s public-private dichotomy, the two natures might be described as on the one hand social, long-term in focus, sacredness-respecting, belonging-maintaining, and with high overlap of “public,” and on the other hand, short-term, moment-to-moment preference not connected to others or to cultural expectations, which must ordinarily be kept more “private.” We are Homo duplex, with one self spread out in time, connected to structures and institutions that may last even longer than a human lifetime, usually corresponding to the self viewed from the imagined perspective of others, the bee-self; and another self, perceived immediately from the privileged perspective of inside, the ape-self. (This is perhaps misleading, because the “ape self ” is still quite social. Desiring belonging, or the sense of belonging, is near-term comfort, not merely long-term coordination. Solidarity or companionship of this type is often available in small units, as from prostitutes or Twitter.) The relationship implied between the egregoric entity and its component people is mathematically complex, and difficult to represent in the two dimensions I have readily available to me. People do not necessarily prefer to exert the least amount of effort, to be on the far left side of the curve. Rather, they need to belong, to feel effective, and to feel useful to each other. They have a need for something that demands a great deal of effort from them, so that they may not feel bored or burdensome, but valuable and

skillful. Demandingness can be analogized to the negotiation between the short-term desires of the Nature Two self and the long-term, narrative, social desires of the Nature One self. The more one favors the long-term and social self over the short-term egotistical self, the more demanding the entity sacrificed for can be said to be. This demandingness is precisely the axis of coordination. In a sense what it demands is preference falsification, but it is more accurate to say that it demands preference husbandry, balancing the preferences of different sub-self (or perhaps extra-self) entities. Moment to moment, adhering to the demands of egregoric entities often looks like preference falsification: the avoidance of “temptation,” which the short-term self, disconnected from narratives of identity and sacredness, might like to engage in: running from battle instead of fighting, engaging in adulterous sex, sitting around instead of doing something hard. But on the other side of the “temptation” is an entity whose preferences are satisfied by not engaging in the tempting activity. This is the self that believes in bravery and glory in battle, or in having an interesting life, or in becoming skillful at something, or in monogamous marriage—the long-term result of many short-term sacrifices. But the magnitude of these sacrifices is the measure of their value, and by implication, costly signals of cooperation. Preference falsification may inhibit cooperation, but this form of preference falsification (or preference husbandry, in favor of a certain subset of preferences) is precisely the axis along which coordination occurs.

Weaponized Sacredness

247

14.

Up to a point, what people want is to do what is difficult (and therefore usually awarded belonging and/or status). Preference “falsification” in this sense is therefore a necessary human survival skill, when survival is predicated on belonging to a social unit. Consider my revised version of Maslow’s pyramid (pictured). But after a certain point, determined by many factors, the dynamic breaks down. Some yokes are too heavy, especially when they are not adequately rewarded. An entity may hitch humans to heavy, unrewarding yokes and keep them there with a true preference falsification dynamic, and therein lies the danger: the very attributes that allow us to cooperate for our mutual benefit, also allow us to “cooperate” for our mutual emiseration. Positing egregoric entities as a layer in the structure of peopling is a suspicious move that tends to meet with opposition. While we regularly speak of these entified beings in specific cases—governments, religions, institutions—it meets with objections to speak

of them as having their own natures and behaviors (and perhaps even agency) separately analyzable from that of their component humans. It may make about as much sense to attribute agency to a particular government as to a hurricane. But since the actions of a government are built on the substrate of human minds, unlike hurricanes, and since agency is a characteristic projected onto human minds (even if not actually detectable, strictly speaking), then it makes at least cognitive sense to attribute agency to one and not the other, if only provisionally. Another reason to project agency onto nonhuman egregoric entities like governments is that it gives them appropriately creepy connotations, so that we may look at them as alien things, so that we may have fresh eyes and be better anthropologists from Mars. The entity known as the Communist Party, centered on Mao, may not

Weaponized Sacredness

249

14.

have intended to starve tens of thousands of people to death; egregores may not (always) eat people. But it is an interesting and very human-scale project, to ask what this kind of entity does eat, how it sustains itself, how it dies. Things that are demanding of us (with or without their own attributed agency) help us coordinate together. But beings of our nature might coordinate on a more intimate level: to choose or create the egregoric entity on the Nature One level that gives us the most benefits on the Nature Two level—keeps us comfortable, belonging, well-fed and satisfied. We may wish to choose an entity that demands little, on the left half of the curve. But there is another possible axis of coordination: we might also coordinate to choose the egregoric entity that allows us to create the coolest stuff on the Nature One level—to go to the moon, to build cathedrals, to make atomic bombs and smallpox vaccines. We may wish to choose an entity toward the peak of the productivity distribution, even if it is more demanding. Of course all this posits that humans have a high degree of control over selecting the kind of egregoric entities they wish to serve. In reality, we may have no more control over that than over what viruses infect us (which is to say, a non-zero but small amount). Kuran’s preference falsification model necessarily simplifies matters, allowing people preferences between only two regimes. Often there are only two available choices; but what these choices happen to look like is determined by a complex set of forces, and the choices may not bear much resemblance to the desires of most of the population. All offered

choices may be poor. Different people are differently susceptible to different kind of entity-choices; the kind of entity offered as a choice (either the status quo or the revolutionary vanguard) depends on the composition of the population, cultural and technological factors favoring entities with certain features, and pure chance and coincidence along an array of other factors. It is a huge and unwarranted assumption to expect that the actually existing government, or its revolutionary or counter-revolutionary replacement, is a simple (perhaps additive or averaging) function of the desires of component individuals. It is also generally unwarranted to assume that any of these entities is friendly. However, “not belonging to one of these entities at all” is rarely an option.

Sacredness and Freedom of Speech Free speech seems like a value designed to prevent preference falsification spirals from occurring, and perhaps even to ensure that cherished values are protected by making sure people are regularly exposed to common counterarguments or threats to values, so that an immunity can be developed. Kuran writes: It has been observed that our beliefs are strongest when they have been mildly attacked, for then we have become aware of their vulnerability and learned how to counter criticisms. Prior exposure to mild objections thus produces resistance to later persuasion, which then blocks sharp changes in private knowledge and preferences. By implication, beliefs whose counterarguments

4 Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Emphasis in original; citations omitted.

251

Weaponized Sacredness

Unfortunately, despite its many potential benefits, free speech must be implemented by those mysterious entities called governments, playing endless games of self-serving “telephone” with vague inputs from constituent humans. Free speech is also implemented socially, through norms and trust. Since free speech is a coordination mechanism and decreases preference falsification, it is a threat to any entity that benefits from preference falsification. And as we have seen, both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary governments benefit from preference falsification. Speech is the stuff of social information; few entities would not like to exert a great deal of control over its exchange. With threats from all sides, it seems like it would be difficult to maintain meaningful freedom of speech as an equilibrium. Even where nominally free in the sense of the First Amendment, speech is the most important battleground of sacredness warfare by social mechanisms, such as shunning or disapproval. (This is especially the case if “speech” is interpreted broadly to include any attempts to communicate information symbolically, as in art or ritual.) As John Stuart Mill observed, the

14.

were unthought are easier to change than ones whose counterarguments, while treated as unthinkable, have enjoyed at least some public exposure. When a revolution challenges many established beliefs, the ones to succumb first may thus be those that had enjoyed the greatest protection from public challenges.4

greatest threat to free speech—the greatest danger of a preference falsification equilibrium, to use Kuran’s term—comes from social and economic forces, not from the government. Everyone needs to make a living, and everyone has an innate need for social belonging; if these are held hostage in exchange for making the correct speech performances, those performances will be made (and others refrained from). One strategy has been to attempt to sacralize free speech itself; but this has not proved very successful. Entities that wish to restrict speech simply define violations of their sacredness as “not speech.” And there seems to be no egregoric entity protecting the value of free speech for its own sake. Freedom of speech is a fragile and rather pathetic construct, unable to defend itself against virulent sacrednesses.

Escape from Preference Falsification? Sacredness warfare may be conducted with words or guns, but relies in part on a sensory capacity for perceiving social information (and the presence, desires, promises, and demands of egregoric entities). Some people are entirely lacking in this sensory capacity— for various neurological or other reasons, they are blind to sacredness. For most people, the capacity varies, in accordance with the variance of individual susceptibility to sacredness in general, and the particular nature of the sacredness the individual is asked to accept, and the fit between them. Only a small subset of sacredness-blind people may be needed to defeat a preference falsification equilibrium, provided that the private preferences of

253

Weaponized Sacredness

5 Eric Crampton, “Preference falsification: King Arthur edition,” Offsetting Behavior, 2013.

14.

others are properly distributed such that their offer of coordination propagates. Under precisely the right circumstances, with the right lined-up dominoes of public and private preferences, “[o]ne truth-teller can break a preference-falsification equilibrium.”5 In other circumstances, even great outpourings of dissent are not enough to upset the equilibrium. And even if it is toppled, there is no guarantee that the new equilibrium will be any better; it may be much worse. In sum, the bad news is that we don’t have much control; the good news is that we wouldn’t know how to use it if we did.

COOPERATIVE IGNORANCE Ironically, once ignorance is defined, it loses its very definition. —Linsey McGoey, “The Logic of Strategic Ignorance” In game theory, rational parties try to maximize their expected payoff, assuming that the other parties are rational, too. Rationality can be a handicap, though: a rational party is limited in the threats it can make compared to an irrational party, because a rational party can’t credibly threaten to harm its own interests. An irrational party may be harder to cooperate with and less likely to be chosen as a cooperation partner, but in certain situations, it has more powerful strategies open to it than a party limited by rational maximization of expected value. An irrational party is not to be messed with, and can often demand concessions that would not be given to a rational party. Evolutionary psychologists, for instance, posit that altruistic punishment is an adaptation that fits in this slot—giving people sufficient irrational motivation to harm their own interests for the sake of promoting fairness norms. Rationality is good, but a little

Cooperative Ignorance

255

15.

strategic irrationality is better—especially in the service of promoting cooperation. Similarly, information and options are valuable, but in certain situations, not having options and not getting information are valuable, too. There is power both in limiting the responses that are available to you and limiting your knowledge. In the game of chicken, in which two cars are speeding toward each other, each with the option to swerve and be disgraced or continue forward and risk a crash, the classic strategy in the literature is to toss one’s steering wheel out the window—signaling to one’s opponent that one has given up the option of swerving. (One might alternatively blacken one’s own windshield, the information-avoidance equivalent of tossing the steering wheel out the window.) A contract is the cooperative version of the steering wheel out the window: it limits one’s future strategies and serves as a costly signal that one will pursue a particular course of action, so that the other party will be motivated to act in accordance with one’s self-limited strategy. Thomas Schelling, in his 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict, calls “the power to bind oneself ” a type of bargaining power. “The sophisticated negotiator may find it difficult to seem as obstinate as a truly obstinate man,” Schelling says. “If a man knocks at a door and says that he will stab himself unless he is given $10, he is more likely to get $10 if his eyes are bloodshot.” Options, in and of themselves, can be harmful. It is not the case that we are always better off having a choice. For instance, the homeowner who opens the door to the man in the previous paragraph with bloodshot eyes obviously would prefer not having this “option” at all, even though he makes the correct

choice under the circumstances. A more common example of a choice that makes the offeree worse off is an unwanted invitation: if an annoying or dull colleague invites you to dinner, you may accept (and suffer through it) or decline (and feel guilty and lousy), but you may not be returned to the blissful moment before being offered the choice. J. David Velleman makes much of this fact in his article “Against the Right to Die,” pointing ultimately to terminally ill individuals who may wish to remain alive without having to choose to do so. Some people, he says, prefer the position of helpless ignorance to either choosing to die or taking responsibility for the choice to remain alive. (Of course, faced with this argument, dark minds like mine immediately conjure up people who prefer to be killed without choosing it, rather than choosing to die or choosing to live.) Velleman provides other examples (mostly via Schelling): The union leader who cannot persuade his members to approve a pay-cut, or the ambassador who cannot contact his head-of-state for a change of brief, negotiates from a position of strength; whereas the negotiator for whom all concessions are possible deals from weakness. If the rank-and-file give their leader the option of offering a pay-cut, then he may find that he has to exercise that option in order to get a contract, whereas he might have gotten a contract without a pay-cut if he had not had the option of offering one. The union leader will then have to decide whether to take the option and reach an agreement or to leave the option and call a strike.

Strategic Ignorance, Negative Knowledge, and Knowledge Alibis Often the value in strategic ignorance is not ignorance itself, but being able to plausibly claim that one is ignorant, in order to avoid the consequences of knowledge. Plausible deniability is the tactic investigated in Linsey McGoey’s “The Logic of Strategic Ignorance,”2 in which she investigates a scandal involving pharmaceutical testing: 1 For an extended treatment of this argument, see “Excerpts from the View From Hell” page 31. 2 McGoey 2012.

257

Cooperative Ignorance

So options can be, and frequently are, a harm. Information is inextricably tied up with options, and information can be a harm, too. Every option is only exercisable if it is communicated; if you don’t know you have an option, then you can’t exercise it. Poor communications may sometimes be a negotiating advantage. But the possible strategic harms of information go beyond knowing that one has an option; all the information about states of the world and possible outcomes is potentially harmful, depending on the situation. The phrase strategic ignorance is used to cover situations in which information is strategically and rationally avoided in order to maximize expected value.

15.

But no matter which of these outcomes would make him better off, choosing it will still leave him worse off than he would have been if he had never had the option at all.1

The effort among senior management to demonstrate non-knowledge of [a low-level medical researcher’s] actions suggests that the most important managerial resource during the scandal was not the need to demonstrate prescient foresight, or the early detection of potential catastrophes. What mattered most was the ability to insist such detection was impossible. For senior staff at SocGen, the most useful tool was the ability to profess ignorance of things it was not in their interest to acknowledge. …[O]rganizations often function more efficiently because of the shared willingness of individuals to band together in dismissing unsettling knowledge. McGoey emphasizes the strategic reliance on knowledge alibis—experts whose function is to prove the plausibility of the ignorance of a given actor, allowing one to defend one’s ignorance by …mobilizing the ignorance of higher-placed experts. A curious feature of knowledge alibis is that experts who should know something are particularly useful for not knowing it. This is because their expertise helps to legitimate claims that a phenomenon is impossible to know, rather than simply unknowable by the unenlightened. If the experts didn’t know it, nobody could.3 In order to employ strategic ignorance and its sub-strategies like knowledge alibis, a special type 3 Emphasis Perry’s.

In strategic ignorance, to think further into a certain direction can be not just unimportant (a waste of resources), but damaging and dangerous. Even free, easily available information must often be avoided. And the value of strategic ignorance does not lie just in plausible deniability. Information itself, even when not known by other people, can be harmful. Consider as a minimal case the defector from North Korea, who must obviously prefer not to know about how his family members who stayed in the country have been tortured. And in a happier case, those who value surprise 4 page 341. 5 Citations omitted.

259

Cooperative Ignorance

Negative knowledge is an awareness of the things we have no incentive or interest in knowing about further. As Matthias Gross writes in a seminal article on the epistemology of ignorance, negative knowledge involves “active consideration that to think further into a certain direction will be unimportant.”5

15.

of knowledge is required: negative knowledge. This, McGoey says, is not “non-knowledge” or a void of knowing, but “knowledge (whether unconscious or articulated) of the limits and the adverse repercussions of knowledge.” How do you know what to avoid knowing? This is the domain of negative knowledge. Negative knowledge is an active process, similar to the active cognitive stopping (“closure”) that helps brains function well, identified in my piece “Puzzle Theory.”4 When performed by organizations rather than brains, the process appears a bit more sinister:

prefer not to receive “spoilers,” that is, information out of the proper order that would maximize the aesthetic experience of surprise. The spoiler taboo is one of the most innocuous manifestations of cooperative ignorance.

Plausible Deniability Isn’t Everything A colorful illustration of the negative value of information, which doesn’t rely on the value of being able to plausibly deny information, is found in the 2000 paper “Strategic Ignorance as a Self-Disciplining Device,” by Juan Carrillo and Thomas Mariotti. The example central to the paper is the fact that almost everyone (including smokers) vastly overestimates the harmful effects of smoking cigarettes. This is true even though information about the true risks of smoking is freely and widely available. In a large sample, “the average perceived probability of getting lung cancer because of smoking is 0.426 for the full sample and 0.368 for smokers,” say Carrillo and Mariotti. “By contrast, the U.S. Surgeon General’s estimate for this risk lies in a range from 0.05 to 0.10.”6 The authors’ posited explanation is that people remain strategically ignorant of the true, surprisingly low risks from smoking in order to bind themselves to a course of action of not smoking and avoiding the small risk. In a sense, they are playing a game against their future selves, each of whom have some time preference. If at any point they chose to learn about the true risks of smoking, the pleasure and productivity benefits of smoking might outweigh the risk (now 6 Carillo & Mariotti, The Review of Economic Studies.

261

Cooperative Ignorance

7 Smith & Leggat, “An international review of tobacco smoking in the medical profession: 1974–2004,” Proc. of Biological Sciences 2007. 8 Dekker et al., “Prevalence of smoking in physicians and medical students, and the generation effect in the Netherlands,” Social Science & Medicine 1993. 9 Sotiropoulos et al., “Smoking habits and associated factors among Greek physicians,” Public Health 2007.

15.

known to be small), and each future self might over-consume cigarettes throughout the lifetime. But by keeping themselves ignorant of the true risks of smoking, they can bind their future selves not to smoke despite the low risks, preventing the risk of overconsumption. It’s the only way they can get their time-inconsistent future selves to all “cooperate” despite sacrificing pleasure and productivity at every stage. The example and the model raise many questions. If knowledge of the relatively low risk of smoking were a powerful factor in the decision to smoke, shouldn’t physicians and other medical experts smoke at a very high rate? They are effectively forced to learn something like the forbidden information identified by Carrillo and Mariotti. Yet doctors tend to smoke at a rate close to that for their country,7 only in a few cases smoking more than the reference population.8 And in many countries, doctors continued (or continue) to smoke at very high rates for decades after the breakthrough reports linking cigarettes to lung cancer emerged during the 1950s. 38% of Greek doctors smoked in the early 2000s, and half of them started smoking in medical school.9 Meanwhile, fewer than 10% of doctors in the United States admit to smoking, despite having presumably the same information about the risks as the Greek doctors. Information about the risk of disease does not seem to be a great

motivator for real people in the world making smoking decisions. Consider this one piece of information, however, as a representative of a body of information—“evidence that smoking isn’t that bad”—and consider its counter-body, “evidence that smoking is really bad actually.” These are, in many ways, conflicting ideologies as much as bodies of information. What evidence exists under each umbrella? And which category is more likely to reach people—either by their personal (perhaps rational) choice, or by factors outside their control? We must include not only cold medical facts, but also soft social facts, such as the social status and moral judgments accorded to smoking by the surrounding culture. To remain ignorant of “evidence that smoking isn’t that bad” facts, and only be exposed to “evidence that smoking is really bad actually” facts, might be a decision a rational person might make, to force their fickle, time-inconsistent selves to cooperate across time to avoid smoking. It is certainly a decision that is made for most people in developed countries. Most Americans would agree that this is a huge beneficial accomplishment. The most interesting question to me is this: what methods do societies use to accomplish these feats of cooperative ignorance? A related question is, how do people know what to avoid learning in the first place? How is negative knowledge accomplished? If you don’t know the risk of lung cancer in smoking, for example, from your truly ignorant perspective, it’s equally likely that the true risk is higher or lower than your belief. Even if you wished to discipline your future selves to prevent them from

Cooperative Ignorance

263

15.

smoking, there would be no reason to suspect that learning more about the true risks would endanger your goal and make smoking more attractive. The existence of cooperative ignorance presupposes that there are strategies that groups use to guide members away from certain information. I will speculate about these shortly. Additional intuitive hooks are available if the lung cancer risk example seems questionable. People who wish to avoid overconsumption of a drug may avoid learning about the desirable effects of a drug simply by not trying it. Students in Ph.D. programs, aspiring actors and musicians, and those in multilevel marketing schemes tend to avoid information about their likelihood of career success, as this might endanger their commitment to their paths. People in committed marriages tend to avoid learning about possible outside romantic options by not going on dates or maintaining profiles on dating sites. In fact, a married person would likely be offended to learn that his spouse went on dates, had a profile on a dating site, or otherwise appeared to gather information about extramarital options: merely being willing to gather this information signals a lack of commitment to the marriage. This is ideology on the smallest scale, the “zone of motivated ignorance” that Jonathan Haidt says we tend to find protecting the sacred. Strategic ignorance as self-discipline is an elegant model, and demonstrates at least an existence case of strategic ignorance without plausible deniability: parties need not deny knowledge to anyone other than themselves. The authors say of their model:

[O]ur model would be analogous to a multi-person situation where the information obtained by any individual becomes automatically public. While this assumption is in general hard to motivate, it seems particularly natural in our intra-personal game with perfect recall.10 The authors may not be charitable enough about the applications of their model that assumes that “information obtained by any individual becomes automatically public,” for a fact of information is that it tends to leak. Often the best way to plausibly deny having certain knowledge is to actually not have it. This may be true both in an institutional setting, when paper trails are the means of checking, and in ordinary interpersonal settings, when emotion, cognition, and ritual responses are the primary means of “checking” the truth.

Leakage Robert Boyd and Sarah Mathew recently released a little paper containing a mathematical model that demonstrates the value of third-party monitoring in reliable communications.11 When communication is only one-to-one, “cheap talk” (signaling that is not costly, like a peacock tail or tattoo) that may be deceptive is slow to evolve; the fitness gain necessary to motivate it into existence is huge. But when third parties monitor communications for truthfulness, cheap talk becomes a much more economical 10 Emphasis in original. 11 “Third-party monitoring and sanctions aid the evolution of language,” Evolution and Human Behavior 2015.

265

Cooperative Ignorance

12 Johnstone and Grafen, “Dishonesty and the handicap principle,” Animal Behaviour 1993. 13 Nick Szabo, “The Playdough Protocols” 2002.

15.

proposition: the fitness gain necessary to get the ball rolling is much smaller. Cheap communication seems to require reputation. The emotion of shame—the sick dread of being publicly caught acting improperly, as in a lie—motivates truthfulness, just as the emotion of spite motivates the altruistic punishment mentioned in the first section. Once a communication framework exists, deception is still valuable and tempting, but deception-detection tends to get better as deception becomes more sophisticated. (The existence of a small, stable population of sociopaths may indicate that there are multiple stable strategies existing at different frequencies, as with some animal species.12) Many tactics have been developed to verify the truthfulness of information. In ancient Sumer, a protocol was developed as a “level of indirection” (a sort of checksum) to verify the accuracy of cheap information: marking not only the number of tokens representing different kinds of goods, but also the number of different types of goods, and multiplying these together into a primitive (but hard-to-fake) hash.13 (This is very similar to the modern use of techniques like parity bits; while the originals worked mostly against deception, the same techniques protect us against the information decay of noise.) Levels of indirection are useful in less abstract contexts as well. An ideology (or aesthetic) can be regarded as containing a truth claim, and ideologies often form axes of cooperation. Commitment to an

ideology, or an “egregore” in previous terminology, with its flags and costumes and rituals and outlandish beliefs, demonstrates commitment to one’s group, without the necessity of constant one-to-one commitment signaling. It’s very efficient, just as speech is more efficient than grooming. The truth claim of an ideology can be dissected into parts: first, “this ideology is true”; second, “I believe this ideology.” Skill at asserting the first generally implies the second, and for that matter, helps everyone, not just the arguer, more plausibly portray belief (not least by actual, sincere belief). Beliefs leak. They leak out from conscious (and even unconscious) knowledge into behavior, emotional display, display of cognition, and ritual performance. The more “checks” a group has available to detect deception by a member, ideological or otherwise, the better its chances of reliably detecting deception. So a member must be able to pass as many checks as possible: crying or laughing or becoming angered when necessary, performing rituals without groaning too much, and demonstrating appropriate cognition as evidenced by speech and action. As an example of cognitive performance leakage, the time it takes to make a decision or produce a response is itself a signal of what’s going on mentally. An insincere person or liar, or one playing another strategy that requires more processing time, will take longer to produce a response. Since leakage is so prevalent, I emphasize again that actually being ignorant of information is often the best way to plausibly deny the possession of information, just as sincerely believing something is often the best way to signal believing it. Before the turn of the

Not all deception is intentional. Animals deceive each other all the way down the phylogenetic ladder. An animal’s coloring, deceptively mimicking the coloring of a poisonous species, arises through no intent at all. And in the human world, many deceptions are unintentional as well; a party to a romantic relationship may form a belief that the relationship is exclusive or permanent when it is not, even though the other party had no intent to cause such a belief. Doctors (and other healers) prior to the twentieth century no doubt believed they had the power to heal their clients, though in fact they did not; their patients were deceived, but not intentionally. The term “scam” implies an intentional deceiver as 267

Cooperative Ignorance

The Cooperative Aspects of the Scam

15.

most recent century, it was fashionable to investigate self-deception as a means of facilitating the deception of others. How can you deceive yourself ? Self-deception is possible because knowledge is stored in many layers of consciousness, not just one coherent store of knowledge. And self-deception may be broadly beneficial. A famous and much-reported study from a quarter of a century ago found that a measure of self-deception predicted success in competition in a single college swim team; my research has not revealed any major attempts at replicating the result. So we are not left with much besides our armchairs to help us determine the plausibility of the hypothesis that self-deception facilitates the deception of others. It is the same for the hypothesis that others help us to deceive ourselves.

well as a victim. In this section we will be considering only intentional deception. There is a truism about scams that a mark can only be deceived if he wants to believe; all deception relies on self-deception. The ideal victim of a scam is a person who desperately wants to believe in a reality different from actual reality. Perhaps he receives no utility—or even negative utility—from the actual state of affairs. In other words, reality, such as it is, causes him pain. He is willing to risk everything on the possibility of a different reality being true, precisely because the present reality is of little use to him. The scammer provides a temporary service, offering for sale a plausible facsimile of a different reality. In this fantasy world, the mark gets to be rich, or loved (as in dating scams), or healthy (as in healing scams), or young (as in anti-aging products); he gets to contact his deceased relatives, or achieve spiritual transcendence or high status. What does the victim get out of it? The service the scammer provides to the mark is a plausibility structure for a desirable belief—usually only temporary. The problem with the scam is that it comes to an end, with the victim generally worse off than if he had never received the “service” provided by the scammer.14 But what if it never had to end? What if we could all scam each other, forever, to believe in a reality that is better for us than actual reality? That is the hope of cooperative ignorance.

Methods of Cooperative Ignorance 14 Erving Goffman, “On Cooling the Mark Out,” Psychiatry 1952.

“Protective stupidity” and “cooperative ignorance” have negative connotations, but recall the very strategic, useful, and even socially beneficial applications outlined in previous sections. It’s not always a bad 15 Orwell, 1984.

269

Cooperative Ignorance

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.15

15.

If we deceive ourselves and remain ignorant of certain information for our own benefit, how do we know what information to avoid? Within a single mind, knowledge and memory do not exist as a single, unitary set of beliefs, all of which are available at all times. Rather, there are many layers of consciousness, many selves for different situations and roles, each of which has access to only the knowledge and memories relevant to the current situation. Before learning information consciously, we get many emotional cues about how to treat the information, and whether to pay attention to it at all. The capacity to be interested or bored with possible research areas or trains of thought helps us seek information that is valuable and avoid information that is harmful or useless. The sinister-sounding process George Orwell describes is quite natural, and frequently valuable:

thing. One method that I have already treated in detail is the maintenance of sacredness.16 Groups protect their foundational myths and fantasies by maintaining an emotional taboo around the sacred myth, a zone of motivated ignorance. It is impolite and even disgusting to question foundational myths, or to discuss them with the wrong emotional valence. But humans are curious creatures, and some research is bound to occur. A powerful method to deal with curiosity is to manipulate the results of research by proffering a biased sample: ensuring that when research does occur, the early stages of research confirm the group fantasy and discourage further research. Benevolent governments or organizations might ensure that research on smoking quickly turns up only negative information: short, easy-to-digest information with headings like “Get the Facts!” that obscure the true risk in favor of reporting on harms alone. If governments don’t want citizens to use drugs (perhaps for the citizens’ own good), but realize that citizens will try drugs as part of their research, they might make particularly poisonous and unpleasant drugs legal and widely available, such as alcohol. If reading and learning in general are to be discouraged because they are bad for us, a government might fill its schools with boring, irrelevant, tedious literature. A related method is to disguise a tabooed area of reality as something else. When a curious human attempts to research “medicine” or “education” or “philosophy,” he will be harmlessly diverted into a safe zone of research that conveniently goes by the name 16 “Weaponized Sacredness,” page 233.

271

Cooperative Ignorance

Thanks to Rob Sica for librarian assistance.

15.

of the dangerous area, and never know the difference. In accordance with Linsey McGoey’s observation that “experts who should know something are particularly useful for not knowing it,” certain people might be given high status, legitimacy, and attention, on the expectation that this makes them experts who should know something. However, as a condition for their high status and legitimacy, they must be persuaded to only reveal beneficial information, and not defect from the cooperative ignorance pact. Such people can make cooperative ignorance agreements much stronger. All of this may sound rather top-down and authoritarian, but we all cooperate to maintain desired ignorance. Law enforcement is top-down, but if everyone simultaneously decided to litter and steal and burn down buildings, the police would not have enough resources to address it. Rather, we all cooperate to not commit crimes (or even impoliteness), both by choosing not to personally commit crimes and by altruistically punishing those who do, at cost to ourselves. In this same way, we all cooperate to maintain ignorance about the things it is better for us not to know. The main problem with cooperative ignorance is that it’s hard to check whether it’s really better not to know something, except by knowing it. And then it’s too late.

INEQUALITIES In “Minimum Viable Superorganism,”1 Kevin Simler posits a minimal structure by which an institution made up of self-interested participants can achieve its goals: “Individuals should grant social status to others for advancing the superorganism’s goals.” There are two definitive activities within the prestige economy. In this model, prestige inequalities are not socially harmful, but a consequence of a system that harnesses self-interest to achieve the goal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” This bears only a vague resemblance to the system we currently find ourselves in. And that’s not a criticism of the model. Humans as a species are unimaginably richer now than in ancestral times, compared to how many of us there are. Why, given this ingenious mechanism for the distribution of talents and resources, is there still so much hunger, misery, and boredom? The answer lies in modern innovations in the ancestrally interacting economies of subsistence, money, and prestige.

Three Ancestral Economies In the most virtuous instantiation of the minimum 1 Simler, Melting Asphalt.

16. Inequalities viable superorganism, people are motivated to advance the goals of the group, using their abilities and property, in exchange for a terminal value (status or prestige), which was, in our evolutionary history, reliably correlated with cooperation and mating opportunities. (Similarly, we might say that sugar is a terminal value because its pursuit was reliably correlated with survival in our prehistory.) For a biological organism, maximizing genetic fitness (survival and reproduction of viable offspring) seems like it would be the terminal value, and in the eyes of Nature, it is. But when other metrics are extremely reliably correlated with biological goals, organisms may in practice find it more efficient to focus on these proxy measures. This is what makes the phenomenon of a “supernormal stimulus” possible. Today, almost everyone could afford to raise a dozen children to reproductive maturity, yet almost no one 273

does. An organism that sought to maximize fitness directly would certainly do so. But humans do not. (I certainly don’t.) Other proxy metrics of fitness, most importantly for this discussion prestige, are pursued instead. In hunter-gatherer and agriculture societies, one of the most important goals of the superorganism is to maximize the number of subsisting people within the group or network. This is especially important for defense purposes: a group of high density can maintain its territory against the incursions of those of lower density. Defense requirements necessitated by the interaction of settled agrarian and raiding nomadic societies were probably historically important in the emergence of mega-empires, Peter Turchin argues, forcing societies to innovate ways to achieve higher density and complexity in order to defend themselves from (also innovating) hostile armies.2 Large-scale cooperation became an existential necessity. So if the ancestral superorganism’s main goal was to maximize viable population density, then it would reward those who contributed to this goal. Wayne Suttles defines three economies operating in some hunter-gatherer peoples of the American West Coast: subsistence (food and other goods directly related to the survival of people), wealth (stores of value, such as baskets or blankets, produced, kept, and traded), and prestige (acquired though gifts of wealth via the potlatch system).3 All layers interact; no economy is separate from the 2 Turchin, “A theory for the formation of large agrarian empires,” Journal of Global History 2009. 3 Suttles, “Affinal Ties, Subsistence, and Prestige among the Coast Salish,” 1960.

Explanations of the potlatch have been only partial ones, finding its function in the expression of the individual’s drive for high status or in the fulfillment of society’s need for solidarity. Relating these functions to man’s other requirements for survival has often been inhibited by an assumption that the satisfaction of alimentary needs through the food quest and the satisfaction of psychological needs through the manipulation of wealth form two separate systems, the “subsistence economy” and the “prestige economy.” Or if a relationship between the two is hypothesized, the hypothesis usually makes the “prestige economy” dependent upon the “subsistence economy”; it is assumed that a rich habitat provides an abundance of food which in turn supports the prestige economy which in turn maintains social stratification. I believe, however, that it is more reasonable to assume that, for a population to have survived in a given environment for any length of time, its subsistence activities and prestige-gaining activities are likely to form a single integrated system by which that population has adapted to its environment.4 The Pacific Northwestern environment provided diverse resources, each with an “owner” who maintained it and controlled its exploitation. These resources exhibited a characteristic common among human environments of evolutionary adaptation: seasonal and yearly variability. A group specializing 4 Ibid. Emphasis Perry’s.

275

16. Inequalities

others. Suttles says:

in a single resource, without opportunities for trade with other specialists, would find its numbers greatly diminished in a bad year. On the other hand, many specialist groups would find themselves with a surplus beyond their subsistence needs in many years. It could not be stored for future consumption. The systems solution to this problem is money. Suttles refers to woven baskets, mountain goat blankets, and the like as wealth—good that took significant human effort to produce, that could be easily stored and transferred, and that were recognized as valuable by other groups. They display the most important characteristics of money: to act as a store of value and a medium of exchange. They allowed consumption to be smoothed across nearby groups over time, providing a mechanism of low cognitive cost to measure complex debts. Among the Salish, Suttles says, a group that had a sudden abundance of food would give it to another group, and the recipient group would “thank” the donor group with blankets and other “wealth.” (This was not conceived of as payment.) The donor group could then use the accumulated wealth to increase its own consumption in times of need. In addition, wealthy families could afford to support more wives and husbands of their children on their property, who could engage not only in subsistence production but in direct production of wealth (e.g. weaving). But what does one do with massive accumulations of wealth? Suttles says: Since wealth is indirectly or directly obtainable through food, then inequalities in food

A stylized integrated economy. 277

16. Inequalities

production will be translated into inequalities in wealth. If one community over a period of several years were to produce more food than its neighbors, it might come to have a greater part of the society’s wealth. Under such circumstances the less productive communities might become unable to give wealth back in exchange for further gifts of food from the more productive one. If amassing wealth were an end in itself the process of sharing surplus food might thus break down. But wealth, in the native view, is only a means to high status achieved through the giving of it. And so the community that has converted its surplus food into wealth and now has a surplus of

wealth gets rid of its wealth by giving it away at a potlatch. And this, though the participants need not be conscious of it, by “restoring the purchasing power” of the other communities, enables the whole process to continue. The potlatchers have converted their surplus wealth into high status. High status in turn enables the potlatchers to establish wider ties, make better marriages with more distant villages, and thus extend the process farther.5 In this system, the innate drive for prestige is directed toward achieving the goals of the superorganism, which in this case are probably highly correlated with the material well-being of its members. (The system of betting on cock fights in Bali is analogous, if not as progressively redistributive.6) Below is an illustration of the workings of such a system. This requires an intricate balance. Innovation and social change upset this balance, and the system must reorganize itself to accommodate changes. In our present economy, prestige is no longer so tightly harnessed to improve the well-being of members.

Modern Money and Prestige We moderns think of prestige inequalities as a bad thing, undermining democratic ideals of egalitarianism. No one is better than anyone else. Within Suttles’s model (and Simler’s model), prestige is actually a 5 Ibid. Emphasis Perry’s. 6 Clifford Geertz, “Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight,” 2005. Discussed by Perry at greater length in “What is Ritual,” specifically the section “Ritual Combat” page 166.

A modern economy. 279

16. Inequalities

mechanism for resource redistribution: a means of combating inefficient forms of wealth inequality. First, in our system, prestige is expected to be produced directly, for example through education, rather than through gifts of wealth or subsistence. Vast amounts of effort and resources are expended with the hopes of directly increasing one’s own prestige (or that of one’s children), rather than producing and acquiring resources to redistribute. Education is even seen as a means to acquiring subsistence or wealth (though its value as an investment may be on par with buying diamonds retail, especially for the poorest). And educational institutions are often the targets of potlatch-style donations from wealthy individuals. Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to the Newark public school system. It was presumably

Zuckerberg’s best option for trading wealth for prestige, but its results were vastly inferior to direct redistribution in terms of the well-being of the recipients. And let us not forget the plight of adjunct faculty. Second, the myth or ideal of prestige equality reduces the ability of high-productivity individuals to purchase prestige in exchange for wealth. Randall Collins (in Interaction Ritual Chains) describes our flat status landscape: Most individuals are known only inside local networks, and invisible outside of them no matter their fame inside… the status order is invisible, or visible only within specialized networks; occupation and wealth does not get deference, nor form visible status groups broadcasting categorical identities. Public interaction is an equality without much solidarity, an enactment of personal distance mitigated by a tinge of mutual politeness and shared casualness. [Erving Goffman] calls it the order of civil disattention… Categorical identities have largely disappeared, replaced by pure local personal reputations in networks where one is known, and by anonymity outside.7 Where do large concentrations of money go when they can’t be turned into prestige within a wide community? They may be exchanged within an isolated network of the very wealthy. Collins says, “[t]he main attraction of having extremely large amounts of money may be the emotional energies and symbolic 7 Collins 2005.

Benevolent and Perverse Inequality Subsistence has probably become more equal under our current system: life spans have drastically increased, especially for the poorest. Wealth, however, is very unequally distributed, with many holding wealth of a magnitude beyond any possibility of personal consumption. This wealth distorts subsistence economies when it renders subsistence goods (such as energy or houses) “partial money.” Prestige inequalities persist (they are even on Donald Brown’s list of human universals), but they 8 “Two Malthusian scares,” Unenumerated, 2016.

281

16. Inequalities

membership markers of being on the phone at all hours of the night and day engaging in exciting transactions.” And money without a place to go may even distort the subsistence economy, turning what were previously subsistence goods into money (and thereby increasing their cost). Nick Szabo describes the monetization of oil and phosphates (the latter necessary for fertilizer): in the absence of a secure means for giant piles of money to be stored (or, I would add, turned into prestige), intermediate commodities become “partial money” and their cost (and volatility) no longer reflects only the costs of production.8 Breakdowns, or discrepancies between our virtuous model and modern reality, are summarized in the previous illustration. Our society directs gifts of wealth toward remedying prestige inequalities, a dubious endeavor, rather than toward remedying inequalities in material consumption and wealth.

are minimized in everyday life and regarded as degrading and unfortunate. Celebrities are their main expression, and the quality of life of celebrities is questionable. Wealth may not reliably be turned into prestige, as experienced in everyday ritual interaction (see, e.g., Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign). However, a society that valued prestige inequalities, and encouraged the exchange of wealth for prestige through redistribution, would paradoxically find itself with much-ameliorated wealth inequality (and likely quality-of-life inequality). Only a superorganism can accomplish this task.

BUSINESS AS MAGIC Vienna, late 18th century, alternate timeline. In the beginning, there was just the tinkerer. One night, after attending a magic show at the palace, he got drunk and made a bet with a rival courtier. A few months later, he unveiled a marvelous contraption before a palace audience. The contraption was an automaton, dressed as a Turkish sorcerer. It sat at a desk filled with complicated gears and levers, with a chessboard on top. The Turk played a decent game of chess, beating dukes, princes, and visiting American statesmen. Its reputation spread, and with it the reputation of Vienna as a hub of technological development. Tinkerers from Austria to America set about making their own Mechanical Turks (as well as Mechanical Russians, Yankees, and chess-playing shepherdesses). Only a few succeeded; most were in Vienna. Of those half-dozen that succeeded, all were known to be acquainted with some down-on-his-luck chess master who, incidentally, was not overly tall or rotund. Vienna’s reputation continued to spread, and it became fashionable for wealthy patrons to support chess automata and exhibit them. Unfortunately, one of the impoverished chess players got the flu. During his performance, such a loud fit of coughing emanated from his automaton’s desk that the audience

was scandalized. The Turk, a hoax! The entire reputation of Vienna was on the line. To meet the crisis, the wise Empress created a Bureau of Chess Automaton Standards, and appointed a Secretary of Chess Automaton Quality Assurance to head it. He in turn hired many Chess Automaton Inspectors. But both they and the tinkerers faced a problem: all the chess automata were fake. There was a guy inside playing chess. They could not pass a penetrating inspection. In consultation with the tinkerers, they arrived at a solution that met the needs of all parties. The Automaton Inspectors were taught a ceremonial procedure for verifying the legitimacy of a chess automaton. For the first part, tinkerers were required to present a PowerPoint describing the workings of the automaton to the Automaton Inspectors. The Automaton Inspectors would then perform a cursory inspection of the machine. For the second part, conducted the next day, the Automaton Inspectors would test the chess ability of the automaton to ensure that it had an Elo rating of at least 2000. (This rating would go up a bit every few years, demonstrating the progress of Vienna’s mechanical intelligence industry.) Meanwhile, savvy firms added sets of noisy gears to their elaborate-looking apparatuses. The noisy gears had no purpose other than to cover any sound the human operators might unintentionally make. Most of the tinkerers quickly created two new departments: a Department of Mechanical Intelligence, whose job was to maintain and improve the complicated-looking mechanism and explain it to visiting Chess Automaton Inspectors, and a

Business As Magic

285

17.

Department of Chess Strategy, whose ostensible job was to continually improve the chess-playing abilities of the automaton to keep up with Bureau standards. The tinkerers (now firms) that did not implement these changes tended to be exposed as frauds, losing their income and status and bringing shame upon their patrons and on Austria. The firms now had an ostensible (narrative or mythic) function, and a real, practical function. The mythical function was to promote the glory of mechanical intelligence—a strategically important myth to Austria’s international standing. The practical function was to maintain (and improve) an illusion. These ceremonial inspection practices benefited firms (at least, those who evolved Departments of Mechanical Intelligence and Departments of Chess Strategy) by providing them legitimacy, and benefited the Bureau of Chess Automation Standards by providing income, meaningful-seeming work, and status. However, firms that got on the wrong side of the Empress could be subjected to Extraordinary Review, a more demanding inspection process that necessarily resulted in the scuttling of the false automaton and the disgrace and dissolution of the firm. Many of the scientists and engineers in the various Departments of Mechanical Intelligence did not even know that the automata were not real. Careful precautions were taken to limit the “testing” of the automaton’s functionality. The secret was kept by only a few insiders who acted as liaisons between the Departments of Mechanical Intelligence and the clandestine human operators. Sometimes the Departments of Mechanical

Intelligence produced real results—quite by accident. One clueless engineer, inspired by his automaton, invented a mechanical weaving machine. Another invented a device that could play voice recordings, enhancing the appeal of the automaton. “Échec!” the automaton would cry. Inspired by the talking machine, an American invented the telephone. The reputation of Vienna was all this time enhanced. However, the Departments of Mechanical Intelligence mostly produced increasingly elaborate mechanisms that didn’t do anything, and increasingly elaborate theories about how the mechanism might work, if it did work, which it didn’t. Universities began to offer programs in Mechanical Intelligence, with curricula often based on the theories developed in the chess automaton firms. Universities supplied graduates to the firms, professionalized the discipline, and further bolstered the legitimacy of the enterprise. Everyone lived happily ever after. Perhaps they eventually invented the Internet, quite by accident.

What Institutions Are Up To I have worked in corporations, nonprofit entities, and government agencies. They have always been extremely mysterious to me. I could never quite figure out what the institutions were up to—their goals, workings, and desired behaviors were never clear to me. Mission statements read at meetings seemed to have little connection to the day-to-day activities we performed. What did they want? What were they doing? I will share here a sociological theory of

I have chosen an instance of active deception as the institutional myth in my imaginary Vienna. But falsity is not the defining characteristic of an “institutionalized myth” or “rationalized myth.” This kind of myth can be identified on four criteria: 1.

Language of Morality. Beliefs about trivialities 287

Business As Magic

Institutional Myths

17.

institutionalized organizations that helped clear up my confusion. In this model, institutions have two competing interests. On the one hand, they need to be efficient at producing their product or service. On the other hand, they need to be legitimate and to fit into myth-driven regulatory and structural frameworks. In response, institutions decouple their mythical and practical activities. They not only pay lip service to myth, but structure their operations and activities toward signaling conformity with it. Backstage, their members accomplish the necessary tasks using methods often at odds with their institutional myths. This theory is a bit of a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, and vulnerable to failure modes that such theories invite: grandiosity, incuriosity, certainty. But it also provides a framework for curiosity (like McLuhan’s tetrads, laws in the form of questions): does it apply in this situation? What do the components of the theory correspond to, in concrete terms? One positive function of a myth is to reduce cognitive complexity and uncertainty. This theory might be one of the very myths it describes. In its favor, it invites criticism and disconfirmation. But once you see it, you can’t un-see it.

2.

3.

are not myths. Institutional myths “refer to widespread social values and emphatically use semantics coming from those value systems.”1 Myths deal with sacred matters and moral consideration, and often use language borrowed from religion. Zone of Ignorance. Myths are protected from falsification or excessive inquiry by social forces. “Follow the sacred and there you will find a circle of motivated ignorance,” says Jonathan Haidt.2 Linda Degh describes “legend-like narratives that enforce belief and that deny the right of disbelief or doubt, narratives that express majority opinion and are safeguarded by moral taboos from negation and, what is more, from deviation.”3 Myths are also often taken for granted, accepted as part of unalterable reality, exempt from questioning because hardly noticed. Idealization and Ambiguity. Myths are not merely falsehoods, but idealized, simplified accounts of complex matters. Myths attach to values that are difficult to precisely define and difficult to measure. A myth is so vague and uncertain that its epistemic status is in some ways unknowable. When government bodies enact legislation concerning these values, it is usually ambiguous: ambiguity is a useful

1 Piber & Pietch, “Performance Measurement in Universities: The Case of Knowledge Balance Sheets Analyzed from a New Institutionalist Perspective” 2006. 2 Haidt, “He Knows Why We Fight,” Wall Street Journal, June 29 2012. 3 American Folklore and the Mass Media 1994.

The cultural myth of national security attires itself in the language of morality: terrorism, the Axis of Evil. It has been protected from scrutiny by the invocation of a sacred event, 9/11. It is ambiguous enough to escape precise definition, and is capable of wide interpretation, from the USA PATRIOT Act to Guantanamo Bay. And it is evaluated symbolically, for instance with adjustments of the “threat level,” that have no clear causal connection to any particular outcome. Are we secure? There’s no way to know. The benefits of myths are that myths reduce cognitive and coordination costs. Since they are simplified, 4 Piber & Pietch 2006.

289

Business As Magic

Example: National Security

17.

4.

feature, because more voters can agree on an ambiguity than on any particular set of specifics. Institutions cope with the uncertainty of interpretation by evolving orderly ceremonies (often in cooperation with regulatory agencies) and by copying the behaviors and structures of successful firms. Symbolic Evaluation. Since myths deal in subjects that are inherently ambiguous and in some sense unknowable, the evaluation of myths is “restricted to symbolic considerations, which leave many interpretations possible.”4 Symbolic ritual activity is directed toward the sacred value, with no demonstrable causal connection to any particular measurable outcome. Empirical falsification is inherently difficult, and therefore can be avoided.

idealized accounts, they don’t take up much cognitive processing power. They are easy to share, and make excellent targets for coordinated activity. The drawbacks of myth are that such idealization, simplification, and elision turns the world into black and white. We want to do good, but we can’t tell what that means in a quantifiable and empirically falsifiable way. Myths are targets for wishful thinking. Just as myth can underpin positive coordination, it can facilitate coordination that does not actually serve the interests of the group.

Legitimacy Selling groceries may make your business a grocery, but selling drugs does not necessarily make your business a pharmacy. So says Mark Suchman (1995), and offers a taxonomy of the types of legitimacy that institutions rely on. Suchman defines legitimacy as …a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions.5 Myths provide opportunities for institutions to claim legitimacy, and the types of legitimacy have parallels to the four features of myth described above.

Practical Legitimacy An institution achieves practical legitimacy when its 5 Mark Suchman, “Managing legitimacy: strategic and institutional approaches,” Academy of Management Review 1995.

Moral legitimacy comes from less selfish evaluations: the moral rightness of an institution, including its actions, structure, and perceived “character.” Institutions structure themselves in the “correct” manner (for instance, having a Department of Research and Development or a Department of Mechanical Intelligence, or having a Board of Directors or an 291

Business As Magic

Moral Legitimacy

17.

audience (customers, regulatory agencies, etc.) believe that it is acting in their interests. This is a “selfish” basis of legitimacy. People even evaluate the disposition of an institution, as if it were a person, projecting onto it the human capacity for being positively or negatively disposed toward others. Do they like me and my in-group? Are they acting in ways that benefit or hurt us? Institutions give gifts and otherwise signal loyalty to their audience in order to assure them of benevolence and positive regard. They even seek input from their audience, though they usually channel that input into forms that won’t be disruptive. Administrative agencies must solicit public comment on proposed rules, for instance, but are under no obligation to make decisions based on public opinion. Institutions often have no idea how to achieve practical legitimacy (or the other types). When your calculator asks you to rate it, or when your insurance company sends you a birthday card, they are flailing around in random attempts to establish this kind of legitimacy. (Mimesis, copying what other successful institutions do, is a common response to uncertainty, whether the practice is effective or not.)

approval board for research on human subjects). They employ professional staff where appropriate. If a representative of an institution does something morally reprehensible, the taint may rub off on the institution; to preserve the moral legitimacy of the institution, the offending leader (of the company or the country) must resign. Institutions can signal allegiance to moral values in symbolic ways: donating to charities, advertising allegiance to causes, or altering workplace dress (on occasion).

Cognitive Legitimacy People have limited cognitive resources. When an institution is easy to understand (at least superficially), as opposed to jarring or mysterious, it seems more worthy of trust. Once an institution has been around for a long time, we may come to take it for granted as part of the background, and not question its legitimacy at all. Even new institutions can seem inevitable and be taken for granted if they array themselves in the structures, ceremonies, and definitions of previously taken-for-granted institutions. Institutions that seem natural and meaningful are perceived as legitimate. This is the most subtle form of legitimacy: to be comprehensible, to mesh with a larger belief system and the experience of everyday life, and to be taken for granted, so that “for things to be otherwise is literally unthinkable.”6 Older people may grumble privately about rituals of security prior to airline travel (they would be advised not to protest while in line to be groped!), but younger people have 6 Suchman 1995.

17. Business As Magic no memory of a time when this was not done. Suchman produces a highly compressed and appealing 2x2x3 matrix (!) that I felt compelled to adapt, if only as a ceremony directed toward the values and aesthetics of the Ribbonfarm readership (figure).

Decoupling The need for legitimacy is often in direct conflict with the need for efficiency in technical matters. Getting the job done often requires acting contrary to legitimizing myths. Institutions deal with this tension by decoupling their myth-serving ceremonies from their practical, “backstage” actions. In my alternate Vienna, the proprietors of chess automata decoupled their legitimacy seeking from their practical activities by the creation of specialized departments to interface with the regulatory agency. Behind the scenes, things happened much differently 293

from how they were reported. Most employees were not even aware of this. Recently, it was reported that the Transportation Safety Administration paid IBM 1.4 million dollars for a randomizer app to tell people which lane of the security check to enter. But they were not paying for a randomizer app. TSA was paying for ceremonially legitimized randomization, in service of the Myth of National Security. IBM, the supplier, provided not only the app, but institutional structure and interfaces: security clearances, regulatory compliance departments, lobbyists, and institutional legitimacy. The decoupling here is so extreme that the service of myth outweighs the technical work by many orders of magnitude. The decoupling process was first identified by Meyer & Rowan (1977) in their paper “Institutional Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.” It has over 20,000 citations on Google Scholar, and inspired a whole field (sometimes called Neo-Institutionalism). When decoupling occurs, Activities are performed beyond the purview of managers. In particular, organizations actively encourage professionalism, and activities are delegated to professionals. Goals are made ambiguous or vacuous, and categorical ends are substituted for technical ends. Hospitals treat, not cure, patients. Schools produce students, not learning. In fact, data on technical performance are eliminated or rendered invisible. Hospitals try to ignore information on cure rates, public services avoid data about effectiveness, and schools deemphasize

Sociopaths, Losers, and the Clueless in Alternate Vienna I close with an application of a classic theory of Venkat Rao’s: the trichotomy of sociopaths, losers, 7 Meyer & Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony” 1977.

295

Business As Magic

When I think of my befuddlement at the behavior of the institutions I have worked in, or the frustration of my engineer friends who work in highly institutionalized environments, this model gives me the sense of dawning comprehension. Institutions have at least two goals, and they are in conflict. The institution tears itself in half in order to simultaneously pursue conflicting goals. This is why their activities and demands seem inscrutable. When you can identify the sacred myth, and identify the legitimation ceremonies, and notice how they conflict with the practicalities of getting things done, then you can start to make sense of the conflicting and often irrational-seeming actions and demands.

17.

measures of achievement. Integration is avoided, program implementation is neglected and inspection and evaluation are ceremonialized. Human relations are made very important. The organization cannot formally coordinate activities because its formal rules, if applied, would generate inconsistencies. Therefore individuals are left to work out technical interdependencies informally. The ability to coordinate things in violation of the rules—that is, to get along with other people—is highly valued.7

and clueless.8 An institution begins with a sociopath; he is the tinkerer in my alternate Vienna. He is conscious of emerging cultural myths, but is not under their thrall. The sociopath then recruits a loser—the chess player who has fallen on hard times. The loser does not believe in the cultural myth, either, but nor does he see a path to personal fulfillment. He does his job in despair. (By the way, the coughing incident described above actually did happen, to a chess player named Hyacinthe Henri Boncourt. His coughing embarrassed the owner of the Turk, who really did install noisy gears with no purpose other than to cover the sound that future losers might make while performing the magic trick. I think “noisy gears” is an excellent metaphor for institutions installing camouflage to 8 Rao, “The Gervais Principle,” Ribbonfarm.

17. Business As Magic hide potential evidence of impotence, deception, and decoupling.) As institutionalization occurs, the sociopath must then recruit the clueless—people who to some degree believe the myth, and will act in the mythical interests of the institution. In alternate Vienna, these are the members of the Department of Mechanical Intelligence. The sociopaths act as managers and liaisons between the clueless and the loser, using “people skills” to creatively get things done across the chasm of the decoupling.

Business as Magic As I have said, the model I outline here inspired an entire field. It is such a fun game that it has been applied to hundreds of purported myths, including 297

salary surveys,9 informed consent,10 open source,11 worker protections,12 job evaluation,13 and null hypothesis significance testing.14 One scholar traces the effort to recouple myth and practice, in the case of an elementary school that had to reorganize its practices based on new legislation about teacher accountability.15 (Result: everyone was mad.) How does this theory do, on its own terms? Meyer and Rowan did make predictions in their 1977 paper, although these might be described as vague. For instance: Organizations which incorporate institutionalized myths are more legitimate, successful, and likely to survive. Here, research should compare similar organizations in different contexts. For instance, the presence of personnel departments or research and development units should predict success in environments in which they are widely institutionalized. Organizations which have structural elements not institutionalized in 9 Herzog, “Salary Surveys as Institutional Myth: Ritual, Validity, Reality,” Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior 2009. 10 Hoeyer, “Informed Consent: The Making of a Ubiquitous Rule in Medical Practice,” Organization 2009. 11 MacAulay, “The institutionalized open source project: Decoupling institutional myths and practical concerns to advance the insitution of open source” 2012. 12 Dobbin, Frank, & Sutton, “The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions,” American Journal of Sociology 1998. 13 Quaid, “Job Evaluation as Institutional Myth,” Journal of Management Control 1993. 14 Orlitzky, “Institutionalized Dualism: Statistical Significance Testing as Myth and Ceremony,” Journal of Management Control 2011. 15 Hallett, “The Myth Incarnate,” Amer. Sociological Review 2010.

299

Business As Magic

Meyer and Rowan have inspired a major research program. Some of the research uses postmodernist buzzwords (which are, after all, compressed myths), but there is much diversity in method, and both qualitative and quantitative research. The paper claiming myth status for null hypothesis significance testing has a higher density of citations per paragraph than I think I’ve ever seen in a sociology paper; perhaps, in attacking one basis for legitimacy, the author felt it proper to provide his audience with an alternative ritual basis for legitimacy. Some have described the myth-and-decoupling theory as cynical. I think it gives us an image of entrepreneur-as-magician. This is an ambiguous image: on the one hand, practicing guile and deception for one’s own benefit; on the other, pulling off a complicated magic trick that audiences come back to see. The research and development of noisy gears (and other

17.

their environment should be more likely to fail, as such unauthorized complexity must be justified by claims of efficiency and effectiveness. Experimentally, one could study the size of the loans banks would be willing to provide organizations which vary only in (1) the degree of environmental institutionalization, and (2) the degree to which the organization structurally incorporates environmental institutions. Are banks willing to lend more money to firms whose plans are accompanied by econometric projections? And is this tendency greater in societies in which such projections are more widely institutionalized?

illusions) is frequently an ignoble profession, but it need not be. Magic is a necessary business skill. And that’s how we got the Internet, quite by accident.

DARES, COSTLY SIGNALS, & PSYCHOPATHS “Last year I organised to do a stunt with my pals. The stunt was to jump out the window from the 10th floor of a flat onto all these boxes of cardboard and stuff. At the start it was just a laugh and I wasn’t really going to go through with it, but then it got serious and everybody was there so I just had to go through with it.” [H]is participation in the stunt was motivated by “not wanting them [his friends, who were videotaping the ordeal ‘for the Internet’] to think that I was a chicken.” He described feeling intense fear immediately before the event (“when I got up to it I thought I was going to die when I leaped”), followed by an equally intense release (“when I got down it was a relief, but I broke my arm”). S. A. Morrissey, “Performing risks: catharsis, carnival and capital in the risk society,” Journal of Youth Studies 2008. F. (8). Dared to eat poison ivy. Did so. F. (9). A number of girls were playing in an alley

which went from one street to the other and had several barns and an undertaking establishment on it. Girls dared Edna to go through when it was dark. She was afraid but took the dare, went through and returned with a feeling of approbation. Genevieve Boland, “Taking a dare,” The Pedagogical Seminary, 1910. Pringle records the case of a man of twenty who swallowed seven nails one inch long “on a dare.” Eight days later he came to operation and the nails were found in the caecum. He died of post-operative ileus and autopsy showed early necrosis of caecum and ascending colon. Another patient (Genglaire) swallowed thirty frogs and had no symptoms until they reached the rectum. A large mass of tangled frog bones was extricated manually. Louis Carp, “Foreign bodies in the intestine,” Annals of Surgery, 1927. A 16-year-old girl developed a cough, hypereosinophilia… hypergammaglobulinemia, and multiple noncavitary pulmonary nodules 1 month after having ingested an earthworm on a dare… In this instance, the ingested earthworm served as the paratenic carrier of toxocara larvae from the soil to the patient. Cianferoni, et al., “Visceral larva migrans associated with earthworm ingestion: clinical evolution

1 An activity popular in 2014, in which individuals filmed themselves dumping buckets of ice water on themselves, then challenged others to do the same as part of a fundraiser for ALS.

303

Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths

For almost every tiny aspect of human life, there is a large, imposing body of literature purporting to explain it. Hypotheses are proposed, supported, and discarded; new journals are created and filled with empirical studies; theoretical frameworks are proposed that cut the subject every which way. Not so, it seems, for dares. Dares, in the sense of “I dare you,” are widespread in human culture, and children start daring each other in early childhood. It is not clear how universal the phenomenon is; “risk-taking” is on Donald Brown’s list of human universals, but not dares specifically. Cross-cultural work is lacking, though I have found descriptions of daring from Brazil, India, the Netherlands (in sign language), and Indonesia, as well as the United States and many parts of Europe. As far as I can tell, no one has written The Sociology of the Dare or even The Economics of the Dare, except in passing on some other topic. Empirical work is sparse, though luckily there is some detailed qualitative work from over a century ago. There is, as far as I know, no Journal of Dare Studies. Yet dares are exciting. Daring games sometimes spread rapidly over the Internet (for example, the Ice Bucket Challenge1), evidencing their continuing appeal. People buy and play “Shocking Roulette,” a toy (it’s not really a game) where four people each put their finger into a slot and the game randomly administers an electric shock to one of them, after an

18.

in an adolescent patient,” Pediatrics 2006.

agonizing countdown. Celebrities often attribute their starts on the stage to dares taken; whether these stories are true or not, it shows that the dare narrative is appealing. And dares can be stupid and dangerous. The dare descriptions above give some idea of the mortality and morbidity caused by dares; G. Stanley Hall & Theodate Smith report that out of 84 dares reported to them by children, twelve experienced broken bones or “serious sprains” as a result, and many others were injured in other ways.2 Broken bones are frequent consequences for many of Genevieve Boland’s informants.3 The stories about dares that make it into the news are often dares gone wrong that result in drowning or other severe consequences. If the consequences are so serious, why do humans participate in dares? Why are they so common and such powerful motivators? What do they do, and what are they for?

A Reputation for Valuing Reputation Barry O’Neill proposes a costly signaling theory of dares: taking a dare is an opportunity to demonstrate one’s willingness to endure risk or discomfort for the sake of one’s reputation.4 As such, it is a kind of ritual. All rituals have a sacrifice; the sacrifice in the dare ritual is some limited form of suffering. 2 “Showing off and bashfulness as phases of self-consciousness,” The Pedagogical Seminary 1903. 3 Boland, “Taking a Dare” 1910. 4 “The strategy of challenges: two beheading games in medieval literature,” Game Equilibrium Models IV: Social and Political Interaction, 1991

305

Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths

Taking the case of a dare to eat a slug, the reputation could not be one of indifference to eating slugs. Having that name would make you a celebrity, but it would not raise your degree of respect or dominance in the group. If it became known that you savoured slugs, the dare would not be regarded as a real test, and the group would simply choose another task. For the daree’s purposes, the audience must know that he or she finds the task aversive but is strong‐willed enough to do it anyway for the sake of the reputational goal. Eating the slug functions like a measuring marker, to show how highly the daree values reputation. My thesis is that the content of the reputation at stake in dares can be defined recursively. The reputation is for valuing reputation. The child is in effect saying, “I don’t like to eat this, but I’ll do it. I attach great importance to your estimate of this very importance. When you see me eat this slug, you raise your estimate of that importance.” …A reputation for valuing reputation might be desirable exactly because it is free of links to specific traits. Onlookers can generalize it to other contexts more readily, in that they infer that the daree would face other risks and discomforts for the sake of reputation.

18.

Dares are about reputation. But reputation for what, exactly? O’Neill answers this question recursively: taking a dare signals that the daree values his reputation for valuing his reputation in general:

Dares are social signaling at its purest: not signaling any quality in particular, but valuing one’s reputation in general. A dare has three participants, all affected in different ways: the darer, the daree, and the audience (which may be just the darer, or any number of other people). In O’Neill’s model, the daree is offered the opportunity to send a costly signal, and the audience (including the darer) is offered information about how the daree might behave in frightening or stressful situations. A child who takes a dare—even a seemingly antisocial dare—signals to the audience his willingness to act prosocially toward them in other contexts. If you have seen your friend overcome his fear in some dangerous dare, he is that much more likely, perhaps, not to run away when you are waging a battle, hunting together, or involved in a risky business venture. The subject of a dare must be aversive. Its unpleasantness to the daree is in proportion to its signaling value. (In the next section, we will look at the content of dares to see what kinds of aversiveness are represented, and what that means.) Videos of people using the dissociative (and very unpleasant) drug salvia are very popular on YouTube; this appears to be a dare phenomenon. Videos where subjects display aversive effects are more popular than videos of relatively pleasant trips, say Paterline & Albo.5 The more unpleasant the effects, the more attractive the “dare” video. A dare is distinct from a bribe or blackmail, where incentives are offered other than 5 “A content analysis of Salvia divinorum use on YouTube,” The Journal of Public and Professional Sociology 2013.

Boland’s other informants use “double dare” in its present meaning, as an intensifier of a dare. But the mutual kind of “double dare” that this eight-year-old girl participated in exemplifies one of the negotiation strategies open to the darer. And the daree often dares back, or conditions his compliance on some other’s performance: M. (12). One day I was swimming in the canal near a small foot bridge which was, perhaps, 15 ft. above the water. One of the boys dared me to dive from the bridge, but I was afraid to do 6 Peer pressure and risk-taking behaviors in children, American Journal of Public Health 1984.

307

Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths

F. (8). When I was 8 I was once dared to jump off the church steps. The little girl told me she double dared me which meant she would do it after me. I did not want to seem babyish, so did it, not only once but three or four times in succession.

18.

reputation-for-reputation. And dares, O’Neill says, center on discrete, measurable acts that are easily observed and verifiable by the audience. It doesn’t work if I dare you not to think about chickens. Not all dares are taken, of course. Genevieve Boland reports 191 accepted dares and 28 dare refusals; Lewis & Lewis report that as many dares are refused as accepted among their 771 middle schoolers.6 By daring, the darer opens a negotiation; the daree may accept, refuse, or counteroffer. The “double dare” is usually thought of as an intense (or particularly naughty) form of a dare, but one of Boland’s informants proposes a different usage:

it. He then dared me to jump from the bridge. I hesitated, but finally said if one of the other boys would jump I would. The other boy jumped and I was still afraid. I stood there for a moment, shut my eyes and jumped. The only feeling I remember is that the longer I stood looking the greater seemed the distance. Daring, then, is a negotiation. Play among young animals is always serious, in the sense that it is practice for the work of the adult animal. The kind of reputation play exemplified by dares allows children to practice risk, negotiation, and social signaling. They define themselves and their groups through their speech acts and actions. Social standing and belonging have been so important to survival that they are worth risking death and injury in order to maintain. Many dares are antisocial acts, potentially harming not only the daree but also others. Disobedience of parents (or law) is a common theme. They are not prosocial rituals in the same way that feasts, religious services, weddings, and funerals are. Perhaps there is something else going on.

Psychopath Awareness Dares require the daree to do something unpleasant. We can classify dares by the aversive emotion that they trigger. (Example dares are all from Boland 1910.) 1.

Disgust. Darees may be asked to handle caterpillars or worms, or to eat noxious, unpleasant,

M. (6). Dared to eat a bottle of quinine pills. F. (7). To eat a mud pie. Unable to finish it. F. (10). Heard it would make a person sick to eat a raw oyster with sugar on it. Was dared to do it and ate one. F. (8). Dared to eat poison ivy. Did so. F. (12). Dared to eat horse chestnut. F. (6). To eat soap and starch with oil in it. 2.

Fear. Darees are asked to jump from high places, to jump onto moving vehicles or horses, to skate on thin ice, to dive into dangerous water. F. (8). When I was about 8 years old, a little schoolmate of mine dared me to stand on the track when a trolley car was coming along. I stood there although very much frightened until the motorman yelled at me. F. (6). When I was about 5 yrs. old my brother dared me to jump from the porch to the ground, which was a considerable distance. 309

Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths

F. (16). Dared to eat a certain weed. Was afraid but had seen the cat eat it, so felt she would not die if she ate it.

18.

or non-food items. Raw onions, spoonfuls of horseradish, hot peppers, poison ivy, poison sumac, mud pies, dirt, and unripe fruit are all reported to have been consumed, not to mention those thirty frogs.

This I was very much afraid to do but finally I gathered up the courage and jumped. 3.

Shame. Darees are challenged to violate norms: to dress in clothes judged not appropriate for their age, social standing, or sex; to talk to strangers; to give incorrect answers in class. Rejection may also be risked; one of my informants was dared to ask out the prettiest girl in school (though, much to his surprise, she accepted). F. (10). To wave at strangers going by the school. F. (11). Dared to say Gordon’s corner when asked the capital of a country in Africa. Excused from the class for it. F. (7). Dared to dress up in old clothes and play mother was a washer-woman. Did so and passed the morning on the street telling people about poverty of the family. F. (8). Wear brother’s clothes out doors. F. (9). Dressed in mother’s clothes and went out on the street. M. (9). Dared to wear mother’s sunbonnet to post-office. Did it.

4.

Guilt. Darees are asked to violate their parents’ authority or cause material or physical harm to others. If they perform the deed, they often feel quite guilty about it. Remorse may even follow.

F. (10). To write an excuse from school and stay out. Did so but did not enjoy herself. In his fascinating 2015 book for general audiences, The Psychopath Code, Pieter Hintjens proposes an evolutionary classification of primary human emotions. The most basic group he calls predator emotions; according to Hintjens, these are the only emotions that psychopaths can feel. Social humans, however, have a much broader emotional register, around fifty emotions total, grouped as follows: 1. The predator emotions help us hunt and capture prey. 2. The defense emotions prepare us to detect and deal with predators and competitors. 3. The sexual emotions drive us to find sexual partners. 4. The family emotions let us talk to our parents and care for our offspring. 5. The group emotions let us form small social groups. 311

Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths

F. (9). Late frequently at school. Carried a note home every day. Dared to tear it up. Did so without looking in note. Wondered what mother would say.

18.

F. (7). We had what we thought was a hard reading lesson. The other girls tore theirs out of their books and dared me to do the same. At first they called me names and then I thought I was a coward so I tore the lesson out. I felt I had done a great wrong and had no peace until I had told the teacher.

6.

The social emotions let us form looser and larger social groups.

Predator emotions, including hunger, obsession, fury, bloodlust, and satiation, are only for purposes of motivating action, not for display or coordination with others. The other classes of emotion include display emotions. Emotions such as disgust, fear, shame, and remorse have characteristic displays (many of which are hard or impossible to fake, such as blushing for shame), giving the audience information about another’s mental state. Disgust, for instance: Disgust is how you warn others to stop eating. Blood flows to your digestive tract. Your stomach prepares to vomit. You make noises and a specific grimace to warn others. You narrow your eyebrows, curl your upper lip, wrinkle your nose, and stick your tongue out. You look at others to make sure they got the message. You make a characteristic groan.7 Hintjens makes the bold claim that psychopaths do not feel or display disgust, and can make at best a studied approximation of the other social emotions. The psychopath, he says, does not show disgust when eating something bad. He just spits it out and throws it away. He does not respond to disgust with his own disgust face. He just stops eating. Again, if he learns to mimic, timing and volume will be “wrong.” 7 Hintjens, The Psychopath Code.

Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths

313

18.

Dares offer a tour through the more social emotions: emotions that have associated displays that provide information to others, and that both trigger and respond to other social emotions. A dare offers the daree the opportunity to display his social emotions in front of others, and the daree in turn offers the audience information on his social display. A social person will display fear when asked to jump from heights, disgust when eating a worm or a mud pie, shame when violating a social norm in public, guilt when disobeying moral authority or causing harm. The remorse displayed afterwards may be part of the information offered by dares. Dares, in other words, are a psychopath test. They allow the opportunity to scrutinize people’s displays of social emotions on demand, rather than having to wait for an aversive event to happen. The use (and often excessive use) of alcohol and other mind-altering substances is frequently the topic of a dare. This allows the audience to see the daree in a less guarded state, providing even more information about the daree’s mental state and character. Hintjens claims that psychopaths avoid mind-altering substance consumption to the point of intoxication around others, though they may encourage other to use excessively. Of course, if dares worked perfectly in this way, there wouldn’t be any psychopaths. Hintjens’s model is a cycle of predators and prey, with psychopaths preying on social humans for resources. Their numbers relative to social humans vary over time, as with population cycles of foxes and rabbits. Psychopaths are a small but significant portion of humanity; Hintjens

estimates that around 4% of humans are psychopaths as a very rough estimate, and posits that both they and social humans have been shaped by each other over the course of evolution. If psychopaths are not able to feel and properly dis­play social emotions, and if avoiding predation by psychopaths has been important in our evolutionary history, then dares may be a kind of evolved Voight-Kampff machine8 that social humans use to detect and maintain awareness of psychopaths in their midst. Psychopaths have many defenses available. As I said above, dares are a negotiation. The psychopath may give dares in a different way than social humans: to control, to harm, to bully, rather than to challenge, get information, and have fun. The psychopath may refuse dares, or may endure the dare with creepy, inhuman stoicism and spin that as courage.

A Note on Creativity, Dares, Psychopathy, & Leadership Other than Barry O’Neill, most of the authors writing about dares take a negative view of dares. Genevieve Boland, however, takes a balanced view; she notes that Lewis Terman found children identified as leaders of their groups tended to be more daring.9 The quality that Terman found most reliably associated with child leaders, both boys and girls, was their creative activity in devising and playing games. This may even make up for other personality defects; children who are generally disliked may be leaders if they 8 From the film Bladerunner; a tool to distinguish replicants from humans. 9 “A preliminary study in the psychology and pedagogy of leadership,” The Pedagogical Seminary 1904.

10 Terman 1904.

315

Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths

Boy. Persuaded 35 or 40 boys to come together for military drill. He acted as captain. Through his efforts an entertainment was given and money raised to buy linen suits. Girl. Was leader in everything we did. She always proposed our games. It seemed we could have more fun when she planned things. Others had greater mental ability but all of us stood aside for her to move first. She was much larger than the rest of us and a little older. She had beautiful manners. Boy of 12. Not attractive, but rules his schoolmates absolutely. He is selfish, rude, cruel, and inspires fear. He is inventive and clever. Girl of 12. Leader of all the rest of us. We always followed her willingly. No matter what game we played, she was “it.” Could run, jump and climb fences better than any of the girls. She was never at a loss in thinking up new games. Girl of 14. Rules the girls with absolute sway. She makes new games, assigns parts, settles disputes and enforces commands. Keen sense of justice, ability to think quickly, and ready expression. Girl of 12. Because she knew stories and could dramatize them was leader of about 15 children. Was also skillful in athletic feats. Boy of 12. Planned our play and conducted it. Could tell stories and illustrate them with

18.

are good at composing and organizing plays, inventing games, and the like. A few examples:10

drawing. Could do all kinds of tricks and make pretty toys. Older and larger than the others. Read much. Boy of 13. A “ring leader.” Broader experience than the others. Had been in town schools. Always had a scheme to interest others. Not truthful or honest, but polite, good in games, and very bright. Was younger than his followers. Children follow those who can invent, organize, and get things done to relieve their common boredom. Inventing new dares as well as new games and plays may be expected of a leader, and requires creativity as well as social power. Some children identified as leaders displayed psychopathic traits (selfish, rude, cruel). But, interestingly, psychopathic traits seem to be much more of a predictor of children identified as outcasts than as leaders. While some children were outcast because they were poor or unattractive, these were a minority of the outcast children in 1904. Accurately or not, informants asserted that many more outcast children were so because of bad character. Half of Terman’s male outcasts and a third of the female outcasts were identified as possessing “teasing, domineering ways, quarrelsomeness, selfishness, bad disposition” and the like. One outcast girl nearly has Hintjens’s full list of psychopathic traits in her brief description: Girl of 16. Very pretty, over-dressed, vain, cruel to animals, ill-mannered, wanted to be babied. Yet was quite attractive at first meeting. Children are often cruel in their exclusion, but they

He makes the provocative claim that, while psychopaths may be “creative” in coming up with excuses for their actions, they do not have creative hobbies, and are not able to respond emotionally to aesthetic beauty. The psychopath “has no creative hobbies,” Hintjens says. “He does not tend a garden, nor cook, paint, sculpt, compose music, or write for pleasure. He prefers to travel, meet new people, and shop.” And psychopaths don’t like card games or board games. A psychopath child would likely be hampered in constantly coming up with new games and plays. While psychopaths often end up as leaders in the adult world, they do not have the ability to manage flourishing, happy groups.

Precious Ignorance We don’t know very much about dares. They are 317

Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths

We create for ourselves and others. We create to make other people feel something. Usually, it’s happiness, though sometimes it’s loss, sadness, or other emotions. A creative act is a message of empathy. And we measure the quality of our art as we do our humor: by its originality, and thus its authenticity.

18.

may also be learning to protect themselves from bad actors in their midst. Being a leader often requires a lot of effort, much of it creative and fluid. As in Kevin Simler’s model of “superorganisms,” the other children repay the leader’s efforts with obedience and approval (sucking up). Hintjens says:

widespread, but how universal are they? Do some societies engage in dares more than others, or not at all? How does the content of dares vary across societies? Do psychopaths give and take dares, and if so, how do they perform? Does performing a dare increase a child’s social standing? Does refusing a dare decrease it? What is the toll, in death and injury, from dares? I have offered sketches of a couple of theories about how dares function in human culture; I imagine there are many more possibilities. I was delighted to find this apparently neglected area of the study of humans, and while I doubt my research will ever answer the questions in the above paragraph, I offer you this precious zone of ignorance that I found, in case you are in need of a mystery.

FRONTIERLAND Disneyland is the most important place in America, and Frontierland is the most important part of Disneyland. By area, it is the largest part of Disneyland. The design of Frontierland occupied a special importance for Walt Disney himself.1 Even as the Imagineers had trouble keeping the futuristic buildings of Tommorowland looking “futuristic,” the archaic appeal of Frontierland never faded. Frontierland does not refer to just any frontier: it presents an immersive narrative about the American Western frontier, a narrative centered on popular myth and literature. (There is no American Indian genocide in Frontierland, because Frontierland is not about the historical reality of the American frontier.) But its appeal reaches far beyond the American West, drawing visitors from all over the world and self-replicating in Japan, Hong Kong, and France. As the American frontier ceased to exist as a geographic and political reality, in myth it transcended space and culture. As much as it is composed of myth, theater, and simulation, Frontierland is actually the real frontier.

1 Richard Francaviglia, “Walt Disney’s Frontierland as an Allegorical Map of the American West,” The Western History Association v30 1999.

Disneyland Main Street Station, 1960 ໙ This is the Main Street of the essay that follows. From here we will visit Frontierland and consider the “actual” historical, expanding American frontier and its global cultural footprint. I will argue that the myth of the frontier has functionally and very effectively taken the place of the actual frontier, in the latter’s sudden absence. In Adventureland we will consider the phenomenon of the “theme park,” a modern and very democratic American phenomenon with roots in aristocratic China, Japan, and Germany, as opposed to the “amusement park.” In Fantasyland we will consider the interaction of the fake and the real, and the Enlightenment conceptions of these which we are still struggling to transcend. In Tomorrowland we will consider the future, and find ourselves back in

19. Frontierland Disneyland’s Frontierland, 1985 Frontierland, where the future always lives.

Frontierland: The Myth of Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis The popular conception of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” is that Turner was a cheerleader for the influence of the frontier on American and European culture, painting it in glowing, positive terms. Francaviglia says: “As if taking cues from Turner’s essay, the works of Disney help enshrine the frontier and sustain the dialogue about its validity that continues into the twenty-first century.” Turner’s portrayal is often described as “romantic,” and he is cited as perpetuating the “Frontier myth.” Some sources cherry-pick Turner’s work for positive-sounding 321

endorsements of the frontier character, such as this: That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy;—that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which come with freedom—these are traits of frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.2 But Turner’s actual essay is far from glowingly positive, and seems equivocal, if not on net negative, about the effect of the frontier. Even in the above quotation, he notes that the “restless, nervous energy” is used “for good and for evil,” and he focuses on the evil aspects as much as, if not more, than the good. It is not Turner’s position that “nervous energy” is a good thing; in a footnote to this very passage, he calls it “strained nervous energy.” And Turner’s actual historical examples in his 1893 essay tend to point to the evil effects of the frontier. Individualism and self-reliance sound like good things, but Turner is clear to point out how they tend to undermine group institutions and cooperative well-being. For example, he argues that political pushes for bad monetary policy, designed to undermine the currency (such as “free silver”), tended to originate in and be supported by frontier states, 2 Quoted by Bridges, Anne, Russell Clement, and Ken Wise, Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains, 2014; characterized as “romantic.”

323

19. Frontierland

generation after generation, as the frontier moved west. He characterizes many policies friendly to frontier interests as dangerous to civilized society, and vividly presents the (quite founded) anxieties experienced by Eastern and European people about the effects of the frontier people on the expanding democracy. Thomas Ligotti says, in his 2011 book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, that “[a]s a rule, anyone desirous of an audience, or even a place in society, might profit from the following motto: ‘If you can’t say something positive about humanity, then at least say something equivocal.’” To my eye, it seems that Turner produced a profoundly ambivalent and equivocal text on the effects of the frontier, emphasizing its danger to culture, and subsequent readers latched onto the few positive statements and forgot the rest. In Turner’s view, each wave of immigrants to the expanding frontier brought with them only the most rudimentary artifacts of their culture, and a small subset of the knowledge available within their home culture. And of this small slice of culture that they carried, an even smaller amount turned out to be useful and applicable to frontier life. They were forced to discard what was not immediately useful and adopt new ways as necessary. This left them with a stunted culture compared to the one they had left. There are many aspects of culture that are critical to operating a complex society that are not immediately useful on a sparsely populated frontier. The frontier people were cut off from their original cultural packages of architecture, literature, history, religion, government, ritual, art, and philosophy. Once cut off, they formed new, rudimentary cultures suited to the

peculiar (and short-lived) environment of the frontier. But as the frontier developed economically and population density increased, the old, original culture did not simply reemerge in its previous state. Rather, the pared-down, hybrid frontier culture grew in complexity and sophistication, resulting in something completely different from the Old World (or Eastern) culture of origin—and not necessarily better. Frontier cultures, and the cultures that arise from them as the frontier moves on, are severely lacking in certain ways. Turner says, [T]he frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression… [T]he frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all effective government… [T]he democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly

Dealing with the expanding political and social influence of this ever-growing “anti-social” culture was “the problem of the West,” as Easterners saw it, according to Turner. Their substantial and often creative efforts to restrict its growth were futile. Turner suggests that the most important weapons the Easterners had in taming dangerous Western influence were education and religion: that is, inculcating frontier people with the old stories, rituals, and culture. What happens when the frontier is exhausted? And how can this new people make up for the deficiencies of its hastily assembled frontier culture? The answers are in Disneyland.

Adventureland: The Theme Park and the Mere Amusement Park “A theme park without rides is still a theme park. An amusement park without rides is a parking lot with popcorn.”4 When Disney created the immersive narrative of Disneyland, he supplied something that had been specifically lacking in frontier people: the connection to a past. It is an imaginary past, but all pasts 3 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier on American History.” Citations omitted. 4 Margaret King and J.G. O’Boyle, “The Theme Park: The Art of Time and Space.” In Disneyland and Culture: Essays on the Parks and Their Influence, Jackson and West 2010.

325

19. Frontierland

developed civic spirit. In this connection may be noted also the influence of frontier conditions in permitting lax business honor, inflated paper currency and wild-cat banking.3

are mostly imaginary. The cultures of non-frontier peoples, with thousands of years to develop, provided connection to the past with architecture, ritual, and myth. Frontier people had only the rudiments of these, having so short a time to establish them. Disney, with his artistic and organizational genius, was able to supply satisfying doses of all these things at once. Margaret King notes that Disneyland is visited by more tourists per year than the United States capital.5 Money voluntarily spent in pursuance of experiences, a sacrifice of resources, is not a ridiculous measurement of the cultural value and effectiveness of an artwork of this type. But there are more reasons than commercial success to take theme parks, and especially Disneyland, seriously as cultural forces and works of art. King says: Theme parks are a distillation of cultural values… The walk-through castles, frontier forts, and other exotic but familiar environments, populated by cartoon characters the size of forklifts, are simulations and symbols, not historic or scientific models. Disney completely avoids any authenticity claim so important to museums or historic sites. This is because his venture is not about the technics of the artifact; it is about our attachment to the idea of a thing. This becomes a far more philosophical question, and therefore far more central to understanding the mind of culture. The theme park’s power lies in the ability to entertain, in its original meaning of “focus of 5 The Theme Park: Aspects of Experience in a Four-Dimensional Landscape, 2002.

King contrasts the notion of a theme park, a values-laden narrative experience designed to entertain in a focused way, and the amusement park, offering disconnected physical experiences with little or no narrative entanglement, designed more to distract than to focus the attention. She identifies the origins of the modern theme park in the detailed, narrative-laden aristocratic gardens and pleasure palaces of China, Germany, Japan, and France, each glorifying its founding myths. But unlike these closed, elitist institutions, modern theme parks (and the myths they support) are accessible to the public. Zen gardens, Neuschwanstein, and the Manchu Imperial Summer Palace require familiarity with elite culture and narratives, acquirable only through years of conspicuous leisure. Disneyland 6 Emphasis Perry’s.

327

19. Frontierland

attention,” rather than merely amuse. While amusement and entertainment are terms too often used interchangeably, the root distinction between the distraction of amusement and the concentration of entertainment is quite critical to understanding the uses and influences of social forms in popular culture. But this type of entertainment, along with great rhetoric, drama, and artwork, is the most important aspect of the cultural process: cultivating values and abstractions through the generations encoded as images, structures, enactments, and re-creations. If America has a successful temple of culture in this country—by this operational definition and attendance figures—it is the theme park rather than the museum or library.6

requires only familiarity with mythology already prevalent in popular culture and shared by all. In “The Theme Park: The Art of Time and Space,” King and Jamie O’Boyle explain the distinction between theme park and amusement park: Theme parks are cultural mind maps—symbolic landscapes built as storyboards of psychological narratives. They are the multi-dimensional descendants of the book, film, and epic rather than the spawn of the roller coaster and Tilt-aWhirl. In the theme park, rides are mechanisms designed to position the visitor’s point of view, much as a camera lens is aligned, moving riders past a series of meticulously focused vignettes to advance the narrative. Rides also offer the opportunity to expand the experience with physical sensations appropriate to the narrative: the disorientation of flashing light and smoke, the evocative smell of charcoal, appropriate temperature changes, the rush of wind, and the confirmatory sensory input associated with floating or soaring. Rides are but one of the many communications media integrated into the body of the theme park, acting as “executive summaries” to underline the principal themes of the overall theme park experience— an experience that averages eight hours. Time spent on rides comprises a small fraction of the total theme park experience—as little as ten or fifteen minutes. Unlike the amusement park patron, a theme park visitor can fully engage in the theme

What makes Disneyland so great? It is full of patterns (in the Christopher Alexander sense, see A Pattern Language): paths and goals, pools of light illuminating vignettes in the “dark rides,” levels of publicness and intimacy, small public squares, and dozens more. Michael Steiner, in “Frontierland as Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Architectural Packaging of the Mythic West,” notes that even city planning scholars have recognized Disney’s genius: A host of planners and architects have been awestruck by his untutored populist designs, believing, in postmodernist Robert Venturi’s words, that Walt’s whimsical places are “nearer to what people really want than anything architects have ever given them.” As early as 1963, the noted planner James Rouse told a shocked Harvard School of Design audience that “the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today 7 King and J.G. O’Boyle, “The Theme Park: The Art of Time and Space.” Citations omitted.

329

19. Frontierland

experience without ever setting foot on a ride. There are many other features to engage and hold attention: architecture, design, animated and live performance, video, sound and music, light and water technics and the simple fulfillment of pedestrian movement within and among the artfully landscaped themed “worlds.” The theme park is not ride-dependent, while rides are the raison d’être of the amusement park. A theme park without rides is still a theme park; an amusement park without rides is a parking lot with popcorn.7

Adapted from Margaret King.9 is Disneyland” and admonished them to realize that “in its respect for people, in its functioning for people” Disneyland contains more positive planning lessons “than in any other single piece of physical development in the country.”8 And a big part of what people want, apparently, is immersive narrative connection to the only myth of origin they can connect to, that of the frontier. And the mythical frontier belongs to everyone, not just Americans. If Disneyland is the canonical theme park, then Six Flags is the canonical amusement park: focused 8 Montana: The Magazine of Western History v. 48, 1998.

9 “The Theme Park: Aspects of Experience in a Four-Dimensional Landscape,” Material Culture v. 34, 2002.

331

19. Frontierland

on kinetic rides, lacking narrative detail and structure, providing distraction and amusement rather than values-laden, focused entertainment. To distinguish amusement parks from theme parks is not to judge amusement parks as bad or wanting; they are simply a different and distinct phenomenon from theme parks. Margaret King offers these criteria to contrast the two. (Pictured.) The theme park-amusement park spectrum is useful for classifying works of art other than parks. Video games, the digital cousin of parks, can evoke emotion, allude to values, and encode narrative in every detail (theme park games, such as the early games of Shigeru Miyamoto).9Or they can simply distract or hypnotize the player with his own kinetic virtuosity (amusement park games, such as Tetris). Games, sports, mind-altering substances, sex, and relationships may be approached from a “theme park” or “amusement park” angle. Summer camps have many aspects of theme parks; the American frontier is the most enduring theme, but alternate frontiers such as space and art (as with Burning Man) have achieved some popularity as camp themes. Camps also incorporate songs, ritual, and architecture into their narrative experiences. Again, to place things on the theme park-amusement park spectrum is not in itself to judge them. But we might also want to judge them. Are theme park or amusement park experiences good for us? Are they authentic experiences? In Fantasyland, we will compare theme parks with museums, explore the complex

fakeness of Disneyland along with Jean Baudrillard, and hopefully stop worrying and love the simulacrum.

Fantasyland and the Dull Habit of Authenticity Museums are generally distinct from theme parks. While both attempt to decode culture and unite people with shared narrative, museums have only their authenticity claims as tools. Their wall tags are not up to the interpretive task; museums merely tell or impart information, while theme parks show or evoke, says Margaret King. I am writing this from Incline Village, Nevada, only a few minutes way from the remains of the defunct Ponderosa Ranch theme park. Based on the frontier-themed television show Bonanza, this small theme park operated from 1967 to 2004 without any kinetic “rides” at all, unless you count Conestoga wagons. Though much more modest in scale than Disneyland, it provided a strong narrative experience and the sense of a participatory connection to the frontier. The most important Disneyland-style cartographic anomaly of Ponderosa Ranch was that it had its own Virginia City. Virginia City is a real town about an hour’s drive from here, a town that is itself a theme park, with rustic frontier-themed buildings (such as self-styled “saloons”), tourist-safe mines, and more thematic details than thrills on offer. Ponderosa Ranch condensed the surrounding landscape within itself, just as Disneyland condenses the West. The Virginia City it condensed and drew within itself is a Virginia City of the mythical past; but the “real” Virginia City also locates itself in the mythical past for narrative and

333

19. Frontierland

commercial purposes. An even tinier “theme park” is located in the basement of the Nevada State Museum in Carson City, Nevada: a simulated underground mine that visitors can walk through, along with yet another simulated frontier town. There even used to be an animatronic miner (with a mule) telling stories about mining, an unmistakable sign that this particular museum chose narrative engagement (the “theme park” route) over the stultifying obstruction of authenticity claims. Another theme park that calls itself a museum is the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California. Smell, sound, and many kinds of vision feature in its sincere exhibits and gleeful trolls; its wall tags are unreliable, eschewing authenticity claims and injecting “showing” and “evoking” into the traditional place of telling and imparting. When the Museum of Jurassic Technology exhibits letters from crackpots to the Mt. Wilson Observatory, words like “crackpot” are never used. The Museum of Jurassic Technology treats the notion of authenticity as a playground rather than an anxious concern. Adam Seligman and Robert Weller (in Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity) argue that the preoccupation with authenticity and sincerity, privileging intent and inner states over action and ritual, is a relatively new phenomenon, dating to the Enlightenment. Of course, this means that the anxious concern for the authentic and sincere was born shortly after the influence of the American frontier was first felt. We are still burdened with it today. In 1910, my great-great-grandfather was profiled

Author’s great-great-grandfather, depicted 1910.

in a book of “notable Nevadans.” He told the interviewer a wild story about crossing the country as a guard on a wagon train, being attacked by Indians, and accidentally getting into a dark-of-night firefight with a fellow guard. Something like that may have happened to him; he did spend a year (or was it two? sources disagree) at the Klondike Gold Rush, where he presumably learned that one makes more money selling liquor to miners than actually mining. But since I happen to know that he was only four years old when his family made the trek from Missouri to Virginia City, Nevada, in 1870, I suspect that his wild story was trolling. (Some of my friends might say that the troll doesn’t fall far from the bridge, in my case.) Is there a real, authentic history of the frontier? Or

Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los 335

19. Frontierland

is it inextricably woven with trolls and fabrications? I recommend Evan S. Connell’s history of Custer’s Last Stand, entitled Son of the Morning Star, as therapy against the tendency to believe in historical truth. Connell examines hundred of primary sources; for each claim, no matter how minor, there is evidence and counter-evidence, and few firm conclusions can be reached. A letter says this; another letter says that; a diary says something completely different. If the little facts cannot be established with certainty, what of the big theses that depend on facts? Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation, is very concerned with the multi-layered inauthenticity of Disneyland. In Baudrillard’s model, images (including narrative) move from the real to the unreal in a succession. First, there is representation; image reflects a profound reality. Second, image “masks and denatures a profound reality;” this is false representation. Third, images “mask the absence of a profound reality;” there is no real referent for the image, so accurate representation is not even a question. Finally, the image has no relation to any reality whatsoever, even to hide its absence; it relates only to itself. Baudrillard locates Disneyland in the third stage of unreality, masking the absence of a reality:

Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. I find Baudrillard’s theories fun, but I think he is wrong to be anxious about these advanced levels of unreality, and to suppose that there was a time in the past when genuine representation of profound reality was the norm. This anxiety seems to be a species of Seligman-Weller Enlightenment preoccupation with authenticity. Culture is made of myth without referent, and it has always been so. To enter the future is to enter Frontierland once again: to cast aside the modern preoccupation with authenticity, and to once again create and live in satisfying stories that bring us together and help us cooperate. Richard White and Patricia Limerick claim that the frontier myth “works as a cultural glue—a mental and emotional fastener that in some very curious and unexpected ways, works to hold us together” (in The Frontier in American Culture).

Tomorrowland: Transcending the Frontier Frederick Jackson Turner notes that the first stage of frontier life is for immigrants to adopt a more primitive, limited subset of their culture’s technology, adapted to the particulars of their region (and often mixed with native technology). The second stage is for these people to influence their culture of origin, socially and politically. Even in the absence of a frontier, in the twentieth century, people have attempted to act out these two stages, a sort of live action role-playing of the frontier.

10 Publication 1968-1971; founded by Stewart Brand. Oriented around reviewing ecologically sustainable, do-it-yourself, homesteading products.

337

19. Frontierland

Almost as soon as the frontier closed, the “back to the land” movement in the United States began to form, eventually gaining perhaps hundreds of thousands of practitioners in the 1960s and 70s, including my parents. Despite the non-existence of a political and geographic frontier, these people voluntarily adopted archaic, primitive lifestyles, farming and hunting to support themselves. They also sought to influence their culture of origin with their adopted values; subscribers to the Whole Earth Catalog10 and similar publications greatly exceeded the number of people actually engaged in primitive subsistence farming. In a sense, they built for themselves, if only for a decade or so, personal Frontierlands dispersed across the country. It is no coincidence, I think, that many of them grew up consuming Disney movies, reading Huckleberry Finn and Little House on the Prairie, participating in the Mickey Mouse Club, and even visiting Disneyland. Ultimately, Disneyland and video games have been more successful than back-to-the-land primitivism in filling the vacancy left by the closed frontier. This is precisely because they make no authenticity claims. Freed from the preoccupation with sincerity and faithful representation, they allow the creation of really new worlds of narrative and shared values. One might say that Bitcoin is a realer currency than gold, because it denies the latter’s authenticity claims and explicitly admits that the value of currency is based on cooperative hallucination of value.

Margaret King defines a theme park as “a social artwork designed as a four-dimensional symbolic landscape to evoke impressions of places and times, real or imaginary.” As less human labor is required to attend to the necessities of life, such as food production, more human attention is available for cooperative narrative production. The truest and most fertile frontier is to remake the world in the image of the theme park. Thanks to Rin’dzin Pamo, David Chapman, and my husband Andrew Breese for developing these ideas with me over the past week.11

11 Published Aug 6, 2015.

LANGUAGE & PHENOMENOLOGY Ribbonfarm 2015-2018

PUZZLE THEORY Let me set the mood by revealing that the starting point for this investigation was the movie Room 237, a “fan theory” documentary about people contemplating Stanley Kubrick’s movie The Shining. A fan theory is an interpretation of an item of art, usually fiction of some kind, that is surprising, bizarre, novel, or disturbing, and puts the item of art in a new perspective. TVTropes calls the phenomenon “fridge brilliance” (that is, theories that you fumble toward after the show is over, when you’re camped in front of the fridge swigging from the milk jug). Movies, television, and books are the usual stuff discussed in the mode of fan theory; the phenomenon also manifests in discussions of the meanings of song lyrics. In Room 237, theories about The Shining range from the plausible to the bizarre. We are presented with evidence for a subtext of the holocaust, and for a related subtext of the genocide of the American Indians. Individual frames are scrutinized for references to minotaurs and labyrinths. The case is made that Kubrick cunningly alludes to faking the documentary footage of the Apollo moon landings (while the fan theorist explicitly says his theory has no bearing on whether the famed moon landings are factual and happened, he proposes that the iconic Apollo video footage is fake).

One has the sensation of creeping into a labyrinth of enormous size and complexity. The movie is pleasantly chilling, but also profoundly satisfying, hinting at promised gifts, unexplored creation, a frontier. Not everyone likes Room 237. Negative treatment of the movie largely takes the form of appeal to authority, which I can’t help but find interesting. Stephen King has said he hates it, importantly finding the theories it presents implausible, and a Kubrick aide dislikes it for the same reason, terming the theories “balderdash” and offering evidence for why they are unacceptable. (Both use terms for Room 237 fan theorists that emphasize their low status.) Again, I think this is interesting: appeal to authority here reveals an implicit, furtive claim that the author’s intent determines the value of an interpretation, treating the film as first, foremost, and finally a creation of the author, the sole encoder. But I think there is something off about this perspective—it misses the point of why the movie is so great. It doesn’t matter if the fan theories are true, nor is it clear what that would even mean. What is important is that the interviewees treat The Shining, an emotionally involving, ambiguous work, as a puzzle box—and present “solutions” to the puzzle with particular properties that people find acceptable, intriguing, fun, touching, and satisfying—if not epistemologically, in a formal, rigorous sense, then at least aesthetically. Fan theorists see their function as decoding messages, and the encryption and the messages they reveal have more room to be interesting if they are not fettered by author intention. Shortly after the second time I saw Room 237, I said (on Twitter) that I would love to see a version of

Puzzle Theory

343

20.

the movie made not about an important feature film, but rather about a random microwave oven manual from 1985. The folks who write microwave manuals are probably not affirmatively adding anything meaningful or fascinating into their work, but perhaps something can be found nonetheless. Since nobody appeared to be filming my dream creation, I decided to see what I could figure out myself. I could not easily find a fine vintage microwave oven manual from 1985, so I used as my subject matter for this task the first PDF of a microwave oven manual that I found to be easily accessible on the Internet. The first words on this manual (pictured next page) are the model name, the Panasonic Inverter. It follows that this anagrams to “Scanner, invite a pro!”—effectively commanding that the puzzle be shared, passed off to experts. (Is its tone affable or ominous? I suppose it depends on the inscrutable sender’s nature.) The first words (after the table of contents and introduction), furiously set off from all others in a box with a gray background, offer certain important safety instructions. This fortuitously anagrams to “Transform tiny spots in Tau Ceti.” Here we have our first hint of who the coy sender of the communication might be. A few pages into the manual is a table to assist with food preparation, listing the appropriate kinds of cookware for use in this microwave. The types of cookware are listed next to a “yes” or “no” depending on whether they can safely function in a microwave. This fairly obviously indicates a binary code. There is only one entry that does not take the form of “yes” or “no”—a single question mark in the yes/no column, in the fifth row. This

The above stunt lies somewhere between joke and fan theory, a collection of coincidences designed to support a surprising interpretation of facts, treating an ordinary, non-ambiguous communication as though it were a puzzle containing a hidden message. It’s not exactly a joke, but it’s not exactly sincere. A more representative example of “coincidence joke” is the one about Santa Claus and Satan being the same person: 1 “‘Habitable’ planet discovered circling Tau Ceti star,” Digital Journal. 2 Petroff et al., “Identifying the source of perytons at the Parkes radio telescope.”

345

Puzzle Theory

A Theory of Humor

20.

likely delineates a meaningful separation of some kind within the communication. Transformed into binary, the first number before the question mark, 1101, is a number 13. This may indicate that the binary number that follows it should be converted carefully into base 13. The number (treating qualified affirmative answers as “yes” or 1, and “no” as 0) is 1100101001110110111101, or 1222029 in decimal notation, which is 339415 in base 13. Perhaps it’s not a very interesting number, but it does have a surprising property in light of the information previously brought to light: it corresponds to the file name of a very particular html file: a news story about a habitable planet in Tau Ceti.1 It has been well known for a few months, at the time of this writing, that aliens who think they are very funny are attempting to send us messages through the obscure but fairly effective medium of microwave ovens;2 why not also through PDFs of microwave oven manuals?

they both wear red, they have the same letters in their name, and have you ever seen them together? Notice that the Santa/Satan coincidence joke does not work if you rearrange the order of the coincidences so that the final coincidence is not last. This “punch line” works because there are, in fact, very good reasons why Santa and Satan don’t appear together: they occupy different mythologies, and they have dramatically opposed emotional valences (fun for kids versus personified evil). This joke, and in fact every joke, gag, pun, humorous incident, and funny cat picture, can be understood under the theory of humor presented by Hurley, Dennett, and Adams in their book Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind. In Hurley et al.’s model, the emotion of mirth is a built-in reward, incentivizing the discovery of an error in committed belief. People are constantly activating concepts in mental space, concepts learned from previous experience and communication. Jokes and comedy are designed to take advantage of this reward system. The comedian leads the listener down a “garden path,” covertly introducing a committed belief that will later turn out to be faulty. Then the listener “tumbles” to the realization that the belief was faulty. The purpose of humor, Hurley et al. say, is to protect us from epistemic catastrophe—to prevent the storage of a faulty belief in long-term memory—and serving this very important debugging function is how the phenomenon of humor “pays for its extensive reward system.” The picture that emerges [of humor] is a

3. 4.

5.

an active element in a mental space that has covertly entered that space (for one reason or another), and is taken to be true (i.e., epistemically committed) within that space, is diagnosed to be false in that space— simply in the sense that it is the loser in an epistemic reconciliation process [ed.: “tumbling” to the correct interpretation] and (trivially) the discovery is not accompanied by any (strong) negative emotional valence.

More simply put: Humor happens when an assumption is epistemically committed to in a mental space and then discovered to have been a mistake. These five conditions are the necessary and sufficient setup for the pleasurable experience of humor. Notice that these conditions are not the kinds of conditions that can be applied directly to a stimulus such as a joke. They are conditions regarding mental behaviors—behaviors that can sometimes, but not always, be well predicted by a joke or other stimulus. This model of humor, then, avoids the projection error categorically.3 To analyze a joke or anything funny, then, locate the 3 Inside Jokes.

347

Puzzle Theory

1. 2.

20.

time-pressured, involuntary heuristic search for valid expectations, which generates mental spaces in which elements are constantly being tested. According to this model, then, basic humor occurs when

covertly introduced, but mistaken, epistemic commitment— the “garden path” that someone has been led down. In physical humor, someone demonstrates a strong belief that turns out to be faulty—that a chair is present (when it has been removed), or that a dance floor is free from toddlers4 (the latter video being one of Hurley et al.’s examples). “Epistemic caution is the foretaste of behavioral caution, and epistemic commitment engenders behavioral audacity,” say Hurley et al. We must commit in order to act effectively; but commitment is risky. Physical humor allows us to take pleasurable emotion from being reminded of the risks we face. What makes cat pictures funny? Or animal pictures in general? One very common “covertly introduced mistaken commitment” in humor is anthropomorphism of some non-human entity, the perception of a mind with human-like goals and emotions where no such mind can be. Pictures of animals judged to be funny usually capture the animals engaged in some activity or making some expression that is impossible not to perceive as that of a human mind. The realization that is “tumbled to” (sometimes instantaneously) is that the inference or projection of a mind is mistaken. This explains why merely drawing eyes on an inanimate is funny. Here is a portrait I drew of St. Rev and a featureless black obelisk eying each other suspiciously (pictured, next page left). It is very minimal, and what humor there is lies in the illusion created by the eyes, of mutual suspicion, 4 “Break Dancer Kicks Toddler,” youtube.com/watch?v=RItgcFgszWM.

20. Mere Coincidence, Suspicious Coincidence, and Evidence Coincidences are fun, engendering the emotion of wonder or the uncanny. They are “remarkable,” in the sense that they often feature in stories that humans deem important or interesting enough to relate. But “Coincidence” is often used as a pejorative, as an illustration of the human capacity for irrationality and error when it comes to probabilities. In “From mere coincidences to meaningful

349

Puzzle Theory

when no such suspicion can of course exist in a featureless black obelisk. In my research I also applied this procedure to graphical depictions of the un-knot and the Hairy Ball Theorem (pictured right). Any joke about nonhuman subjects, Hurley et al. say, must necessarily anthropomorphize; the subjects must be “imaginatively endowed with human characteristics such as vanity or laziness and some capacity to perceive their circumstances.” Humor is an important epistemic phenomenon, core to our mode of cognition, conserving cognitive resources while preventing epistemic catastrophe. The next section will examine another epistemic phenomenon: the spectrum from coincidence to evidence.

discoveries,”5 Thomas Griffiths and Joshua Tenenbaum argue that while the perception of coincidence is often epistemic error, the same phenomenon underlies our ability to understand the world at all. Coincidences, they say, “are not just unlikely events, but rather events that are less likely under our currently favored theory of how the world works than under an alternative theory.” They are an invitation to possibly change beliefs—the perception of a pattern in causal space whose existence had not been suspected before. A “mere coincidence” provides very weak evidence or supports a theory that is very unlikely according to evidence other than the coincidence. A new theory will not be adopted based on a “mere coincidence.” A “suspicious coincidence,” however, provides somewhat stronger evidence, or supports a more plausible hypothesis. The old, pre-existing theory and the new theory are rendered about equally likely by a “suspicious coincidence.” And when a new theory is very plausible, or when the event supplies very strong evidence for it, it is not called a coincidence at all, but rather “evidence.” The continuum is illustrated in a beautiful graphical and mathematical compression (pictured next page). Griffiths and Tenenbaum go on to provide evidence that people are actually pretty good Bayesians when working on problems close to their experience. The brain naturally performs unconscious math, not with symbols but with a complicated array of emotions, neurotransmitters, and who knows what else. Hurley et al. say: 5 Cognition 103, 2007.

351

Puzzle Theory

Surprise is an essential feature of coincidence. Surprising phenomena are the most fertile grounds for adapting our models of the universe; surprise is

20.

There are intrinsic statistics to our knowledge. When something is unlikely, we don’t calculate the statistics—we simply know (or, rather, feel) that it is unlikely. The statistics have been precalculated for us, in our experience with the world such that our knowledge reflects the likelihood of events, and when these likelihoods are contradicted we are surprised.

even “believed to be a trigger for associative learning.”6 An entity that cannot be surprised cannot learn, because its model of the universe is already so perfect that it cannot be improved. Surprise also often triggers the suspicion that someone is playing a joke on us (Hurley et al.). Positing a mind, with intention, behind suspicious happenings is sometimes an unavoidable inference, even if it is seen to be ridiculous immediately after being perceived. Hurley et al. note that for children, the world really is run by an inscrutable conspiracy of powerful beings: adults. The error of attributing intention where none exists is often incorrect, but it’s so often and importantly correct that our cognitive architecture has deemed it worth the risk to get false positives. And some of the potential false positives, in the form of gods and spirits, may have value orthogonal to their actual existence, providing a locus of coordination, among other benefits.7 A good coincidence is eerie, arousing wonder and a sense of the uncanny, because it points to a missing causation where none was suspected to be. Often the missing causation can be filled in by an entity with agency, as described in the previous paragraph—a ghost, fairy, or god meddling in worldly affairs. But just as often the missing causation is left empty, not explicitly accounted for. Dark Side of the Rainbow8 is made of 6 Itti and Baldi, “Bayesian surprise attracts human attention,” Vision Research 2009. 7 See “Weaponized Sacredness,” page 233. 8 Refering to the album-film sync of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz; certain correspondences between the works have prompted theories as to the intentionality of the synergism.

Now we have some idea of the roles of humor and coincidence in cognition, so we can turn to fan theories. Fan theories are produced by approaching items of culture as if they were puzzles, secret communications to be decoded and solved. Fan theories, silly as they may seem, provide the basis for a model of cognition present in all “serious” human epistemology, from law to science. Solving puzzles from ambiguous subject matter represents an evolutionarily important mode of interacting with reality—especially social reality. This puzzle orientation is consistent with my social model of human consciousness presented in “The Essence of Peopling”9—the main puzzle we are always solving is, what do other people have in their minds? Fan theories are successful to the extent that they can find work—just like cognitive concepts. By work, I mean the ways in which a theory interacts with reality, operating on the world and reproducing itself. 9 page 207.

353

Puzzle Theory

Ambiguity and Incongruity

20.

many surprising coincidences, but you can appreciate them with wonder without proposing any particular reason for their existence. Similarly, older versions of the Book of Mark in the New Testament end abruptly at the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb; the ambiguity is not explicitly resolved, and the uncanny, unlikely coincidence is left unexplained. The book ends merely by noting that the witnesses were afraid. The later-added ending of Mark can be regarded as a fan theory resolving the ambiguity of the original, resulting in a text that is less ambiguous and, I think, less wondrous.

The germ theory of disease finds work in hand washing and the manufacture of antibiotics. Fan theories about movies find work on Internet discussion groups and at the kind of parties where people talk to each other (and, of course, in Room 237). Theories that correspond tightly to reality are often very useful, and find a great deal of work; however, theories that do not have much physical-world relevance are often very competitive if they manage to do social work. Some theories may compete by offering hedonic rewards, which can add to their social transmissibility—that is, they are fun, satisfying, exciting, touching, awe-inspiring, or pleasantly horrifying. Theories that optimize for social transmissibility and reward packages may have to sacrifice other qualities, such as strict correlation to reality, but despite this limitation, they can become very powerful and do a great deal of work in the world. One of the most important features of the source material upon which “fan theories” may be created— what makes them plausibly puzzles—is that they are ambiguous. Visual information, in rich supply in movies such as The Shining, is inherently ambiguous. Language is ambiguous too; words may have multiple denotative meanings, or may be anagrams or numbers (as with my microwave aliens). The sound of words is another source of ambiguity, the ambiguity underlying the humor of puns. The sound of words may be experienced backwards for even more ambiguity, a feature explored in the “backwards Satanic messages” craze

355

Puzzle Theory

10 The intentional recording of spoken messages backwards is known as “backmasking,” and was popularized by the Beatles album Revolver; the reader technique of playing records backward to discover such hidden messages is known as “phonetic reversal.” Concerns that backmasking could act as subconscious suggestion, or Satanic mind control, fueled state-level bills in the 1980s requiring such records to include warning stickers.

20.

of the 1970s and 1980s.10 (The existence of these backwards messages as well as their purported content constitute an important 20th century fan theory.) The role of ambiguity is preventing any one hypothesis from being so plausible that it crowds out other possible hypotheses, consigning all possible “evidence” to “mere coincidence” territory in the coincidence model above. Fan theories are distinct from humor in that the emotion triggered is not mirth, but something like wonder, insight, or a sense of the uncanny. And with fan theories, there is no obviously correct interpretation to “tumble to.” In humor, hidden ambiguity or conflict is exploited for laughs by revealing a faulty assumption; in fan theory, ambiguity is exploited to produce insight or wonder by building a case for a surprising hypothesis, rather than suddenly “tumbling to” an error. Humor is destructive; fan theory is constructive. Fan theories grow best on subject matter that does not have a single, obvious interpretation or explanation. Displacing an apparently obvious, well-accepted explanation is a coup for a fan theory, but it is rare, and to do so it will need to make a case for the existence of ambiguity in the subject matter. Another important feature is incongruity or contradiction. In Room 237, much is made of the fact that much of the architecture presented is impossible—an impossible window that shines bright outdoor light

but is clearly in the middle of a building with hallways behind it, for instance. Here is how ambiguity is used, from the perspective of the maker of meaning: 1. 2. 3.

4.

Start with something complex with many fundamental inconsistencies (a book, a movie, a game, reality itself). Bring to conscious awareness and describe as many as possible of the more salient aspects of your chosen topic that don’t make sense. Come up with a theory that tidily explains all your identified nonsense and inconsistencies. (It’s best if it’s slightly shocking but ultimately confirms the unconscious suspicions of your audience.) Bonus: Spread your theory in a manner that suggests it is forbidden knowledge that a mysterious enemy doesn’t want people to know about.

Ambiguity is what allows for multiple interpretations; contradiction is what calls out for an explanation or even introduces ambiguity where none appeared to be before. Ambiguity and contradiction are important principles in the practice of law. There is no such thing as “the law” as a static object; rather, law is a social process of encoding and decoding, statement and interpretation. No legislation or case law is purely unambiguous (it’s made of language, after all), and ambiguity is even intentionally included in legislation. Any specific version of legislation may not be able to find the necessary coalition to pass it; but an ambiguous version may be acceptable to enough participants

Puzzle Theory

357

20.

to pass. Ambiguity is central to contract law; the interpretation of words is the essence of the practice. Most contracts have an “integration clause” that states that the written contract expresses the entire agreement of the parties, and that no party may later introduce evidence of oral agreements or understandings outside the “four corners” of the document. But what if the document is ambiguous? If ambiguity is demonstrated (for instance, the meaning of a word), then outside evidence is suddenly admissible to resolve the ambiguity. Writing contracts is therefore a puzzle of removing ambiguity; interpreting contracts can be a puzzle of locating hidden ambiguity. Ambiguity means more work for lawyers as puzzle solvers (and lawyers are generally the ones writing the rules). A “bright line” rule (one with clear application) may not get the fairest result in each case, but it provides the benefit of making it clear to parties and potential parties just what the result of litigation would be. In contrast, “factor tests” (lists of factors for judges to consider in deciding the outcome of a case) may give fairer results on a case-by-case basis, but they also invite litigation by not providing a clear indication of the result. The inclusion of ambiguity distributes the expected value of future litigation more evenly between potential parties by making its eventual result hard to predict. (Note the similarities between this observation and a conspiracy theory.) Contradiction is extremely important in the practice of law. For example, a jury’s verdict is somewhat sacred, in that a judge cannot usually overturn a jury verdict. An important exception is when a jury’s verdict is found to contain a contradiction—for instance,

finding that a party was not negligent (responsible) but still awarding damages against that party. In contract law, an apparent contradiction can demonstrate that ambiguity exists. More people are probably familiar with criminal law than contract law, as it is “sexier” and earns more popular portrayals. Both prosecutions and defenses take the form of fan theories, in the sense that they seek to unite inherently ambiguous facts, evidence, and law according to some central theory. In jury trials, these presentations must be geared to the cognitive limitations of jurors, and so cannot be more cognitively demanding than a television show. But even in appellate cases, where only judges are evaluating the theories, the cognitive demands the theories make are limited to the capacity of humans to understand them. Appellate rulings are frequently split; not even all the judges on an appellate panel (importantly composed of an odd number of judges, perhaps three or nine) frequently agree as to which side’s fan theory is “the law.” Reality is interpreted as a puzzle; lawyers on each side form theories of solutions to the puzzle; then juries and judges decide which theory is more convincing, according to specific rules of the game (including the rules of evidence as well as “canons of construction”—rules for interpreting language). Language is inherently ambiguous. And we know how ambiguity gets resolved: through ritual. The most extreme rituals of law are the trial and the appellate decision; these are guaranteed to give some result, like the toss of a coin. (This is why it’s important that appellate panels generally have an odd number of judges. Many sporting contests, like fencing bouts,

I have suggested four characteristics which are common to satisfying epistemic explanations, regardless of the status of the claim: ambiguity and contradiction in 359

Puzzle Theory

A Four-Part Compression of Ambiguous Information

20.

have procedures to avoid a tie; these rituals are also guaranteed to give some definite result, and that is the point of them.) And so the domain of law continues, despite the failure of what Seligman and Weller call “notational” understanding; there is ritual at the bottom, to resolve things. The less extreme ritual, accounting for the resolution of the vast majority of cases, civil and criminal, is the settlement or plea agreement. The costs and uncertainty of the extreme ritual incentivize its avoidance as much as possible. Both scientific theories and theological interpretations may be regarded as fan theories of reality itself. Both identify and interpret information according to a few underlying principles. They function as compression of existing data, organizing previously unconnected information into a cognitively thrifty, and perhaps valuable, form. They resolve apparent ambiguity or contradiction in reality, they connect many observations together, and they often include multiple layers of support for themselves—for instance, answer to “why” questions (causal interpretations) or “how” questions (explanations of mechanism). They must defend themselves against counterarguments to remain plausible. Their defenses must be hermeneutic, responding to small-scale and large-scale concerns, in example and in theory. And rituals are often a crucial part of their plausibility structure.

the subject matter; many instances of contact with the subject matter, multi-level explanations and defenses; and compression of observed facts into one (or at most a few) unifying lens. Pictured is a graphic representation to make it, perhaps, cognitively cheaper to hold in mind. We have already seen some of the ways in which ambiguity and contradiction create the possibility for a meaningful “solution.” I think this is why the songs of the Beatles and Bob Dylan (for example) are frequently interrogated and discussed for their “meanings.” They are appealingly ambiguous, rich with incongruous information. The relatively

361

Puzzle Theory

11 15th century illustrated codex written in an unknown language; its script has proven undecipherable despite numerous efforts by experts.

20.

unambiguous songs of, say, Kitty Wells (country songs with only one possible meaning, usually romantic suffering and loss) are not the subject of community interpretation precisely because the interpretation is so clearly communicated by the words. Lateral thinking puzzles often present an apparent contradiction or impossibility in the puzzle prompt, which is resolved by the solution. There is likely a sweet spot of ambiguity: music in a nonsense language would be maximally ambiguous, but outright gibberish does not seem to attract interpretive attention. The suggestion of hidden meaning to be found must be present. Even gibberish, because it is presented as potentially language by the very fact that it is spoken or written in speech or writing forms, contains a hint that it might be meaningful (as with the Voynich manuscript11). However, most discussion of the “meaning” of songs and other items is not performed on apparent nonsense, but on words with clear denotative meanings, even if the overall denotative meaning is not clear. The resolution of ambiguity and contradiction underlies the religious fan theory (sometimes described as heresy) known as Preterism. Preterism is the belief that biblical events usually interpreted to be in the future, such as the return of Christ, have already happened. An important source of the ambiguity underlying Preterism is Matthew 24:34, in which Jesus says “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (King

James Version). This is a problem, as it appears that Jesus has made a false prediction: the events Jesus describes (such as his return) are seen as being in the future, but he says they will happen within one generation. Preterism resolves the contradiction by positing that Jesus was correct, but that the events actually did occur—in the past. Most Christians resolve the apparent contradiction by locating ambiguity in the meaning of Jesus’ prediction, suggesting that it does not describe all the events mentioned, or questioning whether a proper translation of the words has been achieved. Internet atheists like to point out the contradiction in service of the theory that the prediction was wrong. And Philip K. Dick interpreted the contradiction by positing that the two time periods—70 A.D. and the 1970s—are in fact overlapping and both present at the same time. Here we have at least four fan theories for a single apparent contradiction. This last paragraph has been an example—a point of contact with reality for my theory. These are the second feature of a good theory, fan or otherwise, and of a good solution to a puzzle. Points of contact with reality may take many forms. They may be literary examples from extinct languages and neurological observations, as in Julian Jaynes’s excellent book-length fan theory The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. They may be the behaviors of subjects observed in a laboratory under particular conditions, as in the social sciences. They may be planet positions, historical events, economic data, or snippets of conversation. The most useful theories unite the most diverse and numerous contacts with reality. But non-useful theories share this

Puzzle Theory

363

20.

property as well. Schegloff’s theory of confirming allusions is persuasive in part because of all of his examples. The same goes for Hurley, Dennett, and Adams’s theory of humor- and, more dubiously, for Sigmund Freud’s theory of dream interpretation. (Your average published scientific study with a small sample size and tortured statistics just barely reaching a p-value of 0.05 is on similar epistemic ground with my microwave aliens theory.) But regardless of their epistemic value, fan theories, appreciated for their aesthetic and emotional value rather than their usefulness, are generally appreciated more when they explain many data points. The third feature is that the theory anticipates many levels of interrogation. In Room 237, an example of this is interviewees emphasizing the personal care Kubrick took in arranging objects on the set, indicating that he intentionally added barely perceptible information to his films, inviting “solution.” This claim is popped out a level from the particular theories themselves: it is a claim for the plausibility of any such theory. If I were to take my microwave oven aliens very seriously, I might begin by asking why, if aliens are communicating with us, they choose to do so ambiguously and through such strange mechanisms. I might suggest in reply that we know very little about our supposed interlocutors; they may have any number of reasons and limitations that we cannot be aware of—an argument from ignorance. (Kilgore Trout, a fictional Vonnegut character who writes science fiction stories, posits benevolent aliens that can only communicate by tap dancing and farting.) This would be an attempt to connect the fortuitous evidence in a

wider causal structure, with more layers of explanation. It is also anticipating an objection and positing a defense, as in law, science, or theology. Finally, good theories are compressions of information, representations that use limited cognitive resources efficiently, elegantly summarizing what is important about disparate pieces of evidence that were hard to harmonize or organize before. A good compression generates a moment of “aha!” whether discovered second-hand or figured out for oneself. (This pleasurable sensation is related to—though distinct from—the sensation of mirth when one “gets” a joke.) A good theory explains a large number of observations or phenomena with only one explanatory concept or axis (“Maverick and Iceman are gay”12), or at the very most a few concepts that link together (evolution by natural and sexual selection). Note the tension between the second and fourth aspects—number of contacts with reality and tight compression. The explanatory power of a very tight compression is best demonstrated with a giant pile of disparate examples; William James calls this the “apperceiving mass.” But the union of the theory and all the examples it explains is not a small piece of information. Inside Jokes, “From mere coincidences to meaningful discoveries,” and the paper described in the next section are all elegant compressions with many examples—attached to reality at many points. Much is lost in my summaries, and this is likely true for any theory. The elegant solution may be preserved in a summary, but the magnitude of its elegance can only be perceived after comparing it to a large number 12 A reference to the 1986 film Top Gun.

20.

of examples.

Language as Puzzle

13 American Journal of Sociology, July 1996.

365

Puzzle Theory

Why do humans do puzzles? Why do we insist that puzzles exist in unlikely documents, like movies and religious texts and microwave oven manuals? An answer is hinted at in a 1996 paper by the sociologist Emmanuel Schegloff, entitled “Confirming Allusions: Toward an Empirical Account of Action.”13 Schegloff presents a phenomenon (which he emphasizes is just a tiny phenomenon) within the field of conversation analysis—recording actual conversations between people and paying careful attention to their actual words, rather than imagining what conversations are supposed to be like or might plausibly be like. The phenomenon Schegloff analyzes is the repetition of the exact words of one speaker, immediately, by another speaker. He demonstrates that this phenomenon is usually employed to confirm an allusion—to say “yes, you are correct, that is what I was implying in my earlier statement.” In other words, people are constantly presented with puzzles in language— implications and hidden meanings that are not stated explicitly. And we are always trying to “solve” these hidden meanings. When we do so correctly, an interlocutor will often respond not by simply agreeing, but by repeating our exact words. I am hesitant to assign 60-page papers to my readers, but Schegloff’s examples hold a great deal of value and make the phenomenon crystal clear. For instance, on the following page is a typical exchange

demonstrating the phenomenon, one of a couple dozen presented in the text (I quote them in image form—pictured below—because of the difficulty of transcribing the exchange). In this example, “making money” is the repeated phrase, the solution to the allusive “puzzle” presented by the euphemistic “practical reasons.” In another case, in a newsroom, an editor (the city editor, “CE”) presents a potential story to the staff. Here Schegloff is explicit about the puzzle nature of language as presented. He notes: The story is recounted in a manner that requires its hearers to “solve it” for its interest as (presumably) a “human interest story.” In particular, the final components of the telling are left for “working up” by its recipients, and the telling is directly followed by such interpretive upshots. First the final component of the story has its

Puzzle Theory

367

20.

implied contrast made explicit; “hated the cat until this morning” (line 30) being contrasted with “loves the cat now” (line 32), while leaving the basis for this turnaround still unexplicated. Then the penultimate component of the telling, which had been delivered as a stripped-down direct quotation of the mother’s utterance upon

opening the door and seeing the child outside (“What the heck are you doing out here?” lines 28-29), has its import formulated by a recipient for confirmation by the teller (“She didn’t realize her son was missing”). The teller both confirms the understanding that it makes explicit and confirms that the telling had been designed to convey it without saying it in so many words—perhaps achieving thereby a demonstration of its potential solvability by readers as well and, accordingly, its worthy candidacy as a publishable human interest story.14 I would be interested to know if this phenomenon of confirming allusions (affirming that a correct summary of previously implied information has been made) by repeating the exact words of the speaker 14 Emphasis Perry’s.

Puzzle Theory

369

20.

is invariant across languages. If there are languages that do not have the feature, I would be interested to know whether they have other linguistic features that regularly accomplish the same function. (Notice that these ways of exploring the phenomenon of confirming allusions [in this case, positing a falsification, and noting a case in which a falsification would not really be a falsification] are also ways of defending the theory against falsification, thereby protecting it. Defenses anticipate the path of ordinary cognitive investigation, blocking objections at each potentially disconfirming junction. The existence of defenses need not be evidence that the defended theory is suspicious or false; it is just evidence that the ordinary paths of epistemic investigation have been followed. I ask the reader to disregard this parenthetical if it feels dizzyingly meta.) Schegloff quotes Harvey Sacks, who defines culture as “an apparatus for generating recognizable actions.” The main problem that humans have to solve is communication: creating and decoding puzzles in the form of language. Recall my revised Maslow’s hierarchy: social belonging is key to all material needs in our environments of evolutionary adaptedness, the crucial key to access to culture, the stuff of which gives us our devastating advantage over nature. Humans are not that rational and not that smart, but they are brilliant at creating and interpreting social information. Social information is as much our food as food; we need it, desire it, seek it out if we don’t find enough of it. I have long suspected that interest in things like strong AI and the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life stem from our inherent loneliness

and desire for connection. Philip K. Dick, in an “afterthought” to a volume of short stories in 1977, says The basic premise dominating my stories is that if I ever met an extraterrestrial intelligence (more commonly called a “creature from outer space”) I would find I had more to say to it than to my next-door neighbor… The way out of living in the middle of an under-imaginative figment is to make contact, in your own mind, with other civilizations as yet unborn. You’re doing the same thing when your read SF [sci-fi] that I’m doing when I write it; your neighbor probably is as alien a life form to you as mine is to me.15 Communication is a form of social belonging; the fewer people that read the message, the more intimate the communication, and the more meaningful it is experienced as being. Being the first to solve a difficult puzzle is meaningful; but solving a secret, hidden puzzle that no one else even suspected was there may be even more meaningful. It is as intimate as a communication whispered into a particular person’s ear. Our relationship with evidence is very personal and social. When using the relatively new mode of scientific thinking, we personify evidence: it “suggests” and “implies” various theories, and we are invited to “listen to” what the data “say.” It is as if we must posit a communicator in order to think about information. Another aspect of personification manifests in the Myth of the Great Man in science. When information is judged particularly important in our 15 “Afterthought by the Author,” The Best of Philip K. Dick 1977.

Many puzzles go unsolved. Even when the author of a puzzle puts the equivalent of a big sign that says There is a puzzle hidden here, few notice the hint enough to bother to solve the puzzle. Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “The Vane Sisters” contains a hidden puzzle, and the mechanism is even explained in the text (the final paragraph contains an acrostic, the first letter of each word spelling out the creepy and very satisfying key to the story). But it was rejected by the New Yorker, and Nabokov had to explain the puzzle to the fiction editor in order to get it published. I have to admit that I would not have noticed the puzzle if I had not been pointed to its existence. The reason for this is that, as demonstrated above in the microwave oven manual example, there are potential puzzles everywhere, more than could be solved in a million human lifetimes, mostly of dubious significance, and it’s difficult to know where to apply cognitive resources toward solving them. And most proposed “solutions” will be nonsense. One phenomenon that both alerts people to the existence of a puzzle and suggests that a particular solution is correct is what are called confirmers. In a 1987 essay on hidden meanings in The Shining, published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Bill Blakemore defines “confirmers” as clues puzzle makers often use “to tell you you’re on 371

Puzzle Theory

Confirmers

20.

society, the creator or discoverer of the information is often accorded special personal status. He is presumed to have consistent, almost infallible epistemic superpowers.

the right track.”16 Of course, humans are subject to what is called “confirmation bias”—we tend to choose a theory and then find confirmers for it everywhere, ignoring discrepant evidence and evidence for alternate theories. I would like to present one beautiful example of this. In the early 2000s, the magician David Blaine published a book that contained a puzzle encoding the location of a treasure, exchangeable for a hefty cash prize. The puzzle was extremely complex, involving multiple layers of encoding. (He also gave a separate clue in an interview on a television show.) One would-be solver attempted a solution on some of the decoded clues. Here is the first part of his solution: First Part: IF MY TATTOO. Rearrange the spacing to form IFMY TAT TOO. “Tat” is a verb that means to “interweave”. It’s a wordplay command that means to combine letters. “Also” is a definition of “too.” IF MY TATTOO = IFMY TAT TOO = IFMY + ALSO = OS FAMILY. It creates an internal riddle. Who is the “Os family”? Answer: The Osbournes. The first answer to our first puzzle is “The Osbournes.” How do we know it’s correct? Because the Osbournes have “tattoos.” The solver continues, finding interpretations—with confirmers—for more parts of the clues, converging in a location in Kansas. I find the intricacy and plausibility of this solution profoundly disturbing, because it is so plausible, yet it is completely wrong. The actual 16 Blakemore, “The Family of Man.”

Puzzle Theory

373

20.

location of the treasure was in Los Angeles, California, down Laurel Canyon Road. The official solution is very intricate and complex, with many stages of solutions—clues are hidden in alphabetic codes for things like the curls of toes on dragons and combinations of card suits printed on page after page of the book. Once those clues are decoded, complex rules must be applied to whittle them down to the actual clues. The winner of the prize apparently drove to the site where the prize was hidden and looked around but couldn’t find it. As she was driving away, she happened to see the word “TATTOO” on big letters on the back of a truck, which reminded her of the separate clue Blaine had given on a television show. That clue finally triggered the specific location of the prize, and she successfully located it. Even when the existence of a puzzle is clearly indicated, most solutions will be failures. And when a puzzle is not clearly indicated, however broadly its existence may be hinted at, it will most often go unsolved, with no cognitive resources devoted to it. This is interesting from the point of view of cryptography (and its arcane forms like steganography): when the existence of a communication (and its method of encoding) is ambiguous, it may be more likely that a particular encoded transmission goes unsolved by its intended recipient than that an enemy solves it. This is good news: it indicates that unsolved puzzles are everywhere. The real puzzles (those intentionally encoded by an intelligent life form) may be difficult to differentiate from spurious “puzzles”—but they are there, hidden somewhere in the haystack of human communication. Philip K. Dick says:

One time a whole class of kids wrote me about my story The Father Thing and every kid wanted to know where I got my idea. That was easy, because it was based on childhood memories of my father; but later on, in rereading my answers, I noticed that I never said the same thing twice. With all intent at honesty, I gave each kid a different answer. I guess this is what makes a fiction writer. Give him six facts and he’ll link them together first one way and then another, on and on until you forcibly stop him.17

Two Cognitive Functions Returning to the theory of humor, Hurley et al. use a model of cognitive processing that they call JITSA, for just-in-time spreading activation. In this model, people construct mental spaces on the fly, with sensation, perception, and inference activating associated concepts from long-term memory. Often, concepts and beliefs are activated without even rising to explicit conscious awareness. The mind instantly activates some concepts and not others, and combines them to make predictions about what will come next. (When a prediction is violated, the result is surprise, as described above.) Just-in-time spreading activation is a thrifty mechanism, bringing into limited active mental space only those memories and concepts that it deems relevant. It is impossible to bring to mind simultaneously all the information stored in long-term memory; awareness is a limited resource, especially under time pressure, as 17 “Afterthought by the Author,” 1977.

Puzzle Theory

375

20.

is the case in conversation. Hurley et al. describe two “forces” that limit and modulate the spread of activation: friction and closure. Friction refers to the natural “petering out” of energy assigned to the cognitive task. “Whatever the energy limitations on spreading activation are, the energy budget for this activation avenue is exhausted and it ceases operation wherever it is,” they say. Closure is the active function of blocking closing off further exploration along a certain path. “This kind of heuristic search terminator is necessarily risky and crude, not involving further analysis of the path,” say Hurley et al. “All of the cognitive power of an individual person’s JITSA system lies in the use of closure, since friction is as good as content-blind, stopping the search for no reason at all other than running out of time or energy. Closure, in contrast, is teachable, adjustable by experience.” Closure is critically important as a procedure, but one of its risks is that it is extremely difficult to reverse, or even to be aware of. When we have closed off a potential avenue of investigation, we are rarely conscious of it. If you imagine lions basking in the shade under acacia trees on the Serengeti, you do not expect the lions to be wearing socks. But you are certainly not aware of having “closed” that particular line of thinking, or billions of others, every moment. Closure is productive (but risky) thought-stopping, pruning the branches of a cognitive search tree so that healthier branches can have more energy. Those individuals whose closure function does not operate well often think poorly, in a “loose” fashion. This “closure deficit” is sometimes called allusive thinking, a cognitive style characterized by poor inhibition of

irrelevant memories and forming loose associations.18 However, in a person who thinks well, occasional allusive thinking may be a valuable function. The stuff of genius—new compressions, connections, models— is often the result of a novel, loose association pursued by a mind capable of closure, but not as constrained by closure as is normal. The subtype of puzzles called lateral thinking puzzles are exercises in un-blocking, reversing a closure that was covertly accomplished by the statement of the problem. The “two cognitive functions” I allude to in my subheading of this section are thus closure and allusive thinking—blocking and un-blocking. Cognition is a resource management game, and, broadly speaking, the two functions adjust and direct resource flows (cognitive resources, time). Consider the career of Kary Mullis for a sobering illustration of genius and epistemic catastrophe existing together in one mind.19 Some degree of allusive thinking seems to underlie both phenomena, though perhaps it is just a coincidence. Can we hope to do better? Solving a puzzle, as a subset of cognition, is therefore a resource management game exercising these two functions. Is there a puzzle or secret information here? Is it likely worth the cognitive effort to try to solve it? What avenues should be pursued in decoding the communication or finding the solution? Where might ambiguity lie? What concepts might connect? 18 See Rominger et al., “Allusive thinking (cognitive looseness) and the propensity to perceive ‘meaningful’ coincidences,” Personality and Individual Differences 2011. 19 Mullis is a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and inventor of the polymerase chain (PCR) technique, as well as a climate change and AIDS skeptic.

Consider Oedipa Maas, the heroine of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Faced with a pile of suspicious coincidences, haunted by confirmers, she is never able 377

Puzzle Theory

Undecidability and the Consolation of Conspiracy

20.

What operations might be performed? Are you on the right track? Confirmers are themselves hidden communications that indicate that you are on the right track, that cognitive resources should (continue to) be allocated to this branch of the search space. As we have seen, this kind of confirming communication may be inferred erroneously. Nonetheless we continue to look for confirmers, because they are useful for directing cognitive resources. In the Schegloff paper on confirming allusions, verbatim repetition of the exact words of the speaker operates as a confirmer for a very common and important kind of “puzzle”—the puzzle of guessing the contents of the minds of other people, given their ambiguous words and actions. What I have called “the essence of peopling” can be seen as a kind of puzzle—figuring out what other people have on their minds, relevant to you. One of the most important, recurring puzzles in human existence is this: “How hard should I cooperate with this person or group?” It’s a complicated judgment to make, and mistakes can have serious consequences (fitness costs as well as hedonic costs). Then there is figuring out how to cooperate with a chosen cooperation partner. Both involve interpreting ambiguous information, the possibility of mistake or deception, and the necessity of pursuing some cognitive paths and blocking others.

to settle on one theory that resolves all the ambiguity. She sees hints and suggestions of a secret conspiracy; she sees its apparent work in the world. The conspiracy explanation is appealing; it posits order, and, perhaps, belonging. Here (pictured) is a portrait of her situation, reflecting the epistemic situations all of us find ourselves in at some point. Converge on 49, 42—something that we only really know from whispered hints—incipient, tentative enlightenment—coincidence. Beyond lies agony. Certain kinds of knowledge are necessary for our comfort and flourishing; each epistemic emotion (surprise, mirth, wonder, insight) reflects an epistemic need. And underneath all the needs, belonging, and perhaps the outline of a mysterious purpose, just barely suggested by strange coincidences.

CARTOGRAPHIC COMPRESSION Cartography is the practice of making maps. In the narrowest sense, a map is a symbolic depiction of geographic, spatial information inscribed onto a two-dimensional surface. In a broader sense, a map is an abstract representation of information about any domain, spatial or otherwise—“abstract” in the sense that certain features or kinds of information are highlighted to the exclusion of others. But not every abstract representation is a map. Maps have axes, usually at least two; they elucidate relationships between features of the domain; and they are useful for orienting, navigating, or engaging in goal-directed behavior within that domain. Maps that are inscribed on some kind of surface—paper, clay, rock, or an electronic screen—are useful for sharing, pointing at, and comparing with the domain. But the cognitive capacity for map-style thinking likely precedes cartographic inscription. Intimate familiarity with the domain, viewed through the special attention-directing lens of language, is enough to generate mental maps in different minds that are verifiably highly similar. The cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky describes a cognitive change that happened to her while spending

time among speakers of the Kuuk Thaayorre language in Pormpuraaw, Queensland, Australia.1 This language, like a third of all human languages, has the property of absolute direction reckoning: cardinal directions are used instead of relative directions like left and right. Relating one’s directional orientation is the proper response to the most common greeting, “Where are you heading?”—and small children can easily report their directional heading from a list of over eighty possibilities. Boroditsky found reporting her exact directional orientation difficult at first, and suspects that she was considered intellectually dim for not being able to report her orientation. But after some practice, she experienced a radical change in her internal cartography: After about a week of being there, I was walking along, and all of a sudden I noticed that in my head there was an extra little window, like in a video game. And in that console window was a bird’s-eye view of the landscape that I was walking on, and I was a little red dot that was traversing that landscape. Boroditsky shared the cognitive change she experienced with a native speaker of the language, who commented, “well of course—how else would you do it?” Mental cartography, with some assistance from language and social pressure, can be as sophisticated and useful as paper or electronic maps. And when external maps are shared, they are compared not only to the 1 Interview with Tim Howard, “Bird’s-Eye View,” Jan 25 2011.

terrain, but to the internal mental maps of each participant. The usefulness of externalized cartography relies on the shared capacity for internal cartography.

21.

Aboutness Extraction

Cartographic Compression

In the next section I will argue that herbivore trails can be regarded as maps. What about the “trails” created and used by slime molds?2 In order to explain why the former, but not the latter, is a map, I will distinguish two forms of intelligence. The most primordial kind of intelligence is awareness of relevant features in the environment, coupled with responses to relevant information. This environmental awareness-response type of intelligence only makes sense in the light of goals (“relevant” to what?)—from a single-celled organism responding to the presence of food by consuming it, to a human noticing that a plant is dry and watering it.3 Evolution itself has acquired a great deal of intelligence; DNA is the transmissible record of the information evolution has acquired about the environment, from the perspective of billions of organisms with future existence as a “goal.” Simple organisms are still very viable, but the computational process of evolution has revealed that increasingly complex organisms that extract a great deal of information (and energy) from their surrounding systems are also extremely viable, especially over short time frames. Organisms have evolved increasingly complex neural 2 Reid et al., “Slime mold uses an externalized spatial ‘memory’ to navigate in complex environments,” NAoS 2012. 3 For a more comprehensive treatment, see “What Is Intelligence?” page 91.

381

systems and senses that reach into new domains of relevant information. Humans have created instruments that do the same. The “intelligence” apparently contained in complex economies (the “invisible hand” of the market, ecosystems) is of the awareness-response type. Human intelligence includes awareness and response to the environment, but adds a new feature—extracting information from other intelligences, and communicating information as well. This type of intelligence also makes no sense apart from the concept of “goals”—and part of the complexity of the problem of communication and aboutness-extraction is that communication partners have some shared and some competing goals. Sometimes people comment that they’re surprised that the problem of computer translation of languages has not been solved. Extracting the meaning from language—the story or concept communicated by the words—is an extremely hard problem that humans specialize in. It is not inherent to intelligence itself. A self-modifying super-intelligent being with vast computational resources could likely maximize its existence and reproduction goals with only the awareness-response type of intelligence—language and communication might prove to be a hindrance, a possibility explored in Peter Watts’s novel Blindsight. A special type of intelligence is the organization of complexity into a simpler, less resource-intensive form.4 The experience of such a compression is what is called “insight,” and it is pleasurable for humans even when not relevant to survival. The complementary 4 See also the work of Jürgen Schmidhuber.

383

Cartographic Compression

5 Nicholas Hudson, “Musical beauty and information compression: Complex to the ear but simple to the mind?” BMC Research Notes 2011.

21.

tool, humor, offers a pleasant sensation as a reward for weeding one’s model for inconsistencies, though as with compression and music, it has many social applications. Compression is likely one of the regularities in subjective aesthetic judgment.5 This type of intelligence makes sense even without reference to goals—but reducing complexity only makes sense given limited processing power and storage space, a feature as important to human intelligence as cognition being localized within many separate minds. An elegant compression is often itself the “aboutness” that is communicated in symbolic systems. This is where maps (and trails) come in. Maps are compressions of the aboutness-extraction type. They represent and highlight certain features of the domain, forming a useful model, and ignore or downplay others. Language itself acts as a store of information, shared among minds, and language tends toward compression. As stories and concepts are shared, they become more compressed, until they reach the final stage: a metonym, a single word that represents a story or concept that conversation partners are expected to understand. A word is the ultimate tl;dr for human communication. As awareness-response intelligence increases through humans acquiring new senses via technology, language grows to fill the space of understanding. And symbolic cartography grows along with language, even as domains themselves change. New

models compress complex, messy observations into cheaper, cleaner, more useful patterns: natural selection, Milankovitch cycles, game theory. An herbivore trail is an elegant compression of information. Its “aboutness”—its promise of water, seasonal pasture, rare nutrients, or something else—is available to those animals capable of extracting it. Slime mold trails, on the other hand, are low on aboutness. They mark the places the slime mold has been, allowing it to avoid previously explored areas, but offer no promise or information about the territory other than this.

Some Territories Are Maps Alfred Korzybski is credited with the modern proverb “The map is not the territory.” We sometimes need reminding that the thing represented and abstracted is not identical to the representation or abstraction; “magical thinking” often involves confusion of levels of abstraction and representation. But some territories are self-mapping. In the case of herbivore trails, for example, cartographic information has been carved directly into the territory itself through years or even centuries of use. John Batali6 says that trails “are marks of passage used for passage.” In order to use trails, animals must seek a destination, figure out which trail to use and in what direction, and feel some urgency about staying on the trail. This, Batali argues, is the archetypal form of technology usage. 6 “Trails as Archetypes of Intentionality,” Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society; Boulder, CO 1993.

21. Cartographic Compression Illegible natural vs. legible “scientific” forests (fr. Seeing Like a State). Herbivore trails (as well as hiking trails, roads, canals, and railroads) change the territory by adding information that increases the territory’s legibility and navigability. These technologies inscribe the territory with the same aboutness found in ordinary maps—useful information that can be extracted and used by savvy creatures during goal-directed behavior. Google pagerank and search suggestions have much in common with herbivore trails. They are “marks of passage used for passage”—millions of past searchers rendering the landscape more navigable, in particular directions, for later searchers.

Two Legibilities Legibility is the official L-word of Ribbonfarm. In the 385

sense of Venkat’s classic post,7 legibility refers to the perspective of a top-down, outside force shaping a system for maximum control. We might call this external legibility. Kevin Lynch, in his 1960 book The Image of the City, offers a different perspective of legibility, or, as he calls it, “imageability”: the ease of mental mapping and navigation within a system. We might call this internal legibility. The characteristic feature of external legibility tends to be self-similarity: monoculture, grids of endlessly repeating rectangles. A territory is legible and controllable from the outside when its internal features are made very similar to each other. But the characteristic feature of internal legibility is the opposite: variety and difference. Lynch says: [T]he sweet sense of home is strongest when home is not only familiar but distinctive as well. It may be argued against the importance of physical legibility that the human brain is marvelously adaptable, that with some experience one can learn to pick one’s way through the most disordered or featureless surroundings. There are abundant examples of precise navigation over the “trackless” wastes of sea, sand, or ice, or through a tangled maze of jungle. Yet even the sea has the sun and stars, the winds, currents, birds, and sea-colors without which unaided navigation would be impossible. The fact that only skilled professionals could navigate among the 7 See Venkatesh Rao, “A Big Little Idea Called Legibility,” discussing the James Scott concept.

Cartography and Anticartography Distinctiveness is critical for internal legibility. Maps generally represent territories in their most distinctive states: in the daytime as opposed to the dark, in summer as opposed to snow-covered winter, and with clear skies instead of covered in clouds. Common features of the landscape are abstracted away (though they may be often present) in order to present optimal 387

Cartographic Compression

The question is: legible to whom? An environment that is very self-similar is easy to understand and control from above, but an environment that is locally distinctive is easier to navigate from within. This applies to “environments” in information space as well as spatial, geographic environments.

21.

Polynesian Islands, and this only after extensive training, indicates the difficulties imposed by this particular environment. Strain and anxiety accompanied even the best-prepared expeditions. In our own world, we might say that almost everyone can, if attentive, learn to navigate in Jersey City, but only at the cost of some effort and uncertainty. Moreover, the positive values of legible surroundings are missing: the emotional satisfaction, the framework for communication or conceptual organization, the new depths that it may bring to everyday experience. These are pleasures we lack, even if our present city environment is not so disordered as to impose an intolerable strain on those who are familiar with it.

distinctiveness of features. More specifically, Kevin Lynch identifies five features that people use in their mental maps to read, image, and navigate urban environments. I will offer examples of each from Disneyland, a marvelously internally legible environment. Paths are “channels along which the observer potentially, occasionally, or customarily moves.” In Disneyland, these include foot paths, the railroads, and even the paths that rides take through their environments. Edges are linear elements not considered as paths, but rather as boundaries (with different levels of permeability). The Rivers of America at Disneyland form an edge; they may be crossed by boat or canoe, and form a natural boundary to foot traffic. Districts are medium-to-large two-dimensional areas that the observer mentally enters “inside of.” Within Disneyland, the districts are the different lands: Fantasyland, Frontierland, etc. Nodes are junctions (of paths) or concentrations of activity that people travel to and from, and enter into. In Disneyland, railroad stations, ride entrances and exits, and attractions like Sleeping Beauty’s Castle form nodes. Landmarks are distinctive features of the landscape used for navigation, but used externally for navigation rather than entered into. Signs and towers are landmarks. In the case of Disneyland, the Matterhorn could be a node or landmark, depending on how it is used. Since these are features people naturally use to make mental maps of their geographic environments,

Cartographic Compression

389

21.

their relative richness or scarcity makes some territories more legible and navigable than others. There may be analogous features in information space, and different informational domains may be differently navigable. An example of an anticartographic domain is the classic gambling casino. Casinos exhibit extreme local self-similarity, and similarity to each other. They are dark. Their carpets and layouts are confusing; all the paths look the same. Classically, they have no clocks, and if they have windows, they are tinted to reduce time cues. (Some casinos display large monitors with 30-second video clips of soothing views from around the world; this kind of window reduces anxiety but offers no spatial or time cues.) Both time and space navigational cues are reduced to focus attention on gambling. The classic theory exemplified by the work of Bill Friedman suggests that decoration should mostly be in the form of gambling machines; entrances and pathways should be filled with them. Ceilings should be low. Long, easily legible hallways are to be avoided. There is a new and more cartographic theory of casino design: playground-style casinos aim to be more similar to theme parks than to their anticartographic amusement park predecessors. This does seem to be the way of the future. The Nevada casinos have been losing money for five years straight, and meanwhile the percentage of revenue accounted for by non-gaming services (hotel rooms, food, and entertainment) has increased steadily. Over a third of the revenue of Nevada casinos now comes from non-gaming sources, which indicates a more playground-style focus. In

the highest performing casinos, up to two-thirds of revenue comes from non-gaming sources; these also tend to be the most playground-like. The more cartographic, the less focus on gaming as gaming. Information spaces may be similarly cartographic or anticartographic. They may allow for distinctiveness, features, navigability, and patterns for compression, or they may lose people in a vast, featureless wasteland.

Maps and Plots Many years ago, my friend Jo Guldi introduced me to drawing maps. The first step is to choose axes (dimensions). Ideally, for interesting maps, you choose something more interesting than cardinal directions. Second, you plot things along your axes. But this is only the first stage of map making. Maps, as I said earlier, are not only plots of points, but represent relationships between features: paths, trade routes, nodes, boundaries, etc. When is abstract information about a domain, presented on axes, not a map? Here (pictured following page) is Robert Mariani’s plot of sources of journalism, whose highly original and entertaining axes are left/right (political) and bombastic-insane/reasonable. This is a perfectly interesting plot of data, and I mean no disparagement to it when I say that it is not a map (it is not trying to be a map; he specifically calls it a “two-dimensional spectrum”). The relationship between the different plotted points is not implied. There are no paths or boundaries. In this form, it is not useful for navigating the domain that

21. Cartographic Compression [Ed. note, quot. R. Mariani] Factors on the ‘Left-Right’ spectrum include studies of trust and bias, as well as self-description and consensus among those who suggest placement on the chart to me. You can pinpoint the ‘left-rightness’ of an outfit by looking at where the first letter is, not the middle or last letter.

it represents—except, perhaps, for selecting media sources according to one’s taste. Maps, as Richard Francaviglia says of Disneyland,8 are “non-Euclidean”—in the informal sense that the shortest distance between two points is quite often not a straight line. The cities of Burbank and La 8 Francavaglia, “Walt Disney’s Frontierland as an Allegorical Map of the American West,” The Western Historical Quarterly v. 30, 1999.

391

Slate Star Codex map, subsection. Crescenta, California, are quite close together as the crow flies, but quite distant because the San Gabriel Mountains separate them. Maps reveal geographic (and social) connections, rather than just plotting directional coordinates. How social and geographical features relate to each other is much more important than their relative positions in terms of cardinal directions. In contrast, the lovely and entertaining SlateStarCodex map of the rationalist community displays some degree of features and relationships between plotted points, offering much

21. Cartographic Compression local distinctiveness, but has no relevant axes. Despite this, many people have found it useful for exploring areas of information space that may be “nearby” or interesting to them, simply from the portrayal and juxtaposition of points.

A Cartographic History of Cartography in One Map As we have seen, the earliest maps were mental maps and “maps” made of information inscribed onto the territory itself. Here (pictured) I have attempted to portray some aspects of the development of cartography, drawing on figures from Edward Tufte’s The 393

Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The axes are the number of dimensions represented by the map and the level of abstraction and precision achieved. In this modest map, I have attempted to do more than plot the positions of the different maps, but to indicate their relationship. Narratives, calendars, and histories are maps of time in one dimension. Sequential art (early comic books, you might say) are similar to later, more abstract time series, but lack precise dimensions, illustrating narrative causality instead. A sea lies between the early maps and the sophisticated efforts of “book culture” societies: the Map of the Tracks of Yu the Great was a twelfth-century map carved into stone, using a precise distance grid. It was made for people to make paper rubbings to take away and study elsewhere, making it much like a printing press. The earliest known time series, a tenthor possibly eleventh-century plot of the positions of celestial bodies, originates in the early “book consciousness”9 culture of monasteries. As the printing press accelerated book consciousness, the dimensionality and abstraction of maps also increased. A ship sails on the sea; the “dead reckoning” of early ship journeys, as in absolute reckoning languages, prefigures and bridges the precision and abstraction later achieved in book consciousness. The printing press is a railroad allowing access to the higher mountains; computers are rocketships to higher dimensions. As the lofty heights of book consciousness are achieved, it becomes harder to see earlier forms of consciousness—because of the distance or the fog, 9 See “Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture” page 131.

395

Cartographic Compression

10 Sociological Theory 2017.

21.

perhaps. The usefulness of maps is their ability to display some aspects of reality while ignoring others. It is said that all models are false, because they necessarily omit information in the interests of compression and clarity; but some models are useful, precisely because they do not represent all of reality. This is the tension expressed in Kieran Healy’s recent paper, “Fuck Nuance.”10 Humans map everything onto space, including time. We draw timelines, and refer to going forward or backward in time, way back or just ahead. Speakers of sign languages must represent time in space (in front of and behind themselves, or sometimes to the left and right), but speakers of oral languages are no less beholden to the inherent spatial metaphor. Spatial metaphors, including maps, may make information spaces more internally legible and navigable. Encouraging features analogous to those that enable spatial navigation—paths, edges, nodes, landmarks, and districts—may reduce anxiety and increase competence and meaning when navigating information spaces. Geographic navigation may be regarded as a solved problem (just check your phone)—but information navigation has barely begun.

MEANING & POINTING A cognitive phenomenon that can happen to you (if you are unlucky, perhaps) is known as depersonalization or derealization. It is a mild relative of the symptom recognized in psychology as disassociation, a component of many mental disorders. Derealization is the loss of the felt sense of the world as real, as an unchanging and solid world differentiable from the mock world perceived in dream states. It can cause significant anxiety. It is a condition often articulated in art, for instance in our own time in the movie Waking Life by Richard Linklater. As with many abnormal psychological phenomena, the existence of derealization points to its absence in the normal world: the negative phenomenon of the loss of the sense of the average-everyday orientation points to the positive phenomenon of constructing the sense of the real. We can ask how people experiencing derealization can snap out of it and begin to experience life as ordinary and meaningful again. But more importantly, we can ask how people not experiencing derealization come to construct a meaningful, solid, ordinary world out of their stream of experiences. In this essay I will explore a cartographic metaphor for the ways people create meaning and navigate the

The apparently simple act of pointing (indicating an object with an outstretched finger or a nod of the head) is in fact a complex phenomenon. Many animal species engage in pointing, as in the famous “waggle dance” of honey bees: bees use flight patterns to indicate the direction and distance of resources in the environment to other bees, such as flowers or new nesting sites. But in humans, the phenomenon of pointing has been elaborated to extreme versatility and subtlety. We possess adaptations that facilitate pointing, such as the crescent shape of our sclerae (the whites of our eyes), allowing conspecifics (and our evolution partners, dogs) to easily perceive the direction of our gaze. In a sense, if our eyes are open, we are always pointing (at something) to any observer who cares to look. But an intentional and directed act of pointing is a special case. The anthropologist Charles Goodwin1 investigates a single act of pointing in detail, revealing the hidden complexity of the act. An archeology student is working on a dig site. He first catches the attention of his supervisor, calling her by name. He waits until he has her attention, then points to a feature on a detailed map of the site (using his trowel). At the same time, he says “I think I’ve found this feature.” After pointing at the map with his trowel, a 1 “Pointing as situated practice,” Pointing: Where Language, Culture, and Cognition Meet, 2014.

397

Meaning & Pointing

The Complexity of Pointing

22.

complex systems of meaning they create, based on pointing, reference, and maps.

substitute finger, he also points to the archaeological feature he thinks corresponds to the one on the map in the landscape with a nod of his head. Meanwhile, his supervisor attends to the place on the map where he is pointing with his trowel, and then changes her gaze to follow his second indication. The student then changes his gaze to look at his supervisor, to make sure she has understood. Goodwin refers to the “hierarchy of displays being performed by the body” of the pointer: not only the “dual point” (at the map and then at the feature, with trowel and head, respectively), but also picking up the map and gazing at it in the first place, indicating a “domain of scrutiny” (the map) with his postural orientation as well as a target (the feature on the map) within the domain. And the participation of the receiver of the point is just as important: the student doesn’t point right away, but attracts the attention of the receiver and waits until her position, posture, and gaze are appropriate to receive it. He also watches her behavior to make sure she has understood the complex point. There is a third “point” accomplished invisibly: the student has not only indicated the target on the map and the feature in the field, but has indicated a correspondence between the two. The target on the map points to the feature in the field; he has pointed to a point! Pointing, Goodwin says, is not “a simple way of indicating some prelinguistic ‘thing’ in the surround,” but a complex act of communication that utilizes mutual mental modeling and often language. He goes

The word “meaning” in English is itself a polyseme, a word with multiple meanings. In one sense, “meaning” refers to the referent of a word, its dictionary meaning or a particular contextual sense. In a broader sense, “meaning” refers to value, purpose, and more cosmic significance (as in “the meaning of life”). Many of the synonyms for “meaning” in English also have this property; the word I have used for the second type of meaning, significance, suggests that one thing signifies (or means) something else. While not a linguistic universal, it is very common in other languages for the word for semantic, dictionary “meaning” to also be used to indicate a deeper sense of purpose or significance. The semantic sense of “meaning” is a pointing relationship, and a pointing relationship, as we have seen above, requires both a pointer and a party receiving the point. Sometimes the pointer is understood to be a person, as when a person “means” something by a particular use of language: he is pointing to something in the world. But often the meaning is understood to be possessed by the language itself: a word “means” something as if by its own agency. “Semantic contamination” is the linguistic phenomenon by which the meanings of polysemous words 399

Meaning & Pointing

The Double Meaning of Meaning

22.

on to describe how a person with aphasia and only a three-word vocabulary is able to communicate a vast amount of information using pointing, indicating not just locations but significance. A point is not a grunt; it is eloquent.

(and even homophones) become intermingled in the minds of language users. When a word is used in once sense, it tends to drag with it all of its other senses, even if only subconsciously. There is a chicken-egg problem here, because when a word is used in a new sense (for instance, metaphorically), it is because the new meaning is in some way similar to or reminiscent of the old meaning. As words acquire new meanings, they form a tangle of mutual pointing. “Meaning” in the sense of “meaning of life” carries with it from the semantic sense of “meaning” the expectation of a pointing relationship. What is the purpose of life, or love, or getting up in the morning? What does it signify? As with the semantic meaning of words, there may be an external entity doing the pointing (such as a deity), or the things and acts themselves, like words, can be understood to convey meaning all by themselves, to “point.”

Pointing in Life Meanings Roy Baumeister (Meanings of Life, 1991) proposes that humans have four basic needs for meaning: a need for an ultimate value base, a need for personal purpose, a need for self-worth or status, and a need for efficacy or control. Human cognition is characterized by asking “why?”—explicitly as a child, internally as an adult. If an action is difficult or undesirable, it must be justified; more general principles justify specific cases. Stop at intersections because it is part of one’s duty to drive carefully; drive carefully to avoid hitting people; avoid hitting people because injuring others through

22. Meaning & Pointing The meanings of “meaning” as pointing relationships. carelessness is wrong. To avoid infinite regression (and all the cognitive trouble that would go along with it), there must be some end to this process of justification: humans need values that are valuable for their own sake, ultimate values not relying on anything else for justification. A value is an end, as opposed to means to an end, and offers an end to thinking uncomfortable thoughts that have no answer. Ultimate values may be positive (for example, space exploration, or “the show must go on” in theater) or negative (for example, eschewing racism or adultery as purity violations). They are often experienced as sacred— self-evident, not to be traded off against non-sacred values, and perhaps even surrounded by a protective zone of motivated ignorance, as Jonathan Haidt puts it. Sacred values may be lost if not protected, and are difficult to recreate once lost. The need for purpose is the need for a present idea of something in the future that motivates present action. 401

All the sources of meaning provide ways to spread the self out over time, to consider the past and the future when weighing what to do now. Purposes provide reasons to make costly sacrifices in the present in order to improve the future. Baumeister divides purposes into two types: goals and fulfillments. Goals are short-term future plans that are likely to actually be achieved; once a goal is completed, a new one must be found. Fulfillments, on the other hand, are fantasies about an idealized far future. Eternal life in heaven is an example of a fulfillment, but many fulfillments are not religious in nature. Any goal that seems to offer, in one’s own mind, a permanent state of sustained positive affect, is likely to be a fulfillment rather than a normal goal. These might include fame’s promise of eternal bliss or “making it” in a high-status career, more mundane matters like marrying or having children, or even the fantasy of dropping out and raising organic goat cheese on a farm. In each case, if we cared to look, we would observe that currently famous people, high-status careerists, spouses, parents, and goat farmers are not ecstatically happy all the time: they have goals and fulfillments of their own. In an important way, this is not the point: fulfillments do the job of motivating present behavior as long as they are plausible. People need to feel that they have control over the world around them, as well as the ability to reach goals or realize values. Efficacy means the capability to help others as well as oneself. Baumeister also found that a greater sense of meaning was associated with doing things for others, even though in many cases happiness

403

Meaning & Pointing

2 “Some Key Differences between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life,” Journal of Positive Psychology, v. 8, 2013.

22.

was reduced even as meaning was enhanced.2 The illusion of control, a tendency for people to believe they have more control over events than they actually do, is a healthy and adaptive response to this need for meaning. The phenomenon of “depressive realism” suggests that depressed people do not experience this healthy illusion. Finally, the need for self-worth is the need to feel that one is valuable, high-quality, and important compared to others. This kind of status is comparative, and is often realized in comparison of the self to those lower in status. Hierarchies provide self-worth of this kind to everyone except those at the very bottom, who must find an alternative basis for self-worth. In societies without clear status hierarchies, there is less certainty about social position, hence more worry. Each one of these needs for meaning may be understood as a form of pointing. This is especially true in the first case, that of ultimate value; somewhere in the dizzying tangle of pointing and meaning there must be some end, some final thing pointed to that doesn’t point to anything else. Purposes (goals and fulfillments) are pointing to the future, mostly experienced as a pointing relationship from the present and not as an actual sensory experience. Self-worth, being comparative, points between the self and others. Efficacy is the self pointing to the world. Whether by semantic contamination or natural extension of meaning, the pointing/reference sense of semantic meaning is preserved in personal or cosmic meaning. In literature, pointing by allusion is a way

of elaborating meaning. Listening to The Doors’ song “The End” after reading Zhang Xianzhong’s “Seven Kill” Stele,3 I noticed that the word “kill” is repeated seven times at the end of each, and wondered if Jim Morrison had been alluding to the latter piece. Brief investigation suggested that it was a mere coincidence: not a pointing relationship, hence not, in this sense, meaningful. Coincidences themselves, however, may be experienced as meaningful when they seem to “point,” even if their point can’t be discovered: they create an illusion of missing causality, of hidden significance. What does it mean?

Lost and Found in Information Space If, as I have tried to motivate above, meaning is pointing, then in order to perform the essential human functions of experiencing meaning and feeling at home in the world—in order not to get lost in derealization or depersonalization—we must navigate complexity using comfortable mental maps that point to our shared social world of information. In “Cartographic Compression,”4 I described Kevin Lynch’s five-part structure of how people form mental maps and navigate the geographic space of cities. Lynch’s research suggested that people form mental maps with five basic features in order to navigate: boundaries (such as water lines, freeways, and 3 Xianzhong, nicknamed the “Yellow Tiger,” ruled the Da-Xi dynasty in the 17th century; the Seven Kill is a stele in Chengdu believed to be erected by Xianzhong, ft. the inscription: Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man. / Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven. / Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. 4 page 379.

22. Meaning & Pointing

A map of information space.

405

walls); regions (such as neighborhoods); paths; landmarks (highly visible and reliable components of the landscape that don’t change or change in a predictable manner, such as mountains, buildings, or the sun); and nodes (the places people go and enter into, such as home, work, shopping, churches, restaurants, and parks, and also the transitional areas between forms of transportation, such as train stations). Mental maps for geographic navigation may help us feel at home, creating a “meaningful” pointing relationship between what is in our minds and the world around us, but most of our time is spent not in geographic space, but in the information spaces created by language, technology, and culture. And we must have mental maps for these as well. Extending Lynch’s cartographic analysis into an information space metaphor, how do we map and navigate information space is a manner that doesn’t leave us lost and disassociated? Boundaries in information space can be formed by conflict. Metaphorical boundaries of dress, ritual, and speech define in-groups and out-groups;5 people fight sacredness wars in information space, and by doing so, define boundaries by which to navigate. People signaling loyalty to a particular political belief are rarely listened to by those on the other side; the boundary is only mildly permeable. Rather, both sides together are building a wall that helps both navigate their social-informational world in a simple manner. (I am reminded of Peter Turchin’s thesis that wars and frontiers of fighting were responsible for the formation of 5 See “Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty” page 481.

407

Meaning & Pointing

6 Turchin, “A theory for the formation of large agrarian empires,” Santa Fe Institute Working Paper, 2008. 7 See “The Essence of Peopling,” page 207.

22.

large agrarian empires—conflict builds and defines information space, a creative force as well as destructive.6) Judging from social media, people seem to be very aware of their political enemies, expending large amounts of effort directed toward them. Compare a language boundary: people speaking different languages are hardly aware of each other, so this kind of boundary is not as useful for navigation. Conflict creates a visible boundary. Regions are domains within information space, defining the different selves that people present to the world.7 Mathematics and football are domains encompassing both subject matter and a particular manner of speaking, interacting, and behaving. Work, school, home, church, and Twitter are domains (though there may be multiple domains within each). A region can be defined by a boundary of conflict, or split by it. Paths, I think, are stories, in a broad sense: shared understandings of sequential causality. As we move through information space, acting on the world and being acted on by it, stories help us plan our behavior, and help us form a useful, communicable understanding of what happened to us. They are the way we get to and come away from the “places” we go to in information and social space. Knowing the script, or causal sequence, for a restaurant, a date, a temple, or a construction site helps us form expectations and plan; stories help us “get to” our destinations. And turning experiences into stories helps us come to terms with, learn, and communicate what happened;

we can “come away” from our experiences. Paths may be well-traveled or bushwhacked fresh; stories can be old and shared by many, or entirely new. What are these places that we go between using stories? Nodes can be understood as rituals: destinations that are entered into in information space, the metaphorical places where we spend our time and perform activities. If I am correct, then a lack of ritual (or a ritual aversion) may be correlated with experiencing derealization, being lost in information space. Like transportation “nodes” (e.g. train stations, airports), many rituals are associated with transition (graduations, weddings, Mister Rogers changing his shoes as he arrives “home”). But many rituals are the destinations themselves: socializing, dancing, singing, having dinner or tea, having sex. Mountains last for millions of years. Buildings last for decades and stay in the same place. But nothing is static in information space. So what are the landmarks here, the unchanging (or predictably changing) features that anchor our mental maps? Since nothing is unchanging in this landscape, I think we must create landmarks, or perhaps the illusion of landmarks. Ultimate values (in the sense of Baumeister’s first need for meaning, above) must be carefully maintained through shared social signaling in order to seem unchanging. Identities are a kind of socially maintained landmark, either the identities of existing, living people, or the identities of deceased ancestors, historical figures, narrative characters, or deities. Baumeister’s illusory “fulfillment states” (imagined future states of perfect happiness) can be unchanging landmarks precisely because they do not exist. If unchanging or

All of information space is, in a sense, made up. But there are many senses in which it is real: it is stored in human brains (and their technological extensions) as experience and memory, and the patterns identified often correspond to regularities in the world. However, information space is constantly changing. Our information world is changing much faster than that of our ancestors. In navigating this nauseating landscape,8 we need fixed points that do not exist. This points to a salubrious role for both bullshit and absurd conflict. Fighting about politics, sports, or religion, or believing in harmless bullshit like the persistence of personal identity or Newtonian mechanics, may play a major role in keeping us at home in reality. Without our silly conflict and illusions, we may ironically become more lost and adrift, less able to navigate. As boring and irritating as culture wars, clichés, stupid Internet memes, spectator sports, and flagrant wrongness may be, they may be among the very things keeping us oriented in the ever-changing sea of information space.

8 See Venkatesh Rao’s “Welcome to the Future Nauseous” for the (Sontag-inspired) use of “nauseating” as a response to accelerating cultural or technological change.

409

Meaning & Pointing

Healthy Illusion

22.

predictably changing landmarks are necessary for the navigation of information space, and if they cannot really exist, then “seeing through” this healthy illusion poses a risk for explorers.

“SOMETHING RUNS THROUGH THIS WHOLE THREAD” The first zoom was the probably the sound of a train. The various online dictionaries all give slightly different dates for the earliest use of the word “zoom”: a few confidently say 1892 (with no citation), others say 1886 (also no source), one gives a range 1885-1890 (same), and another is more circumspect with “late nineteenth century.” They all agree, however, that the word “zoom” originated as onomatopoeia: the sound of something traveling fast. Anything zooming by in the late nineteenth century would have been powered by steam. Perhaps it was a train, or a steam-powered automobile. So zoom is the sound of speed—not the old speed of horses, but the new speed, vibrating and mechanical, exciting and high-tech. In the twentieth century, different aspects of “zoom” were then taken up by two emerging technological domains: photography and filmmaking on the one hand, and aviation on the other. “Zooming” in aviation is a straightforward application of the original use. A pilot builds up a great deal of speed traveling parallel to the plane of the earth,

Something Runs Through The Whole Thread

411

23.

then uses the built-up kinetic energy to fling the plane straight up into the sky, faster than it could go using just its thrusters. It’s easy to imagine what the ground looks like during this maneuver: rapidly shrinking as it gets further away and less detailed. “Zoom” in photography and filmmaking builds from this aspect of speed: the changes in visual perception that occur when one is traveling quickly either toward or away from something. To zoom in is to quickly get closer in perception, seeing more detail of a smaller area. To zoom out is to quickly get further away, taking in the big picture in an instant. All those specialized senses of “zoom” are still in existence, but the computerized display of information has made another sense of the word ubiquitous. Zooming in and out is viewing some underlying dataset at higher and lower resolution, as if zooming in and out with a camera lens, or as if zooming up and down in a plane, perhaps. But the modern sense of “zoom” is embedded in an extremely elegant gesture performed with two fingers on a touch interface. First, the fingers are placed close together touching the screen, to indicate the tiny area of the map or other data set to view more closely. Then these fingers are spread apart, still touching the screen, as if stretching out the space indicated to the desired apparent size. The modern “zoom” makes no noise; it’s completely divorced from the loud vibrations of the onomatopoetic origin. The merely metonymic association of a particular sound with speed is broken, replaced with a more functional, metaphoric association of speed with quick changes in visual perception associated with movement.

You would look in vain to find the true essence of zoom—the particular thing that connects all these meanings together. And yet they are clearly related. If we don’t get anywhere performing eidetic reduction on things like “zoom,” in seeking out the true essence of categories that provoke us to understanding, it might be that there is no such essence to be found. Wittgenstein offers those in this position consoling metaphors, as therapy for the urge to distill into essences. The most widely known metaphor Wittgenstein uses to comfort the seekers after essences is that of family resemblance. Look for the unifying quality or essence of that which are called games, he invites— board games, card games, sports, informal children’s games—and you will not find one. Rather, you will find that “games” resemble each other the way members of a family do: they each share some of an overlapping mess of qualities, as some members of a family share eye color, others share nose shape, and others share an aversion to cilantro, but there is no one single quality common to all. I have related the zoom example, however, so that it may illustrate Wittgenstein’s second therapeutic metaphor, which is less known, but, I think, more apt than the first. It is a metaphor from an ancient method of textile manufacture. Here is the whole passage (section 67 of the Philosophical Investigations, Anscombe’s translation, emphasis mine): I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members

413

Something Runs Through The Whole Thread

The family resemblance metaphor depicts how things in a linguistic category relate to each other, taking the category as a given. The thread-spinning analogy depicts the process by which linguistic categories are formed and expanded. I suspect that Wittgenstein’s second metaphor is not as widely known because the source domain for the metaphor is not alive in people’s heads. I am surprised that Wittgenstein himself was aware enough of the process of spinning that such a metaphor would occur to him. The typical modern is,

23.

of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way—And I shall say: “games” form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a “number”? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: “There is something common to all these constructions— namely the disjunction of all their common properties”—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: “Something runs through the whole thread—namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.”

Something Runs Through The Whole Thread

415

23.

if anything, more ignorant of how yarn is spun than of how words acquire new meanings. In order to make cloth, fiber must be spun into threads, and threads woven or knitted into fabric. With rare modern exceptions, cloth is made of threads (whether knitted or woven from them), and threads are spun from fiber—wool, linen, cotton, hemp, silk, yak, possum, synthetics, and many more. Each fiber has a different set of properties, but they share one essential quality: when twisted together, they become entangled, forming a strong thread. First, observe what linen fibers look like when they have been prepared for spinning (upper photo). They have been brushed to all face the same direction, but not twisted together. If you hold your hands about ten inches apart on the roving and pull, the arrangement easily falls apart with little effort (middle photo). This is because the individual fibers are less than ten inches long, and easily slide by each other when not twisted. A “rope” made of this kind of roving would be useless to tie anything. However, if you take a bit of the fiber and twist it with your fingers, the resulting string can take quite a bit of tension. In the bottom photograph is a hand spindle, one of the most ancient tools used for making useful threads. The spindle hangs from the newly formed yarn and spins, adding twist to the thread being formed. At the same moment, the spinner adds new fibers to the forming thread. There is a dramatic moment in spinning, when one is familiar with the slippery nature of the roving and can’t quite intuit how the twist will affect things, when

you entrust the weight of your spindle to the nascent yarn. If the yarn is not spun tightly enough throughout its length, it may break, as illustrated above, and the spindle will fall. If the yarn is spun properly, though, the spindle will spin suspended on the thread, strengthening it as it is lengthened. Spinning wheels and industrial spinning machines operate on the same principle: adding fiber and twist at the same time to lengthen the existing thread. Twisting fibers to increase strength is a simple principle that arises from complexity. Yuan Gao explains how the principle applies not only to fibers for cloth, but to metal wires and cables: In general, for both ductile metal wires and non-ductile stranded cable (like rope), the twisted cables makes the strands more fault-tolerant than the same number of strands held separated from each other. It reduces the chance of cascade failure—where before, each strand could fail at a weak point somewhere along its length and no longer contribute its strength at all, in twisted cable, a strand that is broken is still able to contribute its strength elsewhere along the cable. This means a break in a strand is only a localized weakness, rather than weakening along the whole length of cable.1 Each bit of broken wire in the example is like a fiber in the normal case of spinning: much shorter than the whole length of the thread, but contributing its own strength to the strength of the whole, through the magic of microscopic frictions. 1  Yuan Gao, Quora, May 15 2015. Emphasis Perry’s.

Something Runs Through The Whole Thread

417

23.

With this deeper picture of the source domain in mind, we can return to the target domain: the development and elaboration of words. For “zoom,” the initial finger-spun piece of thread (as you would make to start spinning) is a sound effect of speed. (When I call it a sound effect, I mean that it is something John Dewey, in Art as Experience, would recognize as “media” useful for the expression of sense and emotion.) Upon this beginning, the fibers of aviation and photography are added, and of film, all contributing sense and strength to the growing “zoom” picture. The new use (zooming in and out on smartphone screens) binds together the old uses and extends them. There is one thing common to all of them—they all contribute to the strength of the concept—but it is not an essence, but the process of word formation itself, the “continuous overlapping of [the] fibres,” as Wittgenstein says. Spinning takes a bit of skill and knack (though not too much skill, since almost everybody used to do it). At its heart, spinning is using the fingers to balance fiber-adding and twist: adding the right amount of fibers and twisting it the right amount, so that the thread neither breaks, nor gets too thick or thin. Twist is very powerful, and its organizing force will operate on the entire roving unless it is carefully confined to just a small number of fibers at the edge of spinning. This common but skillful balancing act, and not something haphazard or random, is the source domain Wittgenstein chooses for the process by which words get meaning. The final picture is one in which all the meanings support each other, in which new meanings support old and vice versa, even though no one meaning is ubiquitous or universal. Words and concepts,

like threads, grow through the application of skillful processes, rather than remaining the same. I expect a lot from words. Often I am disappointed. There is a rhythm to the swell of interest when encountering some new domain, and the deflation of enthusiasm as it is revealed as empty of some kind of hoped-for meaning. All those interesting things—treasure hunting, zooming, dares, money, art, emotion—no matter how scrupulously vivisected, yield no lasting simplifications, but reveal colossal squirming messes where clarity should have been. (Here I think of Melville’s Pip in Moby Dick, and the vision of the coral insects that drives him mad.) Wittgenstein’s metaphor doesn’t provide a lasting simplification. Yet I find it therapeutic, and I pass it along, spun up a bit. It’s fine to say “there’s no one final meaning or essence to anything”—but that leaves the mind nothing to cling to, stranded in empty space. The spinning metaphor gives the mind purchase: a grounded view of the surrounding landscape of meaning, grounded in a process both creative and concrete.

SOCIAL MEDIA CONSCIOUSNESS The most amazing consequence of the recent transition to social media consciousness is nothing. My first essay for Ribbonfarm, “Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture,”1 was a piece about changing subjective consciousness over the past few hundred years, focusing on what I called scholastic-industrial consciousness, which I claimed has largely displaced pre-literate forms of consciousness. Three and a half years later, I’m interested in examining a different, much more recent kind of consciousness change: the transition to social media consciousness. Ironically, when I was writing in January of 2015, social media adoption had already begun to plateau in the United States. Between 2006 and 2015, two thirds of the adult population of the United States began using social media. The slope of the adoption curve over time for social media looks about the same as for other technologies introduced over the past century or so, such as radio, television, telephones, and refrigerators. During the period that these other technologies were being adopted, major social changes were taking place. The world of 1903 was very different from 1 page 131.

the world of 1985. It was easy to tell causal stories (whether accurate or not) about how technology was changing humanity. The world of 2005, however, looks very similar to the world of 2018, with the exception of the ubiquity of social media and the rectangles through which we reach it. People still find it fun and lucrative to tell causal stories about how technology is changing humanity, of course. But when we are not engaged in this hobby, it is difficult to find hard evidence of a serious before-and-after effect. For instance, one of the most popular causal stories is that social media has caused increased mental illness, such as anxiety and depression. Writing in 2001 (updating in 2009), Hubert Dreyfus cites a 1998 study that concluded that using the Internet caused people to experience more depressive symptoms and more loneliness. “When people were given access to the World Wide Web, they found themselves feeling isolated and depressed,” says Dreyfus. “This surprising discovery shows that the Internet user’s disembodiment has profound and unexpected effects.”2 I’ve heard many such stories about the pernicious effects of social media. However, when using standard diagnostic criteria, there has been no change in rates of depression and anxiety between 1990 and 2010, a time period that would presumably capture the supposedly “profound effects” of Internet and social media use.3 The authors above did find that some studies using questionnaires about general well-being found an 2 Dreyfus, On The Internet, 2001. 3 See e.g., “Challenging the myth of an ‘epidemic’ of common mental disorders: Trends in the global prevalence of anxiety and depression between 1990 and 2010,” Baxter et al. 2014.

Social Media Consciousness

421

24.

increase in psychological distress over the relevant time period, but the questionnaires most likely to produce a positive result were ones that included somatic symptoms (e.g. heart palpitations), which could be associated with increasing obesity over the same time period. Also, none of these studies picked out a specific uptick during Internet or social media adoption, as opposed to the rest of the time period. Psychologically, people seem to be doing about the same. But haven’t suicide rates increased since the advent of social media? The answer is yes, in the United States, a little, but the inflection point is the year 2000, not 2006. 2000 was a local minimum in the age-adjusted suicide rate in the United States, probably the lowest in the past century. The rate has risen from that local minimum to a level that is normal for the past 80 years (the last time there was a big spike or change in the United States suicide rate was during the Great Depression). The rise has not been concentrated in adolescents, the greatest users of social media, but rather is greatest for adults in their twenties through fifties. So it would be strange to attribute the change in suicide rate to social media. Looking at facets of life that changed dramatically over short periods during the 20th century—marriage, divorce, fertility, urbanization, wealth, even suicide (around the financial panic of 1908 and the Great Depression)—it’s difficult to see a mark in the 21st century from social media. I haven’t seen any obvious discontinuities in time trends of indicators such that social media presents itself as a likely cause. Yes, a higher percentage of couples met on the Internet, but once together, they seem to behave according to

trends established long before. Everything seems shockingly the same as it was before social media, at least in the outside world. It’s only in the world newly revealed by the rectangles that change seems to have occurred. So whatever the change social media causes in consciousness, it must leave humans outwardly largely as it found them. Their interior experiences may be different in content and character, but other than spending more time staring at screens (as an outsider would report), Social Media Humans act pretty much the same. I suspect that there are multiple forms of social media consciousness. Each platform offers tools that open up a slightly different world, and different kinds of people are drawn to and continue to use each platform. Perhaps there is such a thing as Facebook consciousness and Twitter consciousness, though of course many people use both. Also, people use each platform in vastly different ways, paying attention to different streams of information, interacting in different ways. I think it’s likely that there exists a specifically social media consciousness that I have no way of understanding, because I am not a very social person. All I can hope to capture here is the essential reduction of a sort of intellectual dilettante social media consciousness, that probably describes less than 5% of the population, but on the other hand probably describes a high proportion of Ribbonfarm readers. Earlier I mentioned Hubert Dreyfus’s book On The Internet. He published the first edition in 2001, boldly claiming, among other things, that something like Google could never work. In his 2009 edition, Dreyfus happily admits he was wrong (in fact, very much to his

I think that Dreyfus’s misunderstanding rests on several misunderstandings about the world revealed by social media technology, which we used to call “cyberspace.” Misunderstandings that were common and easy to make before the past decade or so: 1. 2. 3.

Cyberspace is disembodied. Cyberspace is anonymous. Cyberspace is safe and free from consequences.

Bruce Sterling said that cyberspace is the place where the conversation takes place when you’re on the phone. Does the body go with it into cyberspace? In the early days of the Internet, people were 423

Social Media Consciousness

The Risky Body in Cyberspace

24.

credit, his whole teaching style and personal philosophy is based around taking risks and being open to being wrong in front of students), but doubles down on such propositions as “distance learning has failed.” As a teacher, I would have also predicted this before the success of such projects as Lambda School. My own experiences with classroom teaching emphasized bodily presence, as Dreyfus does, using the body to communicate in-the-moment reactions to students and relating student comments and questions to each other. Further, my few experiences with online teaching were boring and lame. Yet somehow, new forms of “distance learning” are managing to look better than traditional universities. I wouldn’t have predicted it, and I’m sure that Professor Dreyfus would be delighted to be proven wrong, and fascinated to see why.

interested in bringing representative analogues of the actual human form into cyberspace. MUDs and MOOs4 would often contain long text descriptions of characters’ physical attributes, and characters could perform different actions using programmed verbs, again reported to the relevant parties in text. In LambdaMOO, when a user logged off, the “housekeeper” would have to come around and remove their “body” from the room! Dreyfus, in his 2009 edition, focuses on a different and much later exploration of the literal online body called Second Life, which this time added three-dimensional graphical representation of bodies and interactions. A few years ago, Second Life seemed like the future; now, the closest thing to Second Life is massively multiplayer video game worlds. I don’t know much about them; sometimes I see screenshots or references to characters, but by and large, that world seems separate from the real world, which includes the real world as revealed by social media. I will leave the phenomenology of MMPORGs to those familiar with the matter. However, as social media, the pseudo-embodied approach, in which an analogue of the body travels through three-dimensional space and expresses moods, has fallen out of fashion. In its place, there is pure text, text and images, or video. (My own social media world is made almost entirely of text, with some images, but I’m grateful for the video part, because it’s the only way I can watch Hubert Dreyfus 4 “Multi-User Dimension” or “Multi-User Dungeon,” referring to a text-based, multiplayer, virtual reality game popular in the 1980s and 90s. A MOO is a “MUD, Object Oriented,” i.e. one which allows object-oriented programming and greater customization of the game environment.

Social Media Consciousness

425

24.

teach a class.) What I think is this: your body in cyberspace is just your regular body. You don’t get a different body. Your actual body (of which the eyes and fingers and amygdala are subsystems) gets a grip on the world of cyberspace through the interface of rectangle and software, and presses up against the bodies of others through this medium. In the core case of Twitter, the body is not observed visually by others unless one shows it (in carefully chosen glimpses); certainly, the body is not smelled or touched. The state of the body (again, including the brain or mind or whatever) can only be sensed through the text and images it chooses to show and respond to. Through these brief sentences, each participant gradually gets a sense of some number of others, and of “the others” as a public in general. Perhaps this understanding is impoverished in some ways compared to the understanding that would be obtained by someone in the same room, but I think it is enriched in other ways. For instance, I would have to be very lucky to meet a person in meatspace whose thoughts I found as interesting as those in my Twitter feed, and if I did get that lucky, it would take us a long time to work through our epistemic distance. I would have to show my body during this time, risking unwanted attention or jealousy or disgust, and I would have to experience the other person’s immediate emotional reaction to whatever I said. In person, I find I am so busy trying not to offend people or hurt their feelings that I rarely get to talk about anything interesting. In this way, the text-based interface is enriched from my perspective. In person, we wear clothes rather than go around naked; there are aspects of the body

that it’s nice to be able to bracket and leave out of the interaction, such as the appearance of one’s genitals, buttocks, and breasts, or the state of one’s hair (my hair is quite messy, right now). I think it’s possible for the entire appearance of the body to be bracketed, as with clothing. The Internet is a type of garment. That is to say, the body doesn’t disappear in cyberspace. It is merely, to different degrees, bracketed, covered over, in certain of its aspects. It’s still there, typing, having emotional reactions, longing, being involved, being mad. So cyberspace isn’t disembodied; the body is merely revealed and clothed in a different way, specific to the social setting. (Just as social settings vary in meatspace, they vary in cyberspace.) And, as is obvious from the telephone example, cyberspace is far from anonymous. Even when the name of the cyberspace entity doesn’t correspond to one’s government name, the identity can still be perfectly real, with praise or slights to the online identity felt as deeply (if not more) as those toward one’s government identity. I have written before that the idea of a single unified identity is a gross oversimplification of human social reality; each person has many selves, depending on social relationships and setting. Similarly, many online identities can be real to a person, with varying levels of energy and commitment devoted to them at different times. As for cyberspace being risk-free and safe from consequences, it’s tempting to merely snort-laugh, but this was a serious enough thing to think in 2001 (and even 2009) that one could devote a whole chapter to it, as Dreyfus does. He says:

Kierkegaard would surely argue that, while the Internet, like the public sphere and the press, does not prohibit unconditional commitments, in the end, it undermines them. Like a simulator, the Net manages to capture everything but the risk. Our imaginations can be drawn in, as they are in playing games and watching movies, and no doubt, if we are sufficiently involved to feel 5 Ibid.

427

Social Media Consciousness

As we moderns have been made aware during various spectacles, it is not necessary to be in the same room with someone in order to be hurt or humiliated by them. An online identity can become so real and so occupied that it is vulnerable to harm from purely online sources; the online world, now, is the real world, in a way it wasn’t in 2001. Dreyfus imagines, following Kierkegaard, a tension between the fun of playful experimentation, and the lack of meaning without commitment. Here I quote Dreyfus at length, because here he transitions into what I think is a core aspect of social media consciousness, as opposed to its predecessor, movie consciousness:

24.

to trust someone you have to make yourself vulnerable to him or her and they have to be vulnerable to you. Part of trust is based on the experience that the other does not take advantage of one’s vulnerability. You have to be in the same room with someone who could physically hurt or publicly humiliate you and observe that they do not do so, in order to trust them and make yourself vulnerable to them in other ways.5

we are taking risks, such simulations can help us acquire skills, but in so far as games work by temporarily capturing our imaginations in limited domains, they cannot simulate serious commitments in the real world. Imagined commitments hold us only when our imaginations are captivated by the simulations before our ears and eyes. And that is what computer games and the Net offer us. But the risks are only imaginary and have no long-term consequences. The temptation is to live in a world of stimulating images and simulated commitments and thus to lead a simulated life. As Kierkegaard says of the present age, “it transforms the task itself into an unreal feat of artifice, and reality into a theatre.”6 The idea that the Internet “captures everything but the risk” is something that seemed possible in 2001; now, since what we think of as the Internet is largely composed of a drama of real people having their lives ruined or sometimes made better, it’s hard to imagine. The Internet is real to us, now, in part because it obviously has consequences. In theory, one could write up a phenomenology of every piece of technology: refrigerator consciousness, for instance. How does in-home refrigeration change how you relate to food, or feel about decay, or think about animals? Probably there is something interesting in every one. The transition that seems most salient to me, however, is the transition from movie consciousness, which began to dominate early in the 20th century and inform all aspects of life, 6 Ibid. Citations omitted, emphasis in original.

24. 429

Social Media Consciousness

fantasy, and even memory, to social media consciousness, which is informed by movie consciousness but represents a departure from it. The transition from movie consciousness to social media consciousness represents a move in the direction of greater involvement, greater complexity, and greater risk than was previously experienced. In many senses, social media consciousness is more of a direct involvement with reality than movie consciousness. The reason movie consciousness could transition so smoothly into social media consciousness is that they are very similar, and are built on top of very old mental capacities. The best explanation of these capacities is that of Nick Lowe in his 2000 book The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative (pictured). In perceiving all kinds of narratives, Lowe says, from Greek tragedies to detective TV shows, we really take a three-part view of the ongoing situation. He envisions a triptych (pictured): the first part is the movie screen, which is the text itself. This may be the text of a novel, or the carefully chosen visual and audio tracks of a movie, or a sermon, or a campfire story. This “screen” changes rapidly. The second part is a

sort of chalkboard, with notes about the rules of the universe. It is filled in quickly at the beginning, with typically only small revisions as the narrative progresses (though these slight revisions may be of great consequence). Finally, the third part is a sort of puzzle, in which the ongoing big-picture best guess of what’s going on with the story is presented. As Lowe describes it, the outer edges are filled in early and keep getting filled in in a relatively orderly way, but with the constant possibility of revision—even potentially scrapping a whole model that had been almost filled in (though this is rare). When we interact with movies and other narratives, and even with sports and games, this three-part process is occurring. With a vocal, expressive crowd, you can feel it happening along with others in a social way. (I have heard rumors that the theater in Shakespeare’s time, and the pulpit in Paul’s time, were much more raucous places than their modern equivalents, though modern equivalents vary by culture, time, and participants.) In movie culture, which includes books, radio programs, television, and all forms of media narrative that are carefully crafted beforehand (which I mean to include games, even though the precise outcome of the game is not known), this mode of cognition is essentially passive, and the development of mental models (frames two and three) is merely for the pleasure of it, not for any real-world consequence. In social media world, the three-part view still exists, but it is turned onto the world itself, rather than any particular narrative or narrative world. Nick Lowe explains that he’s talking about closed worlds:

7 The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative, 2000.

431

Social Media Consciousness

For instance, narrative worlds are close in time—they have a beginning and an end. This mental apparatus, however, was presumably developed for open-world exploration, that is, interacting with other people, through whatever medium. There is continuity between movie consciousness and social media consciousness, but there is also continuity between forms of consciousness I’d imagined to be extinct in 2015 and that of modernity. Narratives are created to be absorbing when taken in in the three-part cognitive model described above.

24.

[W]hether at a conscious level or a subliminal, we are performing two higher-level cognitive operations all the time we read. First, we are making a constant series of checks and comparisons between our timelike and our timeless models of the story. And second, we are continuously refining the hologram by extrapolation—inductively and deductively projecting conclusions about the story from the narrative rules supplied. Now, this process of extrapolation is ultimately made possible by a property of narrative whose implications for plotting are central to my model. In the coding of a story into a narrative text, the universe of the story is necessarily presented as a closed system. The degree of closure will vary widely, according to the needs of the particular text. But the levels on which such closure operates are more or less constant across all genres, modes, and cultures of narrative, because they are intrinsic to the narrative process itself.7

Typical city trees. Tidy, symmetrical, well-watered, no dead material. But what about regular reality? Where would that three-part apparatus come from, except as a way to deal with regular reality? What’s surprising is not that people can become absorbed in the “fake world” of social media. What’s surprising, to me at least, is that people can find the actual world itself, as revealed through social media, as exciting a target for narrative interaction as movies, if not more so.

City Trees and Wilderness Trees What I see as the essential difference between premade narratives and ongoing social media narrative engagement is that the former is tame, and the latter is wild. I will illustrate what I mean by this with some photos of plants. First, think about the city plants that you see. Most

24. Social Media Consciousness Typical wilderness tree—asymmetrical, sticking out different directions, on top of some half-dead scrub.

This one grew some kind of monstrous tentacle, which is exactly what you’d expect and what happens to personalities under some conditions in social media and other parts of reality. 433

of these are probably trees, flowers, shrubs, and lawns. A city tree is usually tended so that it looks like the idea of a tree: symmetrical, lush, dead parts removed, etc. The dead parts of city plants get removed, because they are considered unattractive, and because they pose a fire hazard. City plants generally depend on humans for their reproduction. It’s a safe life, to call back to Dreyfus’s interpretation of Kierkegaard. I grew up in the woods and spend a lot of time in the wilderness, but when I think of a tree, I think of a city tree. (I suspect that this is a result of my own underlying movie consciousness; city trees look like the idea of trees, as portrayed in movies.) In the wilderness, however, trees are all over the place. Not only every scrap of dirt, but every rock, trickle of water, leaf, cone, ray of sunlight, etc. is up for grabs. Each organism, in seasonal waves along with its conspecifics, takes the world as it is, and fights for everything. Nothing is given. Nothing is tidy. Especially in ecologies featuring plants with “fire-embracing life histories,” in which many plants benefit from fire, wild plants don’t self-prune, and you end up with weird-looking asymmetrical monstrosities that appear half dead and half alive, instead of tidy, symmetrical “trees.” Everybody is simultaneously trying to use everything else, including each other. Nothing is safe. It’s at once beautiful, alien, and profoundly tiring. I love the wilderness, but the order and safety of the city, being built for the comfort of beings like me at all levels, is lovely to come back to.

24.

Fire-embracing life history

435

Social Media Consciousness

Movie consciousness foregrounded safe, tidy worlds, revealed in movies and other narrative media, and distinct from the “real world.” Social media consciousness, on the other hand, foregrounds a wild, unsafe, risky world in which everything is eating everything else constantly, and everything changes from minute to minute. This is not to say that the creators of books and movies did not do this; however, I argue, they did it on a longer time scale, and fewer people were involved in the process. One director performs an homage to another in a work that takes months to make; meanwhile, on social media, one sentence-long quotation might be popularized, parodied, associated with images, associated with past texts, elaborated on, mocked, and made obsolete within hours. Not just texts, but whole identities, are vulnerable to this process. Social media requires the shielding of the body (the garment role), precisely because it is so profoundly unsafe.

AFTER TEMPORALITY Time is weird. The alleged dimension of time has been under investigation by the physics police on charges of relativity weirdness and quantum weirdness. The math is hard, but you can see it in the ominous glint in the eyes of physicists who have had a couple of drinks. But subjective time is even more suspicious. Each observer possesses detailed and privileged access to a single entity’s experience of time (his own); however, this does not guarantee the ability to perceive one’s perceptions of time accurately, so as to report about it to the self or others. Access to the time perception of others is mediated by language and clever experimental designs. Unfortunately, the language of time is a zone of overload and squirrelly equivocation. Vyvyan Evans counts eight distinct meanings of the English noun “time,” each with different grammatical properties. Time can be a countable noun (“it happened three times”) or a mass noun (“some time ago”); agentic time (“time heals all wounds”) behaves like a proper noun, refusing definite and indefinite articles.1 Perhaps we will get some purchase with chronesthesia, since Greek classical compounds are well-known 1 Evans, “How we conceptualise time: Language, meaning and temporal cognition,” Essays in Arts and Sciences 2004.

In folklore,3 the fabula is a stripped-down version of the events of a story in chronological order—a sort of minimal timeline of just the facts. This is in contrast to the way that the story is told (syuzhet), which may be nonlinear and told from the perspective of many characters, including unreliable narrators. Fabula corresponds to linear, sequential time; syuzhet corresponds to the chronesthetic experience. Consider the fabula of the grocery store. You walk into the store and take a basket. Then you pick up 2 Tulving, “Chronesthesia: Conscious awareness of subjective time,” Principles of frontal lobe function 2002. 3 The term originates in Russian Formalism, an early 20th C literary theory movement.

437

After Temporality

The Fabula of Linear Temporality

25a.

for injecting rigor into the wayward vernacular. Chronesthesia is the sense of time—specifically, the ability to mentally project oneself into the future and the past, as in memory, planning, and fantasy.2 It is sometimes called mental time travel. But already there is weirdness: why should the “time sense” be concerned with the imaginary, rather than the perception of time as it is actually experienced (duration, sequentiality, causality)? Linear temporality (time as a sequential series of experiences) and chronesthesia (time as many simulations of past and future) are not conflicting models. Rather, they are deeply interlocking models that constantly construct each other. They are both illusions, though the way in which they are illusions is different. However, they are both highly functional, and the ways in which they are functional are complementary.

items around the store and put them into the basket. Then you walk to the cashier, wait in line, and transfer your items to the checkout counter. The items are bagged; you pay for them, and carry them away. This is a perfectly useful conception of grocery shopping. It functions as a script to help us use the grocery store, and it is articulable to others, in case we have some kind of grocery-store-related problem that we need to seek help with (e.g., is haggling permitted?). The hidden side of the grocery store is that it is a zone of private fantasy and mental time travel. Perhaps there is a particular dish that you want to make. You imagine making the dish and the ingredients that go into it, informed by memories of past cooking experiences and recipe texts. You try to match what is desired to what is available. Products themselves may trigger memories and desires. Cupcakes? Raw kale? You may reach for fresh Brussels sprouts motivated by a fantasy of your future self eating roasted Brussels sprouts; you may draw your hand back, remembering that you let the last batch go bad; you may buy them anyway, thinking, “this time.” If they go bad anyway, then in a sense, your purchase was not of Brussels sprouts as food, but of Brussels sprouts as a scaffolding for a particular self-fantasy. Weird time threatens the thingness of things. Now. Here you are at the cashier. You may rehearse the interaction, wonder if you will have to bag your own groceries, remember the times when cashiers made the joke of pretending to charge you for the cold bags you carry with you. Should you prepare a polite laugh? And then it’s over, and in a month you might not remember it at all. The experience will be

25a. After Temporality

Chronesthetic time

folded into the grocery store script in long-term memory, if any trace of it remains. I think it’s interesting how much mental time travel is involved in crushingly mundane activities. As I became a better cook, I noticed that when I got a food idea (a new dish or way of cooking), I would spend a great deal of time mentally simulating the process of slicing, sautéing, whisking, sprinkling, baking. The future simulations “reach back” into memory, collating scraps of memories of ingredient, flavor, and technique into a new whole. Mental simulations are rarely smooth: they hit obstacles that must be worked around, and particular segments must be re-simulated repeatedly. The fabula of a “recipe” reflects only a small portion of the reality of cooking. But it is a very useful condensation, providing a scaffolding for chronesthetic experience. And it is very easy to communicate. Linear timelines or scripts, along with memories in 439

Deep interlock between outdoors & indoors at the Alhambra a richer sense, provide the basis for mental time travel. But linear timelines must themselves be abstracted (or extracted) from actual chronesthetic experience. Linear timelines are not simply available to perception; they must be constructed, with effort, out of the raw chronesthetic experience. The consensus social experience of time and the private experience of time mutually build each other.

Deeply Interlocking Time “Deep Interlock and Ambiguity” is one of Christopher Alexander’s fundamental properties.4 Multiple elements “hook into” or grip each other, meeting in a zone of ambiguity that doesn’t clearly belong to either element. For example, a building surrounded by an 4 Christopher Alexander, The phenomenon of life: The nature of order, 2002.

25a. After Temporality

Detail in the 16th-century Tabriz Mosque

arcade or gallery (in the architectural sense) deeply interlocks interior and exterior, meeting in a zone of ambiguity that is neither outdoors nor indoors. The shapes created by the columns of the arcade and the shapes created out of the space enclosed by the arcade seem to grip each other. The building becomes less separate from its surroundings. Deep interlock can occur in ornaments, as in this detail of tile-work and brick, from the Tabriz Mosque (pictured). The apricot-colored brick boundary has hook-shaped extensions that interlock with the botanical designs within and without, so that the black interior is deeply gripped. The hooks form spade shapes in each corner, in addition to having their own strong shape. All elements support each other; there is no separation, despite the fact that there is a strong boundary. Time is deeply interlocking in this way: fingers 441

Past and future meet in a zone of ambiguity reach into the past and the future, uniting in the zone of ambiguity formed by the chronesthetic being. Present experience takes its shape from flights into simulated future and past. The future takes its shape in part from the contents of simulated futures. Interestingly, there is evidence that remembering the past and imagining the future are not opposites, but expressions of a unified underlying capacity. Imagining past and future events seem to light up the same brain areas, and people with deficits in imagining the past (amnesia) tend to also have deficits in imagining and planning for the future.5 Thus we can talk about constructing the past and “remembering” the future. 5 Schacter, et al., “Episodic simulation of future events,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 2008.

25a. After Temporality

Iteration as poking the future

Iteration Mental time travel to the future, or simulation, can be modeled as iterations on game theory problems, as in the Keynesian beauty contest. In the “guess 2/3 of the average” game, participants each choose a number between 0 and 100, inclusive; the object is to choose a number that is 2/3 of the average of the guesses of all participants. A naive player might choose at random. Or he might observe that the maximum correct answer is 66 (if everyone chose 100). So, he thinks, everyone will guess below 66. If they do so at random, the correct answer would be around 34. So, iterating again, he thinks, everyone else knows this, so everyone will guess 34. In that case, the correct answer is about 21. The iteration continues down to the Nash equilibrium 443

of 0. Extremely simplified simulations of the future, repeated—and, I should include, projecting those simulations onto the minds of other players—reveal a dominant strategy. Unfortunately, when games like this are played in real life (including more complex forms, such as poker), it is not the case that everyone plays the dominant strategy. 0 is usually incorrect in groups of real humans; they are more likely to average closer to 21. This is because real humans don’t iterate perfectly— and because humans know that other humans don’t iterate perfectly. Only if the answer to the game were common knowledge among the group would choosing zero be the correct answer. The process of life—even simple life—reproducing itself in the course of evolution is analogous to game theory iteration, with similar results. The times at which migratory birds lay their eggs is a function of the history of thousands of generations of successful clutches. Organisms are a “best guess” at what will survive, reproduce, and flow into the future. Chronesthetic beings are a best guess at how to make best guesses. There is some debate as to whether humans are the only species that imagines itself backwards and forwards in time. Nonlinguistic animals cannot report their experiences; however, scientists working tirelessly to annoy corvids and rats (among others) have produced some evidence of mental time travel in animals.6 Corvids, such as scrub jays, cache food of varying perishability for months-long storage. Their ability to cache and relocate food speaks to a time 6 Ibid.

Phylogenetically, we find ourselves after temporality in the sequential sense; we are past or beyond the experience of time as a sequential series of moments and sense impressions. Simulations, however, seem to have a strong relationship to events that actually occur on the consensus timeline. Some simulations seem to be about planning (as in simulating the interaction with a cashier at a grocery store). Other simulations seem to be a form of pleasurable escape, as in sexual fantasy or self-aggrandizing imaginings. People experiencing severe mental pain (as in depression) seem to fall out of time or get stuck in time; they demonstrate a reduced capacity to vividly imagine future (or even past) scenarios.7 7 Ibid.

445

After Temporality

After Temporality

25a.

sense—and they are apparently savvy enough to re-cache food in secret if another jay catches them caching the first time. The rat method is more invasive. Rats run mazes with electrodes sticking out of their brains, connected to particular neurons associated with places in the maze. These neurons seem to fire in the correct order during rat dreams, as if the rats were rehearsing in a sort of dream training camp. When running a familiar maze while awake, the place neurons fire before the rats arrive at the associated place, as if the rat were imagining the future course of events. We just don’t know. But it’s premature to say that time is only deeply interlocked in human minds. It may be that simulation is a very old tool.

Time itself becomes poisoned by affect; the pleasure of reaching out and deeply interlocking with future and past is lost. In the case of planning-type simulations judged to be positive, we are after temporality in that we seek after making these simulations come true on the consensus timeline. Relaxing notions of agency, we might say that the fantasies themselves are after temporality, auditioning to become real. It is not clear how intentional mental time travel is; a good portion of it can be classified as mind-wandering.8 The future and past can spring up to us, seemingly unbidden. Of course, there is no guarantee that a pleasing mental simulation will translate into a pleasing timeline reality. The signs and symbols of language form a scaffolding for collective mental time travel, as in political/ religious narratives of transformation and salvation. Common knowledge is powerful, as we have seen. Signs and symbols especially seem to be after temporality, in the sense of seeking to become real in the consensus timeline. The tactic of semiocide—“a situation in which signs and stories that are significant for someone are destroyed because of someone else’s malevolence or carelessness, thereby stealing a part of the former’s identity”9—can shape both simulated and temporal futures. Fantasy colonized reality long ago. The war for the future plays out in the realm of fantasy and sign, as well as brick and blood.

8 Stawarczyk et al., “Mind-wandering: phenomenology and function as assessed with a novel experience sampling method,” Acta psychologica 2011. 9 I. Puura, “Nature in our memory,” Sign Systems Studies 2013.

FEELING THE FUTURE In “After Temporality,” I wrote about the phenomenology of the ordinary, healthy experience of time. I wrote this as an outsider, because my own experience of time is not normal. Here, I focus on the phenomenology of time in psychopathological states (prefrontal brain injury, schizophrenia, mania, and depression). What can breakdowns in the experience of time reveal about how the brain constructs time under ordinary circumstances? I used the word “chronesthesia” to refer to the sense of time: awareness of one’s past and future, coupled with the ability to do “mental time travel,” assembling appropriate memories and projecting the self into imagined possible futures. This is a rather cognitive and bloodless way to describe an alleged sense. But the psychopathological time experience suggests that the experience of normal time is produced and guided by emotion. We feel the future as much as we think it. The feeling of time is instantiated in our bodies out to our skin, and beyond, in the felt bodies of others with whom we synchronize. In the phenomenological account, there are two modes of being that are relevant here. The first is the absorbed state: proficiently using tools without

awareness of the tools as such. Picture driving a car. One is not aware of the motions of one’s hands and feet, or the internal workings of the automobile. One is simply absorbed in going someplace, and possibly thinking of other things, or even socializing. The second mode is the breakdown state, initiating conscious awareness of oneself and one’s equipment. The brain “wakes up” to some aspect of the environment that has failed to accord with previous unconscious predictions. Imagine the gas pedal stops working and the car slows to a halt. Now one pops out of absorbed state into a state of simply using the car, and becomes aware of the car as a thing (a broken thing).1 It is the same with time. In the ordinary case, time is invisible. The experience of time is one of absorption. Only when there is a problem do we become conscious of time, and of ourselves in time.

Four ways to fall out of time The relationship to the future is the actual relationship to the other. —Emmanuel Levinas2 The ordinary experience of time, the absorbed state in which time is invisible, is what Thomas Fuchs calls “implicit time” or “lived time” (as opposed to explicit time, which is experienced from time to time when breakdown cases prompt updates). In “Temporality and Psychopathology,” Thomas Fuchs describes two 1 In Heidegger’s account, the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand. 2 fr. Die Zeit und der Andere, quot. in Fuchs, “Temporality and Psychopathology.”

The second aspect is what Fuchs calls the “conative”—the emotional energy drawing one into the future, toward certain possibilities and away from others. Healthy conation contains an energetic undercurrent of aliveness and self-affection, perceived as being drawn into the future. Picture a large, happy golden retriever exploring a new park. However, healthy conation is also capable of subtle discrimination: some future courses are felt to be desirable, others repellant. That golden retriever would do well to be less enthusiastic approaching, say, a bear, than approaching another goofy dog. In humans, taking the perspective of others is an important check on 3 Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 2010.

449

Feeling the Future

The mere succession of conscious moments, as such, could not establish the experience of continuity. It is only when these moments mutually relate to each other in a forward and backward directed intention that the sequence of experiences is integrated into a unified process. Husserl called this the synthesis of protention (indeterminate anticipation of what is yet to come), presentation (primal or momentary impression) and retention (retaining what has just been experienced as it slips away).3

25b.

interlinked aspects of the experience of implicit time, one cognitive, the other emotional. First, implicit time rests on the mental faculty of “basic continuity of consciousness”—weaving together memories of the past with predictions about the future, through the vehicle of the self. Fuchs says:

what to pursue and what to avoid. Dogs seem to do this too, watching a human or another dog’s body language for cues on how to feel about a situation. The process of connecting our own experience of time to that of others, which happens naturally and unconsciously, is synchronization. We get into rhythms along with others. In conversation, facial expressions, speech, pauses, and silence are implicitly synchronized. Circadian and weekly rhythms organize time on longer scales. Effective and thoughtless synchronization is the essence of mental health, of normal peopling in this model. Desynchronization— becoming disentangled from others in time, unable to connect socially—appears to be a salient feature of many types of mental illness. If “the relationship to the future is the actual relationship to the other,” those who cannot feel the future cannot feel others, and have lost “vital contact” with social reality. Desynchronized people are lost (temporarily or permanently) to the rest of humanity, much in the way that the dead are lost: they are no longer able to connect to others in possible futures. I have outlined a basic structure of time: implicit (absorbed) and explicit (breakdown); within implicit time, continuity of consciousness and conation (emotional valence of the past and possible futures); and synchronization and desynchronization. This structure forms the basis for four ways of pathologically experiencing time, or “falling out of time.”

Future Insensitivity First, the conative function can be obliterated by brain

451

Feeling the Future

4 Cognition 1994. 5 Bechara et al., “Failure to Respond Autonomically to Anticipated Future Outcomes Following Damage to Prefrontal Cortex,” Cerebral Cortex 1996.

25b.

damage. Patients with this kind of time experience have normal memory, but do not seem to experience emotions about the future, in the sense that they are insensitive to future consequences. While they often have trouble functioning and make bad decisions, they are not impulsive (see Bechara et al., “Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex”4). They appear to be insensitive to both punishment and reward, despite being able to understand and articulate consequences. The authors later investigated the scope of this supposed insensitivity. They used measurements of skin conductance (basically, moment-to-moment sweatiness) to determine whether patients with prefrontal damage experienced autonomic responses to risky future outcomes. Skin conductance measuring devices (sometimes called galvanic skin response or GSR) are extremely fun to play with, and I’m disappointed that they are not widely available as toys, as they are very cheap to produce. Anyway, strapped to these devices, the subjects played a card game in which they turned over successive cards, to reveal a reward or a penalty. In normal controls, penalties triggered autonomic responses, and as more cards were turned over, subjects seemed to autonomically anticipate the risky action of turning a card. Their skin conductance began to spike before each turn. Prefrontal patients, however, had no such response: they were not able to feel the future at all.5 This research is not phenomenological, so we don’t

get to hear much about prefrontal patients’ self-reported experience of time. But this appears to be a falling out of time precipitated by the failure of the conative function: emotions no longer distinguish imaginary future courses of action, because the future-feeling is itself absent. In the following two sections, both describing phenomenological studies, the problem is not the absence of future-feeling, but a valenced fixation of future-feeling. The future-feeling is stuck on ecstasy or dread; because of the overwhelming emotional valence, the ego can no longer distinguish small gradations of better or worse futures (or good or bad past memories, in the case of depression). Both fixations cause desynchronization, and prevent authentic social contact, by walling off an aspect of the future (risk, or joy) whose implicit perception underlies the nature of full-contact social reality.

“A catastrophic loss of vital contact with the reality of a risky world” Wayne Martin has conducted a phenomenological investigation of the experience of time in manic episodes, including interviews with hospitalized subjects (whom he calls “collaborators”) in the grips of mania.6 He reports a particular flaw in inductive reasoning about the future of the self. His collaborators are able to report about many past episodes of mania, and give rich detail about their warning signs and the course of the illness. However, they deny being currently manic (even when their own articulated “warning 6 Martin, “Manic temporality,” Philosophical Psychology 2019.

The opposite (or near-opposite) case is depression: a negative emotional valence overwhelms the experience of past and future. Depressed people lose the capacity for discrimination of better and worse futures (as in mania), but the misery also acts as a constant “breakdown” case, interrupting implicit, absorbed time over and over with its felt urgency, and ultimately preventing the return to absorbed, implicit time. (See Fuchs, “Temporality and Psychopathology,” and also “Psychopathology of depression and mania.”) Fuchs quotes a patient: 453

Feeling the Future

“Then this attracts my memories”

25b.

signs” or indications of mania are objectively present), and deny the possibility of future episodes of mania. They are able to sense that some things in the past are bad, but the future presents in a “mood” of ecstatic freedom and openness. The “mood” appears to overwhelm the ability to distinguish good and bad futures with conation: subjectively, only good futures are possible. The manic person has lost a sense: he is blind to risk, to possible harm in the future. And like a blind person, his lack of perception makes him vulnerable. Eventually he will come down and have to live with the actions taken by a self that couldn’t foresee this future. In not being in full contact with the future, he has only superficial contact with other humans. He cannot really adjust his behavior to accord with social expectations. Desynchronization in mania happens by a speeding-up of personal time in relation to social time (in Fuch’s model, cited above).

It comes from below, from the gut, like a terrible oppression rising to the chest; then a pressure arises, like a crime that I have committed. I feel it like a wound on my chest, that is my tortured conscience… then this attracts my memories, and I have to think again of all that I have missed or done wrong in my life…7 It is normally possible to escape self-awareness in absorption in implicit time. But in depression, absorption is no longer possible, thwarted at every turn by the “breakdown case” of strong negative emotion. Memories may be accessed, and often fly into consciousness unbidden, but both good and bad memories are now reprocessed through the lens of the depressive mood. They are reinterpreted in light of this emotion, and the new, poison copy is the one that is retained in memory. Even if the depressed mood lifts, the memories accessed during that period may be forever emotionally tainted. The mood “attracts” the patient’s “memories” to be reprocessed in turn under this harsh light; the poison spreads itself throughout the temporal experience, eventually trapping the depressed person in the unbearable present moment of un-absorbed conscious awareness. Projections of the future are treated in a similar manner. Without conative energy, there is no emotional reason to do any particular thing. In order to function, depressed people must substitute conscious willpower for the lost human capacity of implicit enjoyment and desire. Rarely is this possible to a satisfactory degree. 7 Journal of Psychopathology 2014.

25b.

“The one speaking now is the wrong ego”

A 32-year-old patient reports that since he was 16, he has had growing doubts whether his possessions were really the original ones or had been secretly replaced by someone. Whenever some of his possessions moved out of sight, he started to have these doubts. When he went shopping, he suspected that the salesperson had replaced what he had bought with something else while it was being wrapped, and he could therefore no longer use it. When he was studying, if he was inattentive for a moment, he started thinking that the student sitting next to him had replaced his book and he had to throw it away, so that he was constantly buying new books. He was gradually losing “confidence in his environment.” After breaking off his studies at the age of 21, he finally began to doubt whether his own arms or someone else’s were performing some activity. He would trace his arms from the hands to his trunk, fully concentrating on his hands and on the force he exercised in order to feel that he really did have his own arms. Nevertheless, he had to look behind himself repeatedly in order to make sure that no one was standing there and moving 455

Feeling the Future

Similarly, in the case of schizophrenia, the person loses his felt sense of the unified self, and often attempts to cope by doing each behavior explicitly and consciously—a desperate copy of the outward appearance of ordinary peopling, engaged in from a place of confusion and fear:

them. Now he doubted the simplest activities. Whenever he moved just a little too fast, he had to repeat the movement in order to make sure that it was his own. In the end, he needed an endless amount of time just to get dressed because he repeatedly had to check whether he was holding his clothes properly, whether his trousers fitted well, whether he had put them on himself, etc. Every move had become “like a mathematical problem” for him.8 What the schizophrenic person has lost is the ordinary experience of time, and of the self in time—the “basic continuity of consciousness.” Eagleman explains that even healthy people experience temporal illusions. The brain uses multiple methods to estimate things like time and causality, but these present as a single, unified experience of time due to brain magic. Under laboratory conditions, the brain magic illusion can be revealed as a complex structure vulnerable to error (as in breakdown conditions in phenomenological time). Stanghellini et al. report that among schizophrenics reporting abnormal time experiences in interviews, the most common was experiencing the world in unconnected snapshots, like a series of photographs. (One subject even repeatedly took photographs of the street beneath his window, so that he could externalize time with evidence that things changed or didn’t change.)9 When you fall out of time in this way, you can get 8 Fuchs, “Temporality and Psychopathology.” 9 “Psychopathology of Lived Time: Abnormal Time Experience in Persons With Schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 2015.

25b.

lost within a sentence:

Desynchronization in schizophrenia follows from not being able to piece together snapshots in time as a lived timeline, with implicit feeling of the past and future. Having shown up just now, unable in some cases to sense what was going on five minutes ago, or at the beginning of the sentence now being spoken, the schizophrenic struggles to find purchase on the present, and lacks a foundation for future cognition. In Fuchs’s model, his protention is impaired—the scope and content of his protentive field, unconsciously predicting each moment in normal persons, is limited to a few words or moments. Normal people carry with them an unconscious sense of the immediate past (a few seconds, at least) and this is seamlessly integrated with the biographical past. This provides a foundation for protention, the sense of the future: a projected field predicting likely futures and possible obstacles or rewards that might arise. The title heading is a quotation from a schizophrenic 10 “Temporality and Psychopathology.”

457

Feeling the Future

I can concentrate quite well in what people are saying if they talk simply. It’s when they go into long sentences that I lose the meanings. It just becomes a lot of words that I would need to string together to make sense. I have to pick out thoughts and put them together. I can’t control the actual thoughts I want… I think something but I say it differently… Last time I could not get the words that were correct to make up a sentence…10

subject in Fuchs: “I am not able to feel myself at all. The one speaking now is the wrong ego… When I watch television it is even stranger. Even though I see every scene properly, I do not understand the story as a whole. Each scene jumps over into the next, there is no coherence. Time is also running strangely. It falls apart and no longer progresses. There arise only innumerable separate now, now, now—quite crazy and without rules or order. It is the same with myself. From moment to moment, various ‘selves’ arise and disappear entirely at random. There is no connection between my present ego and the one before.”11

Back into time If you are mentally healthy, I hope that this has brought you into contact with abilities you didn’t even realize you had. If you have mental illness (as I do, under any reasonable reading of the folk concept12 of mental illness), I hope that this provides a novel way of thinking about normal life, illness, and treatment. Fuchs suggests some treatment options that arise from thinking of depression as a temporal disorder: first, treating the underlying mood symptom with drugs (hopefully ones that actually work), and second, “resynchronizing” the depressed person gradually back into social life. I suggest that a novel therapy for those stuck in depressed time might be drugs like 11 ibid. 12 See “Folk Concepts,” Appendix page 629.

Feeling the Future

459

25b.

zolpidem that induce anterograde amnesia when used in waking subjects (especially in safe social settings). This might break up time that seems otherwise unified and monstrous. The depressed person can’t ruminate over memories that never formed in long-term memory, and gaps in memory might provide relief and hope for the future. Ketamine, a dissociative successfully used to treat severe depression, may operate on the sense of time as much as mood. People who fall out of time are often able to re-enter time, in remission or intervals of lucidity. However, after falling out of time once, the experience remains—and remains a future possibility. Fuchs remarks, on depression: “Even the explicit memory of a recovery from an earlier depression remains abstract for the patient and does nothing to change the hopelessness of the present situation.” This may seem to be a cognitive error from the outside, but the outside observer is not experiencing time as an eternal painful now. And even after recovery, the reality is that the depressed state will likely recur at some point (and the more times it recurs, the more likely future episodes become). I am not sure that it is always possible to re-enter time. It may be that we need to acknowledge a second kind of life, outside of time, for those who are not capable of living in time. It consists in palliation of the eternal now, rather than plans for the future, like a really horrible version of Zen Buddhism that’s not half as funny, but that is more comfortable than the alternative. The technological and material wealth of modernity could allow a new kind of human zombie to exist, who would have in earlier eras perished by suicide.

RECTANGLE VISION It’s probably not a good idea to look directly at the rectangles. If you get into this mode—Rectangle Vision—you wake up in the morning on your rectangle. You lift your head off of its rectangle and toss aside the rectangles wrapped around you, still holding your body’s warmth. You pull a string to lift the sheet of rectangles covering the rectangle in the wall and let the light stream in. You pick up your rectangle to check the time, and perhaps touch a rectangle inside of it, to see all the latest rectangles to make you mad. You step through a rectangle to leave the bedroom, step through another to wash (perhaps using a cuboid of soap), dry your skin and hair with a rectangle, and check out your reflection in the rectangle. Make your way to the kitchen and open up the rectangle that shields the cold things; perhaps open another rectangle to warm something up. Take it from the counter rectangle and eat it on the table rectangle, sitting on a rectangular platform. Wipe your face with a rectangle. Leave the house through the rectangular portal, making sure you carry your necessary rectangles for identification, payment, work, and entertainment. Then you really enter the land of rectangles: the walls,

I had some hypotheses about the origin of rectangles in human culture. One was farming: the linearity of farming (sowing seeds or plowing along straight lines) goes back at least seven or eight thousand years. The linearity of the farming, combined with the relatively planar nature of the surface of the earth, and again combined with conceptions of individual property, 1 See “The Essence of Peopling,” page 207.

461

Rectangle Vision 

Dawn of the Rectangles

26.

the steps, the parking spaces, the sidewalk blocks, the signs, the crosswalks, the vents and gratings, all the windows, and every discarded wrapper of a rectangular eyeglass wipe. Where did all these rectangles come from? There are few rectangles in nature; those that do form (e.g., tessellated pavements) are objects of wonder and mystery, precisely because rectilinear forms present to us as the work of man. This is why the rectangular cuboid monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey is so evocative: without saying so, it’s understood that a regular cuboid like this is the work of intelligence like ours. Somehow, rectangles managed to enter our brains, seemingly out of nowhere, and then escape our brains to become the primary form of our world. Perhaps it’s a product of pathological Rectangle Vision, but rectangles and rectilinearity seem to me to be as much a part of special human consciousness as projected self-awareness.1 My questions are these: what were the first rectangles? How did rectilinearity enter our consciousness? How did they get everywhere? And what do they mean, if anything?

would naturally lead to rectangular farms. Another candidate was weaving. Weaving goes back perhaps 27,000 years, and the nature of woven fabric is inherently rectangular. Mathematician Ralph Abraham traces the development of geometric forms in wall paintings and tile tessellations to earlier woven geometric forms;2 perhaps this was the origin of rectangular geometry as well? Nope. The paintings in the Lascaux caves (dated to around 17,000 years ago) are mostly naturalistic animal figures; there are also hand stencils and other non-rectilinear forms. I didn’t expect to see this guy (pictured following page, top). Center: Tectangles inscribed on a lion head sculpture, dated to around 35,000 years ago, in Vogelherd Cave in Germany. But the oldest human-created rectangle I’m aware of is described by Christopher S. Henshilwooda, Francesco d’Errico, and Ian Watts, found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa. They located pieces of ochre inscribed with lines forming rectangles; the oldest (bottom) is dated to between 98,000 and 100,000 years ago. The authors note that “when the incisions were freshly made, they would have stood out as vivid red against a dark background.” Here rectangles emerge from the planar face of the rock, and parallel lines inscribed upon it. (In some cases, the rock face was smoothed prior to the engraving.) A hundred thousand years, is how old the first known rectangle is. It may not be meaningful, but Henshilwood et al. found a slightly earlier engraving in which there are 2 “Geometry of the Early Neolithic,” 2015.

26. Rectangle Vision 

Rectangle at Lascaux Cave

Lion Head Sculpture, Vogelherd Cave, Germany. Photo by Rainer Halama.

Figure 16, Henshilwood et al., 2009 463

inscribed lines, but they aren’t quite parallel. They look to me like stems of an aquatic plant growing upward and outward in a natural way. Is it possible that in those few thousand years between when the two artifacts were created, the makers of the inscribed stones were developing the capacity to perceive and recreate parallel linearity? Maybe. It’s probably just chance.

Tiling and Close Packing It’s interesting that the first rectangle isn’t all on its own. It emerges specifically in a tiling of rectangular shapes, a sort of proto-frieze (this becomes even more apparent with the later Blombos pieces and the Vogelherd lion’s head, above). And it may be that the main point of rectangular shapes is that they tile easily with each other in two and three dimensions: cuboid rooms and rectangular lots, cuboid cereal boxes and shipping containers, yoga mats and parking spaces. If rectangular tiling is so great, why isn’t it used in nature? Organisms tend to tile in spirals (composite flowers) or hexagons (emerging from an attempt to tile circles, as in beehives and plant stalks). Rivers become curvier and less linear over time; any curves in the river are dug out further by the action of the water, which flows faster on the outside of a curve. You won’t see any rectangles in national parks, other than a sign or two, and the ones you bring with you (and you had better carry them out). Plants (and animals) do respect the linearity of gravity; many plants grow directly upward in order to distribute loads properly and maximize sunlight. But

26. Rectangle Vision 

Onion cells, E. B. Wilson 1900 when plants try their hardest to do rectilinearity, it comes out like above (onion cells, pictured). Somehow rectilinearity doesn’t emerge from bottom-up processes. In the onion, there is nothing holding the quasi-rectangular cells to a rectangular geometry; they squish around however, and end up in irregular shapes. Rectilinearity emerges from lines: painted dividers for parking spaces, walls, threads on looms, etc. Parallel lines are the hallmark of legibility in the James C. Scott sense.3 Rectilinearity must be imposed. Generally, human brains must impose it. When tiling is used for aesthetic beauty, as in Anatolian architecture, circular geometries are preferred to rectangular. Physicist Peter Lu has argued that special regular (but non-rectangular) tiling shapes called Girih tiles were used to create the spectacular geometric effects. Somehow, hiding the legibility seems to be important for beauty, as if there were a tradeoff between legibility and an arrangement whose 3 See Venkatesh Rao, “A Big Little Idea Called Legibility,” Ribbonfarm, as well as James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State.

465

order is mysterious.4

Monolith Vision One of my favorite independent scholars, Rob Ager, has a theory that the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey is Kubrick’s attempt to induce Rectangle Vision in the viewer. The rectangular cuboid monolith, he says, obviously represents the screen on which the viewer is viewing the movie. (In fact, he argues that within the logic of the movie, the monolith is not an alien artifact at all, but a sort of hoax produced by humans.)5 The Industrial Revolution was an explosion in rectilinearity. Its factories, products, and shipping networks imposed the rectangle on the world on a scale never before seen. But the most important rectangle of our age is the one that you’re reading this through.6 How many rectangles can you see right now? Again, I don’t know if it’s a particularly good idea to walk around being aware of the rectangles. Following Heidegger and John Dewey, we’re mostly aware of the form of our tools, such as their rectilinearity, if they break down (e.g. if they become “bricked”). Perhaps it’s best to continue interacting with them as invisible portals through which we access cold food, outside, the Internet, etc., and body-extension territories such as parking spaces, rooms, yoga mats, etc. But there may be times when we want to see legibility itself. For that, there’s Rectangle Vision. 4 Jurgen Schmidhuber, “Driven by Compression Progress,” 2008. 5 Ager, “Kubrick: and beyond the cinema frame,” The Meaning of the Monolith 2008. 6 As this essay was originally published online, the rectangle in reference is a computer screen.

ON SOME POSSIBILITIES FOR LIFE AS A JOKE If we hear the metaphor “life is a joke,” our usual inference is a negative one: that a joke is a pitiful and sad thing for life to be, that life should be more than a “mere” joke. It seems to be a negative judgment of both life and humor. Here I will explore the difficulties of living life as a joke, a feat that requires agency, intelligence, creativity, and hard work, and has perhaps been achieved by only a handful of sages throughout history, if at all. I will examine other common metaphors for life, and see how they compare to life-as-joke on moral and aesthetic grounds. A joke is itself a complex cognitive phenomenon; I will review the most promising theory of humor from cognitive science, that of Hurley, Dennett, and Adams, to highlight the technical problems of the phenomenon of life as a joke. I will distinguish mere deception and other phenomena that might first appear to be living life as a joke, but upon closer inspection are lesser things. Finally I will present a few candidates for successful lives-as-jokes: Laozi and Zhuangzi, Socrates, and Andy Kaufman. I will argue that a joke is an excellent thing for a life to be, though of course very few can achieve it.

Metaphors for Life The cognitive linguist George Lakoff argued that metaphor is central to our cognition, not just a poetic device. Lakoff says (in The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor): What constitutes the LOVE-AS-JOURNEY metaphor is not any particular word or expression. It is the ontological mapping across conceptual domains, from the source domain of journeys to the target domain of love. The metaphor is not just a matter of language, but of thought and reason. The language is secondary… This view of metaphor is thoroughly at odds with the view that metaphors are just linguistic expressions. If metaphors were merely linguistic expressions, we would expect different linguistic expressions to be different metaphors. Thus, “We’ve hit a deadend street” would constitute one metaphor. “We can’t turn back now” would constitute another, entirely different metaphor. “Their marriage is on the rocks” would involve still a different metaphor. And so on for dozens of examples. Yet we don’t seem to have dozens of different metaphors here. We have one metaphor, in which love is conceptualized as a journey.1 Metaphors are not just language games, but underlie our thinking. They are a complex mapping of structures, not just associations between things (as with the less complex metonymy). Lakoff summarizes: 1 Lakoff 1992.

3. 4. 5.

6.

Metaphor is also conventional, a concept elaborated by both Lakoff and Lakoff’s colleague and collaborator Mark Turner. A few basic metaphors underlie each culture’s understanding of abstract concepts, and are elaborated and built upon in original artistic works. Why is death so often a reaper in English poetry, asks Lakoff, but never an ice cream salesman? The reason is that the conventional metaphors of “people are plants” (that bloom, wither, and die) and “death/time is an agent” are conventional and effortlessly accessible, and artistic metaphors that elaborate, extend, and compose with them will be more accessible to English minds. Turner says (in Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science): 469

On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke

2.

Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning. Much subject matter, from the most mundane to the most abstruse scientific theories, can only be comprehended via metaphor. Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature. Metaphorical language is a surface manifestation of conceptual metaphor. Though much of our conceptual system is metaphorical, a significant part of it is nonmetaphorical. Metaphorical understanding is grounded in nonmetaphorical understanding. Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured subject matter in terms of a more concrete, or at least a more highly structured subject matter.

27.

1.

Invention is not originality… We are vigilant for the new and the variable and concentrate upon it. Consequently, our consciousness is habitually blind to the unoriginal, which we take to be merely background. Of course, the unoriginal is not background, at least not in the sense usually conveyed by that description. The unoriginal is normally the dominant active matrix in any original achievement. Originality is no more than the exploitation of what is unoriginal… Relative to the complexity of the unoriginal conceptual context of invention, it is the original in invention that is simple. The concept of a “room” or a “poem” is immeasurably more complex than the original aspects of any one room or poem.2 This concept of creativity is realized in the traditional gardening principle of borrowed scenery, in which natural, pre-existing background features such as mountains are incorporated into the design of a garden. The gardener does not create the mountain, but uses it ingeniously in his composition. A dominant and easily accessible metaphor for life is as a journey. Christina Flores Moreno breaks down “life is a journey” into several composite geographic metaphors for time: states are locations (e.g. youth), changes are movements (birth toward death), obstacles are impediments to motion.3 A major benefit of this metaphoric scheme is that it is easily applicable to almost any life. Any life can be 2 Turner, 1991. 3 Moreno, “Time, Life and Death Metaphors in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The Lakoffian Approach to Poetic Metaphors,” 1998.

What is a joke? In Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse Engineer the Mind,4 cognitive scientists Hurley, Dennett, 4 Hurley at al., 2013.

471

On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke

The Nature of Jokes and the Absurd

27.

conceived of in this manner. But this is also a problem: if “life as a journey” is so easily applicable to any life, it is no great achievement. Another benefit, Lakoff says, is that it is a purposeful metaphor: the person going on a journey is an agent responsible for his travel, providing cognitive support for free will. This is also a feature of the metaphor of life as a war against time and death. But how often are journeys chosen, versus imposed on us? How often are those fighting wars the architects of the war? If all lives are trivially journeys, can we choose to live life as a journey? Another important metaphor, elaborated in Shakespeare and increasingly important in our age of mutual watching and self-observation, is life as a play (a narrative with actors and an audience). This metaphor is also easily applicable to almost any life, and offers even less agency than life-as-journey. If we are actors, we have not written our own narratives. Life as a joke compares favorably to these metaphors. As we will see, not many lives succeed as jokes; it is a difficult challenge. And creating a joke (as opposed to having one played on us) offers substantial agency. The complex concept of the joke is pre-existing (unoriginal) and available to us; however, succeeding in originality within its confines is a difficult creative task.

Anatomy of a joke and Adams present the most comprehensive, plausible theory of humor to date. In their view, the emotion of mirth is an adapted reward mechanism for something that is necessary but would ordinarily cause negative emotions: discovering that we have made an error. Complex minds that use abstractions need error-checking and bug-finding functions, but finding out we were wrong would ordinarily cause us to feel stupid. Nature provides mirth as a reward for this necessary procedure. Humor and jokes exploit this built-in reward system. The essence of a joke, in Hurley, Dennett, and Adams’s view, is that the teller of the joke surreptitiously introduces a certain epistemic commitment, and then reveals it to have been mistaken. When we experience humor, we are led down a “garden path” of a

On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke

473

27.

mistaken assumption, introduced covertly, and then the mistaken assumption is revealed. A joke relies on a: 1. covertly introduced 2. epistemic commitment or assumption 3. that is revealed to be false. (See my previous essay “Puzzle Theory” for a more detailed explanation of the theory.) Mere deception is not a joke. A lie is an overtly introduced mistaken assumption; to work as a joke, the assumption must be hidden. This is why Joaquin Phoenix’s long-form prank documented in I’m Still Here ultimately failed: the “mistaken assumption” (he’s not trolling) was introduced much too overtly, and collapsed into simple deception. From the very beginning, it was clear that it was quite possibly a hoax, undermining the possibilities for humor. How can life be a joke? Jokes and humor are generally rendered in language, pictures, or other communicative media. A life is not naturally a communicative medium. All of my candidates for successful lives-as-jokes are teachers or performers; a communicator and an audience are necessary for the existence of a joke. It may be possible to perform life as a joke purely for oneself, and likely many have succeeded at that, but the cultural usefulness of such projects is limited. Telling a successful joke, even a long-form joke, is not living life as a joke. A successful joke-life must incorporate the entire life, including death and the cultural memory of the life. Again, simple deception is not a joke. A serial killer who ostensibly lives life as an upstanding neighbor and citizen is not living a joke, nor is the miser who lives in poverty despite a secret fortune revealed only

at death. These are tired stories, not surprising. And simple irony is not a good joke; to live one’s life terrified of skin cancer, only to die of vitamin D deficiency, is not funny, and there is no agency: the liver of life is not the architect of the joke. It’s difficult to live life as any kind of joke, but especially difficult to live life as a good joke. The phenomenon I’m talking about is distinct from the conception of life as absurd—that there is a fundamental mismatch between the kind of meaning we seek in life and the kind of meaning that’s actually available, a situation created by no apparent agent. Absurdity is a subset of humor, in which the expectation of meaning itself is defeated, as in anti-jokes. This is a relatively unsophisticated and repetitive brand of humor. The challenge posed by Camus (in The Myth of Sisyphus), to live life sneeringly in constant awareness of its absurdity, is a lesser challenge than living life as an actual joke that is funny. The latter may not even be possible; I will examine some candidates.

Laozi and Zhuangzi Laozi, the legendary author of the Tao Te Ching, is a possible candidate for life lived as a joke, especially when viewed in connection with the other Taoist sage, Zhuangzi. To live an unremarkable life as a bureaucrat and ride out into the wilderness on a donkey leaving only a book of serious nonsense is a moderately decent joke; it’s a better joke if the book of serious nonsense becomes the basis for an entire school of minimally harmful philosophy. To see the Tao as a joke is not disrespectful, but an entirely reasonable Zhuangist

This is one of Zhuangzi’s most useful teachings, and a central tenet of philanthropic trolling. He goes on to say that “Using a horse to show that a horse is not a horse is not as good as using a nonhorse to show that a horse is not a horse.” Does it not follow, then, that using a life to show that a life is not a life is not as good as using a nonlife to show that a life is not a life? Mark Berkson (in “Language: The Guest of Reality”5) suggests that Zhuangzi uses humor and “apophatic” language as a way to get beyond the futility of debate and declarative language, and even to point his audience toward a kind of knowledge inexpressible in language, that kind of non-book knowledge embodied by Cook Ding skillfully dismantling an ox. Jokes and humor do what serious statements cannot. Even better, perhaps, if the jokes are contained in life itself as a communicative medium, rather than mere language. And what do we know about Zhuangzi, anyway? Did he exist? The incidents we have of his life are playful stories likely composed by Zhuangzi himself, rather than by well-attested contemporaries. His text 5 Kjellberg et al., Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi, 1996.

475

On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke

Making a point to show that a point is not a point is not as good as making a nonpoint to show that a point is not a point.

27.

interpretation. It is perhaps a better joke if Laozi did not exist at all, but only surreptitiously pretended to exist. Laozi is not funny; Zhuangzi is much funnier. Zhuangzi says:

about the butterfly dream hints at his own unreality but does not resolve it one way or another.6 Surreptitious nonexistence may be the most perfect form of wu wei, but as the Yiddish proverb says, who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand.

Socrates We know Socrates as a literary character in the writing of others, not through his own writing. His existence and nature are as much in question as that of the Taoist sages. And it was all so long ago, who knows? The Socrates we know from Plato’s dialogues is a gleeful troll, playfully refusing to understand the obvious in order to show that the obvious is not obvious. He does not engineer his own death, but accepts it as gleefully as anything else when it comes. From the dialogues we understand that he had the option of allowing his friends to get him exiled, but, condemned to die, he chose death rather than flight. Is Socrates’ life a joke? I can’t locate a specific surreptitiously introduced assumption that is later shown to be mistaken. But his manner of existing and dying (or perhaps of pretending to exist) suggests a joking life to me. Perhaps there is something to learn from this non-joke. 6 “Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know that he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.” (Burton Waston translation 2003)

27.

Andy Kaufman

The Challenge Far from being a pejorative of life and humor, “life

477

On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke

Like Socrates, Andy Kaufman lived as a gleeful troll. He identified an emerging sacredness (gender equality) and an emerging art form (professional wrestling) and combined them in a wholly original way. He experimented with “nonlife” or pretending to exist (with his Tony Clifton character), and while his death from lung cancer at 35 was not predictable or engineered by him, it can be argued that his decades of preparatory trolling allowed it to be strange, funny, and mysterious. There is the saying, you make your own luck. We could regard it as an example of “borrowed scenery” creativity: using the uncontrollable eventualities of life in order to make a creative composition. Again, it is difficult to identify a single surreptitiously introduced mistaken epistemic commitment in the life of Andy Kaufman. Maybe it’s “Tony Clifton exists” (always a covert implication, rarely stated as explicitly as in the aforementioned Joaquin Phoenix’s movie title I’m Still Here), or maybe it’s “all this conflict that you see on your television is real,” or maybe it’s “death is not real but a gag.” Perhaps, as in a painting or a dance or a video game, if the “point” can be summarized in a few short words, then the art form (a life) wouldn’t need to exist. But we would expect that a life lived as a joke could be analyzed as a joke, even if, as with jokes, the explanation were not itself funny.

as a joke” may be so difficult that no one has successfully done it in a way that is genuinely funny and analyzable within the modern cognitive science model of humor. At best, there have been those who played with existence and death, denying their seriousness. For life to be a joke, life must be lived as a communicative medium: an audience is required. Living life with an audience may be especially painful, as evidenced by the pathologies of the famous. There must be an epistemic commitment surreptitiously introduced through living life itself, that is later defeated, in sequence. The joke must encompass an entire life, including death and post-mortem cultural existence. And it must be funny. Anyone can define his life as a journey or narrative. Few, if any, have been able to succeed at life as a joke. This is too bad, because living life as a joke is both morally and aesthetically laudable. Credibly denying the seriousness of life may ease its pain, and a good joke in a novel medium provides aesthetic benefits for the entire audience. Jokes provide a sense of mystery: what appears to be a natural pattern may actually be a creation by an agent for our pleasure (see my diagram of epistemology from “Puzzle Theory”7). A successful joke suggests that other things may be jokes. Living life as a joke aggressively imposes meaning on the meaningless, instead of complaining that no meaning can be found.

7 page 378.

SYSTEMS & COMPLEXITY Ribbonfarm 2016-2018

GARDENS NEED WALLS: ON BOUNDARIES, RITUAL, AND BEAUTY This essay attempts to place ritual in the context of evolving complex systems, and to offer an explanation for why everything is so ugly and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.

On Boundaries and Their Permeability Boundaries are an inherent, universal feature of complex systems. Boundaries arise at all scales, defining the entities that they surround and protecting them from some kinds of outside intrusion. To be functional, boundaries must be permeable, allowing the entities to take energy and information from outside themselves. If we are looking at complex systems, we will find boundaries everywhere. Boundaries are structures that protect what is within them and allow their contents to solve smaller, more manageable design problems than would be possible in a perfectly interconnected system. Islands are surrounded by natural boundaries. Strange varieties of life arise on islands that are not

seen anywhere else, precisely because they are cut off from the densely interconnected systems present in the ocean and on large land masses. Islands, small systems surrounded by a natural ocean boundary, give life the opportunity to try amazing stunts that would be impossible on a large landmass. Drifting daisies evolve into trees; drifting iguanas learn to swim; fruit flies evolve into fantastic, showy varieties; crabs grow a meter long and figure out how to open coconuts. Tree kangaroos, ground parrots, and giant tree skinks are niches only available on islands. And when the boundary opens (often because of that great destroyer of natural boundaries, humans), the unique species on islands are often out-competed by species that evolved in the diversity-flattening zones of great land masses. Boundaries drive diversity. Note that the moon, however, despite being separated from the continents of Earth by a significant boundary, is not teeming with unusual life. This boundary is too great, too harsh, and not permeable enough to allow life to adapt to it in the first place. Life itself has discovered a number of effective boundaries that allow it to diversify and flourish. The cell membrane is the most basic boundary. Trivially, there are no multicellular creatures without cell membranes; less trivially, there are no complex creatures whatsoever without this protecting, organizing, problem-space-limiting innovation. And in evolving a cell membrane, the most important problem to solve was how to get things through it: how to make it permeable enough to be useful. The diversity explosion of the Cambrian era was aided by the discovery of a different kind of

Distinct neighborhoods and distinct ways of life can only evolve within permeable boundaries of some kind, so that they can have communication with the outside world, but not be simply absorbed, flattened, and made uniform by forces outside them. When natural boundaries between human groups are lacking, there has been intense pressure in human history to create effective boundaries of other kinds1; military arms races across poorly defined boundaries may be seen as building a new kind of boundary. This is one interpretation of “good fences make good neighbors;” only good boundaries are capable 1 See Peter Tuchin, “A theory for the formation of large agrarian empires.”

483

Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty

The mosaic of subcultures requires that hundreds of different cultures live, in their own way, at full intensity, next door to one another. But subcultures have their own ecology. They can only live at full intensity, unhampered by their neighbors, if they are physically separated by physical boundaries.

28.

boundary: the exoskeleton. Exoskeletons provided a boundary protecting individual trilobites, which differentiated into many different forms and niches. Cell walls, evolving independently in multiple taxa, protect and shape the forms of plants. Another kind of boundary that limits the space of problem solving and promotes diversity is Pattern 13 of Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein’s A Pattern Language: the Subcultural Boundary that occurs between neighborhoods in cities:

of organizing people well. (It is important that G. K. Chesterton chooses fences for his famous analogy about reformers.) If we think of agency as “the ability to take action,”2 boundaries are essential for an entity to have any kind of agency. In the present essay I am mostly interested in boundaries around groups much smaller than a nation state. I suggest that these small group entities—overlapping entities of multiple sizes, from Dunbar-sized “tribes” to neighborhoods of 7,000 or so—have increasingly had their boundaries undermined, and have largely ceased to exist and function. I suggest that ritual, my subject for the past two posts in this series, both functions to draw boundaries and to energize and coordinate human groups within the boundary so defined. I suggest that the loss of these small groups, in favor of nation-level organization of atomized individuals, has had serious consequences for human welfare and human agency. We are missing a layer of organization essential for our happiness.

Individual Imagination, Groups, and Flourishing Perhaps the most important question of our time is how human beings can flourish and enjoy satisfying, meaningful lives under conditions of material abundance and extreme cultural interconnectedness. In “A Dent in the Universe,” Venkat proposes that “imagination” is a crucial survival skill at higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.3 Here, I propose that individual “imagination”—even at its best—is woefully 2 M. Travers, “Patterns of Refactored Agency,” Ribbonfarm 2012. 3 Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm 2015.

28. underpowered to solve problems of human flourishing by itself. The lower levels of Maslow’s pyramid reflect material well-being. But material abundance is not itself the cause of anomie and angst. Rather, ancestral, evolved solutions to lower-level problems also tended to contain solutions to higher-level problems as well. As these ancestral solutions are made obsolete by solutions that are more efficient on the material level, the more ineffable, higher-level problems they solved present themselves anew. Simple abundance of food is not the cause of obesity, but rather the loss of carefully evolved ancestral diets. Our ancestors found it easy to get to sleep because they were tired from intense physical activity; we often find it a challenge to get to 485

Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty

Some challenges encountered at supposedly high levels of Maslow’s hierarchy

sleep because modern solutions to material problems do not include physical activity. We are lonely and bored not because of material abundance simpliciter, but because the specific cultural patterns that have reproduced themselves to produce material abundance have whittled away the social and psychological solutions that were built into old solutions to material problems. Here, I hope to motivate a humility toward carefully evolved ancestral patterns, and, especially, to the conditions and forces that allowed such patterns to evolve in the first place. The old patterns, exactly as they existed in the past, simply will not work to solve modern problems. But new, effective patterns do not come in a “flash of insight” to individuals; individuals have relatively little agency and power in shaping the way things are. Individual imagination is weak; evolution is strong.

Boundaries as Constraints on Design Complexity Evolution, like human designers, faces constraints. Design problems that are too large, complex, and densely interconnected are unlikely to be solved by either process. Christopher Alexander opens his 1964 book Notes on the Synthesis of Form with a quotation from Plato’s Phaedrus: First, the taking in of scattered particulars under one Idea, so that everyone understands what is being talked about… Second, the separation of the Idea into parts, by dividing it at the joints, as nature directs, not breaking any limb in half as a bad carver might.

28. What does it mean to carve reality at the joints? Alexander provides an explication with an analogy to a hypothetical design problem. He introduces the concept of “fit,” the absence of misfit, which is to say, a design that solves its problem. “Fit” is a song that is beautiful, a chair that is comfortable, a kettle that is not too heavy or expensive and that heats water quickly. “Misfit” is ugliness, discomfort, uselessness, or other failures to solve design problems. Now imagine an abstraction, a grid of one hundred lightbulbs connected to each other, ten by ten, representing a design problem with many variables. If a light is on, it corresponds to misfit; if a light is off, it corresponds to fit. Each light (variable) is connected to 487

Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty

An interpretation of Alexander’s design space metaphor

some number of other variables, just as, for instance, the variable of teakettle material is connected to expense and to its capacity to heat quickly. If all variables are uniformly connected to all other variables, the system has little chance of reaching an equilibrium of “fit” by trial and error; the problem is too complex. However, if there are zones of dense interconnectivity that are not densely connected to each other, then reality may indeed be capable of being “carved at the joints,” and less difficult design problems exist that have a chance of being solved independently of each other, whether by evolution or by human agency: The existence of these zones of dense interconnectedness, that are not densely interconnected to each other, is a prerequisite for solvability. They are surrounded by a kind of permeable boundary, as pictured. This is analogous to “information hiding” in object-oriented programming; just as a living cell controls what enters it and acts on it, an electronic “object” limits access to its internal processes, accepting and returning only certain types of information. More ominously, a “black box” with limited interaction that solves a problem effectively is often so useful that it backfires: it becomes a new, required “solution” that limits the space of future design, often ironically resulting in poor fit. (More on this in the later section entitled “Tiling Structures and Monstrosities.”) Another relevant analogy is the concept of life and death in the game of Go. The game of Go is a game of drawing boundaries. Within a boundary of stones, a structure is “alive” if any action on it can be met with a reply that preserves it, even when surrounded

Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty

489

28.

by enemy stones. A kind of programming is occurring here, a complex tree of if-then statements abstracted into shape. Only a bounded structure can “live,” but within its bounds, it cannot be vulnerable to dangerous inputs. A perfectly impermeable boundary—a solid group of stones, with no holes or “eyes”—is dead, captured when the opponent encircles it. But a structure with enough “eyes” (holes where enemy stones may be placed) lives, and is held as territory. To summarize, boundaries function to protect their contents from harmful intrusion, to allow for the solution of smaller design problems, and to preserve and encourage diversity. On the other hand, solutions developed at small scales are of limited utility if they cannot be adapted for use on larger scales. There must be communication and connection in order for bounded entities to live. Perfectly impermeable boundaries result in stasis and death, in social and biological life as in the game of Go. Networks allow bounded entities to communicate and coordinate, and allow solutions developed at small scales to be used more widely. However, densely interconnected systems carry inherent risks not seen on the lower levels of organization. As we have seen, good design solutions cannot emerge from systems that are too densely interconnected. Beyond that, complex networks are vulnerable to (often inscrutable) risk of large-scale collapse. And black box “solutions” often seem to reproduce themselves like a plague, limiting design space and preventing new refactorings. The next section introduces some analogies to help think about networks and the balance between boundaries

and interconnectedness.

Networks and Complex Interconnected Systems On May 30, 2002, three ice climbers died in a fall on Mt. Hood. The incident, described in Laurence Gonzales’s excellent Deep Survival, involved several of the most common factors in mountaineering accidents: the climbers were roped together, without fixed protection. That means that they did not anchor themselves to the ice, but attached themselves to each other, so that if one fell, all fell. They chose to form a tightly-coupled system (via the rope), without anchoring that system physically to the ice they clung to. “When a system is tightly coupled,” Gonzales says, “the effects spread. When a system is loosely coupled, effects do not spread to other parts of the system.” Like falling dominoes, the mistake of one ice climber spreads to the others he is roped to—especially in the absence of adequate protection. The hope of one or more climbers executing a “self-arrest”—stabbing an ice axe into the ice before it is too late—is hampered by the fact that the force of a free-falling human (or two) is enough to dislocate the shoulders of a human strong enough to hold onto his axe. There are two important points to this analogy. First, in tightly coupled (densely interconnected) complex systems, one entity can send force into the system that destabilizes the entire structure. Second, humans are not good at noticing the dangers inherent in such systems. The type of accident reported in Gonzales’s 2003 book continues to occur with clockwork regularity. Gonzales quotes a climber who characterizes

Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty

491

28.

climbing roped together without fixed protection as “a suicide pact”—but climbers are apparently not good at noticing when they have entered such an unreasonable pact. There are many problems with this analogy. In the case of climbers roped together without fixed protection, all the risk comes from individual accident or mistake. In reality, the risks inherent in complex systems often come from the system itself—though individual inputs are often dangerously propagated as well, as with parasite infestation in agriculture. Another problem with the climbing analogy is that, in complex systems, there are many levels of “falling” other than death. Certainly, the extremely interconnected system humans have built risks complete collapse and extinction. But being “roped together” in a sufficiently interconnected system may also mean that we become stuck at low levels of well-being, unable to evolve better solutions at small scales to problems not quite as dire as death and extinction. Consider healthcare and education systems that require all citizens to participate in them and prevent smaller, better solutions from evolving. Obesity, boredom, and loneliness may not be quite as bad as death, but are levels of “falling” that sufficiently connected and tightly coupled systems impose on their member human beings, limiting their freedom to attempt smaller-scale solutions. Consider this substitute analogy, for contrast: instead of being suspended on ice, the people are suspended in air on a commercial airplane. Here, people are not roped together, but entirely dependent on a complex system, any aspect of which may fail.

Who “chooses” when to become part of a complex system, and which of its components to accept or reject? Where is the agency located? Often, poorly fitting pieces of complex systems seem to be thrust upon us without our consent, with no practical way to refuse it. Network effects can frustrate human agency instead of magnifying it; I call these “tiling structures.”

Tiling Structures and Monstrosities I use the personal jargon “tiling structure” or “tiling system” to describe a system that causes itself to be replicated, tiling the world with copies of itself. Some tiling structures are biological; humans are a tiling structure, tiling all continents with copies of the same kind of naked primate. Some are technological; agriculture tiled the world with itself not by making humans healthier, taller, or less prone to famine, but by producing sheer numbers and densities of miserable people for thousands of years so effectively (despite all the famines) that other options for subsistence were tiled out of existence. Tiling structures are one explanation for why urban design looks so uniform (and so soul-crushingly ugly) throughout the United States. Certain forms are ubiquitous because they solve certain delineated problems effectively enough to become effectively mandatory: power lines, big box retail, strip malls, freeways, parking lots, and billboards are such powerful patterns that few locales can refuse them, despite their ugliness and the constraints they impose. Education has tiled the world with itself; it is taken for granted that children are to be locked up in adult-controlled cages for most

4 See “The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth,” page 606.

493

Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty

Tell a bunch of average software developers to design a sailship. They will do a web search for available modules. They will pick a wind power module and an electric engine module, which will be attached to some kind of a floating module. When someone mentions aero- or hydrodynamics, the group will respond by saying that elementary physics is a far too specialized area, and it is cheaper and more straight-forward to just combine pre-existing modules and pray

28.

of the day. Together with the other tiling systems, education has obliterated unique children’s cultures.4 The democratic government that requires this kind of education (what I call the “free child caging service,” although it is certainly not free) may be regarded as a tiling structure: it tends toward more control and intrusion into the boundaries of smaller entities, constraining what they can do. Some tiling structures are “top down,” like government education: imposed on sub-entities against their will. Others are “bottom up”—a design problem is solved in such a way that all later actors adopt it, and it gradually becomes just as mandatory and constraining as a top-down imposed pattern. The blogger Viznut examines this latter dynamic with respect to software development; instead of attempting to solve problems by refactoring from scratch and “cutting reality at the joints,” pre-existing chunks are adopted and glued together to form a monstrosity that just barely works and is riddled with misfit:

that the combination will work sufficiently well.5 Whether or not this is a fair description of software developers, I think it is an accurate description of how people build their lives. We select from the available chunks and try to fit them together into a coherent whole—an education here, a job there, a box to live in, entertainment to pass the time. These available “life parts” tend to be black boxes in whose design we have little say. They may not fit together into a satisfying whole at all—the boat they make may not float. Perfectly adequate material solutions fail to provide essential “nutrients”—sometimes literally (as with obesity), sometimes figuratively (sunshine, eye contact, exercise). It is tempting to accuse a person who cannot make a coherent life out of the available parts of having too little imagination; however, I do not think this kind of problem is one that individual imagination is powerful enough to solve. Even the most imaginative among us will tend to build a “monstrosity” instead of a life. We may ask a very practical question: where lies the agency that accepts or rejects certain “black box” structures or tiling systems? An important myth of our time is that voting is an effective way for individuals to have agency in a democracy. The idea that the aggregate will of millions of people is adequately expressed by voting in elections is a rather outlandish claim, and clearly one with much evidence against it, but the “plausibility structure” of democracy causes us to believe this fiction on faith. 5 Viznut, “The Resource Leak Bug of Our Civilization,” countercomplex Aug 5 2014.

28. One pathological boundary that has been imposed topdown by our democratic system is drug prohibition. Total prohibition, in the form of the drug war, drew a boundary that created a very lucrative niche that only the most ruthless, violent actors could fill. The drug war prevented small-scale, non-totalitarian solutions to drug problems from ever being attempted, including the kind of small group rituals that allow people to use drugs in healthy, prosocial ways.6 The drug war hampers small group agency even more than individual agency; individuals may use drugs underground, supplied by those violent niche-fillers, in isolation 6 See “Controversy Brews Over Church’s Hallucinogenic Tea Ritual,” NPR April 25, 2013.

495

Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty

Why democracy seems to work.

or among the dispossessed, but if groups attempt to use drugs in healthy ways, a raid is almost guaranteed. “Prescription power,” limiting doctors’ power to prescribe drugs, is part of the drug war; I do not hold much hope for medicalized drug rituals administered by doctors.7 Despite wide agreement that the drug war is a failure, humans do not seem to have the agency to end it. The idea that individual “consumers” express their will effectively by choosing among the options provided in the market is a myth that is related to democratic agency through voting. There is agency in market choice, but it is limited to the options provided, which are in turn limited by what other people are willing to buy. Much of what humans want and need is not possible to supply in markets, and the chunks that are supplied are often not good materials for composing a human life. I think that only small human groups are capable of supplying these benefits that are difficult for the market to capture. Both producers and government find it easiest to tile the world when humans are atomized into individuals, rather than in small groups with appropriate, permeable boundaries; but a nation of individuals makes it difficult for anyone to experience belonging. Only a small group, and not “the nation” or, even worse, “Mankind,” can supply social belonging and even multiply agency. A small group has its own agency, in the sense that a group of 200 or 7,000 is capable of more, when coordinated together with boundaries, than the same number of individuals operating completely independently. (This 7 See, e.g., the work of Michael Pollan, as well as recent psilocybin and ketamine trials for treating PTSD and depression.

A story I have heard about the Langley Schools Music Project8 is that one of the music teacher’s strategies was to supply the children with instruments that were tuned such that they could not make “off” notes; rather than overwhelm children with a piano full of notes, they were given gamelan or other instruments that only made harmonious notes. The children could immediately pick them up and make music, rather than having to wade through years of inharmonious noise. “Toy instruments” (the thumb piano is a beautiful and very functional example) reduce the problem solving space: there are fewer options, but they all sound good and can be combined together to make music that exhibits “fit.” 8 Collections of children’s choir recordings from the 70s, featuring songs originally recorded the era like Fleetwood Mac and The Beach Boys.

497

Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty

Boundaries, Agency, and Beauty

28.

is why the ideal firm size is not one; transaction costs turn out to be significant.) Firms are efficient at producing material goods and services for the market, but they are not good at providing belonging and happiness for people. These small-group levels of organization are increasingly missing. Church membership decreases, and no new cults spring up to take their place. Work, education, legal, and residential design patterns make it difficult for local groups to form and express themselves. Rituals increasingly tend toward the spectacle rather than small group participation. And without rituals to set their boundaries and energize them, small groups cannot thrive.

Maynard Owen Williams, writing in National Geographic in 1921, writes about what happens to folk aesthetics when unfamiliar elements are introduced: In Merv I saw the havoc modern commerce has wrought with lovely Oriental rugs. The same thing is taking place in the peasant costumes of Czechoslovakia, with the same aniline dyes being substituted for vegetable colors, which were not only much softer when new, but which fade into mellow tones no chemical dye can duplicate. Factories are calling the women from the farms, where they utilized the winter months in working out the designs traced by the village designer or in evolving their own. Thus, gradually the arts of the past are being lost. Good solutions to design problems—beauty in all its forms—evolve into being as least as much as it they are created by individual human agency. The solution to design problems in the human realm have had a long time to evolve in ancestral cultures, in which they evolved under more bounded, less interconnected conditions than we experience today. When new variables are added, the old aesthetic cannot instantly absorb them, but must work through many iterations of misfit before good fit is discovered. Individual humans continue to change, elaborate, and shape their aesthetics, but the more elements (choices) are added to the problem space, the smaller the chance of hitting on a good solution. Christopher Alexander seizes on the same example as Williams in a bit more detail in his 1964 book Notes

499

Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty

The Slovakian peasants used to be famous for the shawls they made. These shawls were wonderfully colored and patterned, woven of yarns which had been dipped in homemade dyes. Early in the twentieth century aniline dyes were made available to them. And at once the glory of the shawls was spoiled; they were now no longer delicate and subtle, but crude. This change cannot have come about because the new dyes were somehow inferior. They were as brilliant, and the variety of colors was much greater than before. Yet somehow the new shawls turned out vulgar and uninteresting. Now if, as it is so pleasant to suppose, the shawlmakers had had some innate artistry, had been so gifted that they were simply “able” to make beautiful shawls, it would be almost impossible to explain their later clumsiness. But if we look at the situation differently, it is very easy to explain. The shawlmakers were simply able, as many of us are, to recognize bad shawls, and their own mistakes. Over the generations, the shawls had doubtless often been made extremely badly. But whenever a bad one was made, it was recognized as such, and therefore not repeated. And though nothing is to say that the change made would be for the better, it would still be a change. When the results of such changes were still bad, further changes would be made. The changes would go on until

28.

on the Synthesis of Form to elucidate a model of cultural evolution, which I quote at length:

the shawls were good. And only at this point would the incentive to go on changing the patterns disappear. So we do not need to pretend that these craftsman had special ability. They made beautiful shawls by standing in a long tradition, and by making minor changes whenever something seemed to need improvement. But once presented with more complicated choices, their apparent mastery and judgment disappeared. Faced with the complex unfamiliar task of actually inventing such forms from scratch, they were unsuccessful. It is frequently observed that constraints and obstructions are precisely where great art comes from; far from limiting art, they allow it to happen and feed it—the more demanding the constraints, the better. This paradoxical relationship between constraint and expression is the subject of the movie The Five Obstructions9 (which I highly recommend). An aesthetic is one form of a constraint, and aesthetics tend to be developed, elaborated, and enjoyed in small groups. Certain aspects of reality are excluded in order to focus on the ones within the aesthetic. An aesthetic also provides a context in which forms can exist, fit, and be beautiful (or fail to be). The work of elaborating an aesthetic together, as a small group, providing context for each other’s selves, is some of the fundamental work of being human, a way for humans to be valuable to each other that markets cannot supply. 9 Lars von Trier & Jørgen Leth, 2003.

501

Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty

10 See “Fungibility and the Loss of Demandingness.”

28.

It is perhaps a hipster universal,10 and one I share, to declare that modern fashion is ugly compared to almost every “folk costume” ever devised. Clothing is cheaper and more plentiful than it has ever been in human history, and yet we all look terrible. The “chunks” that individuals may select from the market are difficult to fit together into a coherent aesthetic; most retreat into a nondescript uniform (jeans, printed t-shirts, hoodies) that is more of an apology for existing than an outfit. If people are not good at solving even so simple a problem as fashion, with the help of all those factories, how are they supposed to design excellent lives for themselves? I am not blaming anyone for bad fashion here; I am remarking that we are all deprived of a possible source of beauty and enjoyment by the lack of coherent community aesthetics. We are deprived of both context and excuse for beauty, and individuals are seldom up to the effort and social risk. It is not a problem we are well-designed to solve individually, for it is not an individual problem at all, but one of groups. The more that economically efficient tiling systems intrusively organize us and our environments, the more beauty is crowded out and eradicated. There is a tendency to imagine that the world is fair and that there must be a trade-off—longer lives and more clothes in exchange for less beauty, perhaps. But it is not clear what entity’s agency is authorizing such a trade. Ugliness is an easy externality to impose because it is difficult for individuals to coordinate against. Consider the leaf blower. Millions of people are

subjected to loud, unpleasant noise every day so that the removal of leaves from certain areas may be performed more efficiently; this is possible because there is no mechanism for the suffering of those affected by blasts of noise to be internalized by the actors who benefit by making it a bit cheaper to blow leaves around. Are we better off because gas-powered leaf blowers exist? I submit that we are much worse off, and we have been “tiled” by the leaf blower tiling structure because there was no coherent agency to refuse this intrusion. Individuals do not have much power to stop the noise; small groups are sometimes successful in excluding them from their environment, but the continued prevalence of leaf blowers indicates the absence of widespread, powerful small-group agency capable of protecting its members’ aesthetic interests. Noise pollution is rampant and very damaging, but a more subtle form of pollution, equally unremedied, is legible word pollution. Pictured (following page) is Johan Christian Dahl’s 1839 painting View of Dresden by Moonlight, and the same painting given a modern update with word pollution. Words are processed differently than non-words, and literate people are forced to process words if they are in their visual field. Words on top of beautiful things ruin their beauty. But beauty is a difficult interest to protect in our world, and ugliness externalities flourish. The advertising tiling structure fills the landscape with signs and billboards that create more ugliness than value in the aggregate, but whose damage cannot be recouped on the market. Increasingly, fashion itself is tiled with words and

28. Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty legible symbols—words express social meanings more cheaply and legibly than clothing without words. The result is that everyone’s eyes are constantly being assaulted with unwanted meanings that ruin visual fields that might otherwise be beautiful. Individuals alone can only retreat from all the noise and ugliness into a walled, private world (if they’re 503

lucky, and tolerate loneliness well). The most sensitive people are the worst off, and of course people vary in sensitivity. Small groups of humans, however, might provide real respite from the tiling structures of the world. The next section considers these entities that have become semi-mythical, described in nostalgic, archaic words like “tribe,” “neighborhood,” or “community”: small groups of humans.

Small Groups of Humans Small groups, and not masses of disconnected individuals, are the contexts in which most ancestral solutions to human design problems evolved. There is much romanticism these days for “tribes,” a form of organization that has not been economically effective for many centuries. We still instinctively long for this kind of belonging, as our sacrifices to sports teams, fraternities, or churches demonstrate. Vernor Vinge’s novel A Fire Upon the Deep portrays an alien species of dog-like animals, with each conscious individual made up of multiple animals, forming a group self. In military combat, after most members of a pack are killed, singleton “fragments” wander the countryside, asking other packs, “Where am I? May I be part of you… please?” I find this depiction to be a poignant analogy for our present state as humans—except that the small group entities mostly do not exist for us to join. They have been tiled out of existence, merged into a mass of individuals who can no longer supply each other what they need. We don’t really know how to make tribes.

505

Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, & Beauty

11 See “Two Patterns,” Appendix page 611.

28.

Pattern 12 of A Pattern Language, Community of 7,000, declares that “individuals have no effective voice in any community of more than 5,000-10,000 persons.” This is the neighborhood layer of small groups. Small groups ideally (and traditionally) exist in multiple overlapping layers, mirroring the nature of the human self.11 Internet communities are becoming more valuable as sources of belonging and meaning, but their geographic boundlessness is a limitation as well as a benefit. Only local groups can protect their members’ interests in local physical space; quiet Internet communities of intense connoisseurship cannot protect us from noise or ugliness in the meat world. Internet communities have less power than local communities to give us eye contact, sunshine, and exercise, or even to allow us to wear beautiful clothing in public. While I have much hope for the Internet as a ritual domain, the groups that will be most powerful in solving the problems set out at the beginning of this essay will be local, on-the-ground, “colocated” groups. It is difficult to say how to bring these groups into existence, but I think that doing rituals together is an unavoidable component. Rituals function as permeable boundaries, network people together, smooth conflict, provide beneficial mental states, and allow the group to practice the expression of its agency as a corporate entity. Whether the rituals exist for the benefit of the group, or the group exists as an excuse to do the rituals, is a matter of perspective.

INTERVIEW II Interview with Suspended Reason, December 2016. ໙ I want to bracket your View From Hell writings on the ethics of childbearing, suicide, etc., to focus on music, aesthetics, and literature. But I’m curious what caused you to transition circa 2013 or ’14 from writing about big-picture existential topics to things like architecture, aesthetic patterns, and ritual. I think I just got it out of my system. Venkat [Rao] has this theory which he traces to Hannah Arendt, that “finding your voice” as a writer means developing and transcending a political consciousness. I think that was true for me. Seeing that everybody is wrong in a particular way, coming up with the best case I could for why they’re wrong, publishing it, and realizing it didn’t change anything and never will, because people don’t update based on arguments. What do you mean by political consciousness? Hmm. I mean specifically political, though I’m not sure how to define [it]. The only other political thing I feel that strongly about is the drug war probably. Borges says, near the end of his life: “A man sets himself the

Part of the peculiarity of modernity is the idea that one’s self is the source of moral judgment, and that “looking within yourself ” is the key to enlightenment. I think that’s a little… silly. But recently it seems like that view is passing, and something else will replace it, though I’m not sure what. It seems as if the idea is starting to become passé (the idea, that is, of finding yourself, looking inside yourself, the true self, self as source of ultimate moral truth). Baumeister has this thing about Work Ethic as a recent (19th century) innovation that was vaguely helpful for a while and is now dead. The Self is maybe something like that. [Baumeister’s] a good phenomenologist in the sense of seeing the unthematized, the underlying theories and beliefs that we can’t see because they’re part of our reality. Anyways, I think, if there’s a personal change in 507

Interivew II

Writing definitely started out as an exploration for my personal use—whether there was a philosophical answer to existence. I spent a long time specifically studying the “self ” (see Philippe Rochat’s Others In Mind, plus a lot of Baumeister’s work).

29.

task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.” This idea that the creative process, even when seemingly focused externally, is steered by self-discovery or self-representation, maybe as primary navigator maybe secondary it’s unclear.

this aspect of culture today, maybe it’s that the Big Questions are too big to find satisfying explanations, and only little questions are going to be interesting or entertaining. The possibility of passing is very interesting. Does one monitor TEDx talks to keep a pulse on mainstream discourse? Haha, I have no idea, I’m sure what filters in to me is not representative. What’s interesting about this observed shift away from the “big questions,” or at least, this crisis in confidence as to whether they have answers—it coincides with tremendous advances in neural insight and technology. So that for the first time, in a sense, we actually may, soon, be able to answer some these questions, though in very a different way than pre-modern philosophers might have approached them. No, yes, it does seem a bit similar to suddenly understanding the determinants of fertility just as CRISPR changes everything and makes it obsolete. Pivoting in the direction of aesthetics now. One of your early touchstones, as you began transitioning away from antinatalism, is the idea of fitness. What attracted to you to this concept? How’d you stumble across A Pattern Language? My undergrad was in city planning, but I didn’t get into Christopher Alexander until after college—it was just something that my friends read. One, a programmer, gave me a copy of Notes on the Synthesis of Form; another had a copy of A Pattern Language. I gradually got obsessed.

I’m curious your thoughts on Jane Jacobs given that undergraduate background, but don’t let me derail your train of thought. I have tried to read her stuff on many occasions, somehow could never get into it. An odd hole in my erudition. Let’s talk about Alexander’s 7,000-person ideal then. I was caught by that section as well in A Pattern Language. The idea of dissolving or dividing cities and nations into many small communities, city-states, etc. is coming up in neoreactionary writings, in the seasteading ambitions of Thiel and Patri [Friedman]. It feels like we still would need a metasystem to organize geopolitical coordination on big issues (e.g. climate change) but that this concept of a smaller community’s benefits—self-chosen in a subculture instead of the product of a birth lottery, and therefore better “fitting” to the individual— could be valuable moving forward. I’m thinking as well here of your writings on Maslow’s Hierarchy, and on social belonging. I think there are [already] a lot of meta-systems; one problem is trying to collapse them into one. There’s a 509

Interivew II

Alexander is almost a Sapir-Whorfist but for “pattern languages” dictating our abilities, not regular language. Dictating, that is, what we can do together, and not alone.

29.

It does, in a way, relate to politics and backing away from politics as a mode of engagement. Alexander believes there can’t be meaningful democracy in a group larger than about 7,000. And of course at that time (2011-2015ish) I was talking to a lot of neoreactionaries who rejected democracy.

Chris Alexander essay called “A City Is Not A Tree,” which talks about how things like cities are many overlapping lattices, not top-down tree organizations. So you’re in one lattice for kids’ school, another overlapping lattice for church, another for work, but it’s not like there’s one set of top-down control with nested entities at every level. This is similar to how Facebook fails by trying to make humans into things that have only one identity. There is no single self of course; you have a work self, a family self, a game-group self, etc.This is elaborated in Others in Mind. [Rochat] talks about how collapsing all identities into one is social death. Pinker has talked about how multiple overlapping social hierarchies (i.e., per lattice) are shown to decrease aggression in primate communities; I believe Gwern picks the idea up in his piece on subcultural societies. Now, from this idea of pattern languages, you move on to investigations of ritual. What’s the connective tissue, in your mind? Hmm. For the past fifteen years or so I have not had a strong narrativizing component to my brain, so it’s hard for me to remember big-picture changes. But I feel like there was a particular source for the ritual stuff, hmm… Alexander does talk about sanctity, and holy spaces, but your interests seem less architectural and more behavioral; practice over spatial design. Yes, definitely… When my husband and I first got together five or six years ago we talked a lot about ritual. He was on the paleo diet (we still are, vaguely)

Yes. And right before that, I had discovered distance running while high on cannabis. Finding out that these mental states which almost nobody ever experiences were right there, accessible just by combining tools everyone already has access to… Wondering what other mental states were achievable by ritual, some kind of behavioral and chemical combination. Also, my high school district […] every semester would do a big conference-slash-ceremony for us, just a few hundred people parents included. One year they got a hypnotist as our entertainment, and he had us do some exercise through which he determined I was the most hypnotizable. I got brought onstage and I remember it quite vividly, my body parts moving without my control. I quite liked it. I didn’t even do any drugs until college, but it was another kind of, “wow there are these mental states specifically accessible through crowds.” That was when I first read [Julian] Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind, and from there I got Felicitas Goodman’s book [Speaking in Tongues] on glossolalia… Which only works in a crowd, you can’t do it by yourself.2 I feel a similar anticipation regarding virtual reality and the 1 See “Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture,” page 131, as well as “Why Cultural Evolution Is Real,” page 109. 2 See “Ritual Epistemology,” page 173.

511

Interivew II

I’m glad to hear the ritual vitamins analogy1 has a backstory.

29.

and we thought there was a behavioral paleo component. Like ritual vitamins.

grey market for research chemicals; the pursuit of new and relatively exclusive modes of consciousness is becoming increasingly possible. Did you or do you feel any anxieties about the loss of control involved in a hypnotism? That seems to be a fear for a lot of people. Not at all. I have more anxiety about having a self. My brain spends almost all its time torturing me. I… hm… It seems—this is delicate— Oh dear. But it seems to me that what makes the rationalist and, in its own way, the post-rationalist communities, predisposed to insight (if they are) is first an outsider or atypical perspective, and two, a need or deep desire to shed that positioning for an a more fluent one. In the post-rationalist community, with its unique relationship to mental health and depression, I think as a result there’s a heightened awareness of the self, and of what makes one content or satisfied and also existentially unhappy and dissatisfied. When can yield insight into the behavioral practices which lend themselves to a sustainable, productive, satisfying life. Which, at its core, is what I perceive your writing to be about: the relationship between systems and qualitative outcomes. Structures of living and their effects on conscious experience. In a similar way, and perhaps this is a better if more dangerous example, the “Aspie” side of the rationalist community… There is this idea that one must step or exist outside the “invisible system” or culture for it to manifest itself as visible. To Heidegger, the ready-to-hand vs. the present-at-hand. For those who are born with brains which don’t easily adapt, or aren’t built to

Anxiety about the self is really interesting. I think this is what drives the work of a lot of the queer thinkers, and of feminist thinkers—those whose selves are marginalized or otherwise othered in the social eye, or who must invent new identities because their desired selves do not have existing templates. Some of the best ethnomethodology is about trans people (in the way early days, decades ago, 60s-70s I think). Well, I have two questions based on this subject of self and selves, and of self- or selves-writing and dissolution. One is whether you’ve experienced ego death on psychedelics, and whether this is the sort of ultimate escape from the self which you see in hypnotism and crowds. Moreover, whether there are other deeply pleasurable activities which—for you personally— cause this loss of self, beyond the sort of collective transcendence, the dissolution of the self into the crowd, which ritual brings with it. 513

Interivew II

Yes, some of my Aspiest friends have essentially synthesized ways of interacting with neurotypicals from the ground up. Indeed, an insight-generation machine!

29.

be neurotypically social, or who are brought up in certain lessthan-flourishy environment, they have to reverse-engineer these bizarre interpersonal conventions our society runs on. Break it apart, reverse-engineer it, reconstruct it artificially. And in this way, the concepts of status… of signaling… which are natural and unconscious behaviors to quote-unquote neurotypicals… this is a very prominent part of the discourse in certain corners of the Internet.

I have never experienced ego death exactly. The closest [I’ve gotten] is probably something like feeling like a computer with no monkey emotion. I get a lot of anxiety in crowds, but distance running is probably the closest [to transcendence], where there’s nothing but pleasurable feeling and it lasts for hours, however long you can manage to continue running. Running and sex are probably the best it gets. Would these be flow states? I only know this through Victor Turner’s “Liminal to Liminoid,” which he himself adapts from Csikszentmihalyi and McAloon. This being the idea of disappearing into your work as an ideal state, where the brain shuts down conscious sensory perception. I’ve had the “flow state” once, in a fencing tournament when I was eighteen or nineteen. Suddenly I had tunnel vision, time slowed down, I could sense exactly where my opponent’s blade was going to be before it was there. I found it more effective than pleasurable as a state. When running it’s the opposite—you can see the world more clearly, feel each body part more, feel the pleasure of the texture of the road or trail on the bottoms of your feet. It all seems to come down to sacrifices, yes? In your mental model. I mean this partly tongue-in-cheek. I would say costly signaling, at least. It’s rare to find a subject where that [framing] doesn’t yield insight, because it’s such a unified theory of everything. To what degree do you see yourself as an idea innovator, an idea synthesizer, an explorer-discoverer, or else a translator? Do you

collect exotic goods in the New World and bring them back to Europe? Do you study the wheel meticulously or set out to create something entirely other?

29.

I see myself as a connector, showing how other people’s pieces fit together. Sometimes that’s synthesis. My brain works by apophenia mostly. I will translate somebody else’s ideas with a huge sigh if nobody will bother to read them and I need their piece in order to explain how it connects to something.

Interivew II

Is the apophenia ever a challenge? Personally it feels like I see how things fit together, but I know sometimes I’m probably wrong and making it up. It’s just so easy to do. This is why I’m fascinated-slash-horrified by zones of rogue epistemology—conspiracy theories, fan theories, politics etc. At first, when delving into these zones, I could only see the superficial tricks. Then after reading or watching hundreds of them, I could start to see what made them lazy versus considerable intellectual work. Room 237 [a set of fan theories about Kubrick’s The Shining] is one of my favorite movies. There’s some epistemic humility in that the same things that make wacky conspiracy or fan theories good are also what make insight-writing good. Surprising evidence, wide-ranging sources, spending lots of time looking very deeply at the subject matter with eyes that remain fresh. Much of my [writing] is lazy; the small amount that’s good tends to be good in the same way that a great fan or conspiracy theory is good. So I have very little hope that I’m actually right 515

about any of it. Your piece on that film is one of your best, I think. “Puzzle Theory” 3 does a good job of approaching the thorny subject of interpretation in an interesting way. You write that acceleration causes clearcutting of sustainable rituals. With cultural change accelerating, do you still think it’s possible for rituals as we know them to exist, and exist sustainably? I think the only sense in which they can be sustainable under change is if they keep adapting. There’s no One True Ritual Order that’s going to survive forever. The best hope is maybe there are micronutrients or vitamins that we can discover, and then figure out how to supply them under different technological regimes. Humans themselves don’t change and evolve as rapidly as the things around us. I’m very curious about your upcoming mess project. I’ve followed it loosely in the chat but always in fragments. Are you at the point you could give an abstract, or a synopsis of how you conceptualize mess, and what about it interests you? I have always been unusually messy since I was little. Most people grow out of it; I never did. And yet it makes me very uncomfortable; I hate a mess. Once in college I was on LSD and realized that almost all of “cleaning” or “tidying” has nothing to do with pathogens, but is all about separating “self ” from “non-self ” in a ritualized manner. It’s “silly” in the sense of pathogens but important psychologically. 3 page 341.

I don’t know, hopefully this all comes together somehow. If I wrote it now it would be… a mess. I’m tempted to write a mess version and a tidy version.4 Do you think LSD, and by extension other consciousness-distorting drugs, can or frequently does lead to genuine insight? I really didn’t see how Notes on the Synthesis of Form mapped onto A Pattern Language until I thought about it on LSD. Most of my insights are from the way marijuana affects my brain. It helps with seeing patterns, or seeing connections by noticing the same pattern in different places. Again, the hard and useful part is translating that back into the consensus reality. 4 “Tendrils of Mess In Our Brains,” page 531.

517

Interivew II

It’s also kind of a lens for seeing order by analyzing instances of its apparent absence. One of the earliest universal human technologies is fiber organization. Tying, spinning, weaving, knitting, etc. Also our hair: braiding and hairstyles are a target of social signaling and something that can be “a mess” or tidy. So there’s this conspicuous trait we carry with us that serves mainly to display intentionality or lack thereof.

29.

Anyway, [the essay’s] shaping up into a kind of “ordinary language philosophy” project of what is a mess, what is the concept, how universal is it, what characterizes it, what makes something more or less messy. There’s a natural/artificial (artifact) aspect too, which may be related. Natural things all mixed together (leaves, stones) aren’t mess, but artificial things mixed together are mess, and the artificial mixed with the natural is mess.

Have you read [Stephenson’s] Cryptonomicon? It’s like the inaccessible piles of gold bars in the jungle that nobody can move. ໙ Reading & listening recommendations: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Nabokov, Pale Fire Stephenson, Cryptonomicon Brian Eno, Apollo Spacemen 3, Dreamweapon Cody Chesnutt, The Headphone Masterpiece

A BAD CARVER Consider the Venus of Willendorf, the Venus of Hohle Fels, and the Venus of Dolní Věstonice. These three paleolithic statuettes were made from different materials—stone, mammoth tusk, ceramic. Each depicts a female figure with exaggerated breasts and buttocks. Each head is abbreviated, with no face; the legs taper to points. What were they for? What purpose did they serve? The only guess we can make with any confidence is that they likely served multiple purposes, whatever those purposes were. Paleolithic people were obliged to carry everything they owned with them. The material culture package of nomadic people was severely constrained. Each item was absolutely necessary, and often served multiple purposes. As we go back in time, artifacts, institutions, and even people are more condensed. Each person must wear many hats and perform many functions. Each tool must serve many purposes. In this highly condensed order, a minor innovation in some specific technological function would not be worth much, as it would likely come at the expense of some other function. In our prehistory, Nick Szabo explains, institutions usually condensed the functions of

Hohle Fels, left, and Willendorf, right. religion with business, business with politics and war, law with lore, tort law with criminal law, ceremony with accounting, and gang warfare with a substantial body of customary rules. Objects could condense the functions of jewelry with coinage, and concrete utility with media of obligation satisfaction and store of value.1 Settled people, on the other hand, can collect more stuff. Going forward in time, artifacts with specialized purposes proliferate, and people specialize. New institutions appear. The cultural package de-condenses. It can look like a mess. Almost every technological advance is a de-condensation: it abstracts a particular function away 1 “Artifacts of wealth: patterns in the evolution of collectibles and money,” Unenumerated July 31 2016.

521

A Bad Carver

First, the taking in of scattered particulars under one Idea, so that everyone understands what is being talked about… Second, the separation of the Idea into parts, by dividing it at the joints, as nature directs, not breaking any limb in half as a

30.

from an object, a person, or an institution, and allows it to grow separately from all the things it used to be connected to. Writing de-condenses communication: communication can now take place abstracted from face-to-face speech. Automobiles abstract transportation from exercise, and allow further de-condensation of useful locations (sometimes called sprawl). Markets de-condense production and consumption. Why is technology so often at odds with the sacred? In other words, why does everyone get so mad about technological change? We humans are irrational and fearful creatures, but I don’t think it’s just that. Technological advances, by their nature, tear the world apart. They carve a piece away from the existing order—de-condensing, abstracting, unbundling—and all the previous dependencies collapse. The world must then heal itself around this rupture, to form a new order and wholeness. To fear disruption is completely reasonable. The more powerful the technology, the more unpredictable its effects will be. A technological advance in the sense of a de-condensation is by its nature something that does not fit in the existing order. The world will need to reshape itself to fit. Technology is a bad carver, not in the sense that it is bad, but in the sense of Socrates:

bad carver might.”2 The most powerful technological advances break limbs in half. They cut up the world in an entirely new way, inconceivable in the previous order.

De-Condensing, Unbundling, Refactoring I have previously described (“Gardens Need Walls”3) some of the ways that activities and institutions have become de-condensed: The lower levels of Maslow’s pyramid reflect material well-being. But material abundance is not itself the cause of anomie and angst. Rather, ancestral, evolved solutions to lower-level problems also tended to contain solutions to higher-level problems as well. As these ancestral solutions are made obsolete by solutions that are more efficient on the material level, the more ineffable, higher-level problems they solved present themselves anew. Simple abundance of food is not the cause of obesity, but rather the loss of carefully evolved ancestral diets. Our ancestors found it easy to get to sleep because they were tired from intense physical activity; we often find it a challenge to get to sleep because modern solutions to material problems do not include physical activity. We are lonely and bored not because of material abundance simpliciter, but because the specific cultural patterns that have reproduced themselves to produce material 2 Plato, Phaedrus, quot. in Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Alexander). 3 page 481.

abundance have whittled away the social and psychological solutions that were built into old solutions to material problems.

30.

Gabriel Duquette describes how movies, games, and art de-condense (unbundle) various needs:

A Bad Carver

Unbundling—Elements formerly only available as part of a unitary object are now sold separately, like nutritional supplements instead of food. Those who only want the competence porn aspect of science fiction (without, say, the romance or character development) can get it from The Martian.4 Food was probably the first domain of de-condensation. In early prehistory, a technological revolution (cooking, and a more varied diet) abstracted nutrition away from the past order, which involved sitting around chewing for ten hours a day. The change disrupted not only our behavior, but our bodies; our saliva, mouth, teeth, and gut adapted to this change. And agriculture changed everything all over again. Only recently, after yet more technological revolutions (abstracting fertilizer into constituent chemicals, abstracting micronutrients from food), have humans overcome the stunting and nutritional deficiencies that became common after the agricultural de-condensation event. Refactoring at a minimum de-condenses a concept in a new way. At its best, it re-condenses the mess it makes into a new whole. 4 “Belonging > innovation,” Liposuction 2016. Also found in Art (That) Works, ed. Not Nothing, 2020.

523

The Sacred Wholeness Many of us moderns have a wistful feeling for the simpler, more condensed order of the (imagined) past. We might not want to be subsistence farmers, but a cast iron pot over the fire, in a rustic cabin in the snow, evokes a longing. Our own objects do not seem so dense with meaning. Each time we become aware of bad fit in the world— traffic, getting sore from sitting in a chair too long, a moment of loneliness, a software malfunction—we are tempted to nod along with the Unabomber that industrialization was a mistake. So we can understand, a little bit, why technological change triggers a sacredness immune response. Technology threatens the fragile order with which humans orient themselves. Technology threatens to tear the fabric of society, and even to carve up humans themselves into separate functions. Previous structures of meaning may not survive. Technological de-condensation is a kind of logical analysis, and logical analysis is very impolite in sacred matters. Technology breaks down unified structures and demonstrates that they are partible. Christopher Alexander describes a “loss of innocence” when using logical, instead of intuitive (sacredness-respecting), means for design: The use of logical structures to represent design problems has an important consequence. It brings with it the loss of innocence. A logical picture is easier to criticize than a vague picture since the assumptions it is based on are brought

5 Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, 1964. 6 Abrutyn, “Religious Autonomy and Religious Entrepreneurship: An Evolutionary-Institutionalist’s Take on the Axial Age,” Comparative Sociology 2014.

525

A Bad Carver

Technology brings to the light of conscious reflection, and therefore renders profane, the functions underlying previously sacred objects and relations. One of the most amazing things about technology and sacredness is that (according to Seth Abrutyn) the domain of the sacred is itself a product of technological revolution and refactoring. Abrutyn examines the so-called Axial Age (around 800-200 B.C.) and claims that sacredness and piety emerge for the first time as a separate and autonomous domain. “Religious entrepreneurs” (such as Buddha and Confucius) carved out a specifically religious domain, separate from kinship relationships and the political domain in which they had previously been embedded. And here is yet another synonym for de-condensation: “‘disembedding’ human concerns related to integration, origins of humanity, and morality/piety from kinship and polity and embedding them in the logic of religion.”6 The sacred itself got refactored.

30.

out into the open. Its increased precision gives us the chance to sharpen our conception of what the design process involves. But once what we do intuitively can be described and compared with nonintuitive ways of doing the same things, we cannot go on accepting the intuitive method innocently.5

De-Condensing People People are very sacred. Technologies that refactor, disrupt, and de-condense human beings are perceived as extremely dangerous to sacredness. Clocks de-condense time from people, so that their hours may measure their sacrifice in exchange for wages.7 This is the basis for industrialization. Industrialization de-condenses particular behaviors from humans. Sacredness responses to this include Marx’s alienation of labor, in which humans through industrialization are separated from their species-essence. Vaccines, antibiotics, and medicines de-condense human health from its previous context of mystery and randomness. Birth control de-condenses human reproduction. This allows sexual relationships to be de-condensed from mating relationships. The production of new humans is de-condensed by in vitro fertilization and surrogacy. Communications technology de-condenses human relationships into messages. Hormones and surgical technology de-condense gender. Sex robots threaten to de-condense human relationships altogether. The sacredness of the “whole” person is threatened by each of these intrusions into its functioning. One author laments the de-condensation of talk: Amazon is great, you can buy things without having to talk to anyone! Google Maps is great, you can get directions when lost without having to talk to anyone! Grubhub is great, you can get 7 See Nick Szabo, “A Measure of Sacrifice.”

8 Bret Victor (@worrydream), Twitter, Oct 27 2016. 9 page 254.

527

A Bad Carver

I think this is an important statement about the coercion that is naturally present in highly condensed culture. In a culture without electronic maps and online encyclopedias of everything, you have to talk to people in order to serve your needs. The absence of this technology provided excuses—plausible deniability—for presumably pleasant social interactions. It is true that having choices does not always make us better off (I give many examples of choices making people worse off in “Cooperative Ignorance”9). Given the choice to talk to people or not, I might choose not to annoy anybody. But I might prefer to talk to people without it being my fault. (Successful online dating technologies provide mechanisms for plausible deniability of interest, such as “matching” only after minimal mutual interest is signaled.) Earlier levels of technology forced us to do a lot of things, some of which were good for (most of) us. It’s not incoherent to regret

30.

food delivered without having to talk to anyone! IMDb is great, you can remember who was in that one movie without having to talk to anyone! Shazam is great, you can find out what song is playing without having to talk to anyone! Facebook is great, you can keep up with your friends without having to talk to anyone! Twitter is great, you can harass and be harassed without having to talk to anyone! Self-driving cars will be great, you’ll get driven around without having to talk to anyone! Texting is great, you can talk to anyone without having to talk to anyone!8

having a choice that you didn’t have before. Many people, however, are benefited by the separation of functions. People with ambulatory disabilities, chronic fatigue syndrome, or some forms of chronic pain are much better off not having to do manual labor or walk everywhere. Deaf people have more opportunities when more communication takes place in written text. Blind people can participate more easily in a world abstracted from the visual through software, text, and computerized voice transcription. People who have trouble with eye contact and face-to-face communication are better off with more opportunities for text-based relationships. Technology implies a kind of coercion: you have no choice but to sit in traffic if you want to go anywhere, and you can’t go back to an earlier order. Pre-technological condensation implies coercion, too: you can’t have access to one function without everything that it’s attached to. But neither of these forms of coercion is necessarily worse. In any change, there are winners and losers. The instinct to return to a sacred wholeness, a system in which all the parts fit, including the human parts, is healthy. But the way to this wholeness, if it exists at all, is forward, not back.

The Age of Recondensation The general trend in human culture is toward de-condensation. Yet I write this from the most highly condensed artifacts that ever existed: a mobile tablet. This small object (like the ubiquitous smartphone) condenses innumerable functions: a detailed map of the world, a telephone, a newspaper (sending and

30. A Bad Carver receiving), an encyclopedia, an alarm clock, a musical instrument, a research library, a neighborhood pub, a stereo, a video camera, a game console, an art studio, and new functions still to be thought of. Many of the technological advances of the past few years condense functions within an artifact. Airbnb adds a function to a house: where previously it was a consumption good, now it is also something to rent on the market. Uber and Lyft do the same for automobiles. Self-driving cars de-condense driving from human effort and attention; in doing so, the automobile is re-condensed into a space where new functions are possible. 529

The grocery chain Whole Foods re-condenses food with piety and the sacred. The “wholeness” of food, before it was desacralized by industrial processing, is hinted at in the name. Stores are anchored by a prominent produce section, where shiny, earthy-tasting greens gleam from the beets they’re still ostentatiously attached to. Most of the shelves of Whole Foods, of course, contain processed foods, like this: (pictured). This food is a processed, highly palatable and convenient rectangle that nonetheless proclaims its connection to the “whole” foods that went into making this. (I’m not hating, I had this on my counter because I like them.) The point is that we are in an age of recondensation, in which technology begins to heal the ruptures it has caused. This is my optimistic portrait of the glorious technological future.

TENDRILS OF MESS IN OUR BRAINS Messes are intimate, secret, somewhat shameful. Mess is supposed to be kept backstage. Posting this picture of my messy workspace is almost as embarrassing and inappropriate as posting nudes, but it’s necessary aesthetic background:

All the new thinking about mess is apologetics: what if mess is good? Perhaps mess makes us more creative. Messiness is a sign of intelligence. All that. As a pathologically messy person, I cannot concur with this glorification of mess. Being in a messy environment is stressful and discouraging. There is an unease that remains even when you block out the conscious

Einstein’s desk, a picturesque mess awareness of mess. This is not say that mess is a pure bad. Mess is not even necessarily ugly. The famous photograph of Albert Einstein’s desk, taken on the day he died, is a particularly picturesque mess. This is recognizably a mess, but it is calming to look at, and deeply touches our personal feelings. It has mono no aware. Most mess is not pleasing to look at, especially when experienced raw, without the benefit of a photographer imposing an overall order on the mess through composition and a monochrome palette.1 Alan Watts is, as far as I know, the premier ordinary language philosopher of mess. He enters the problem with an observation: clouds are not a mess. When you look at the clouds they are not symmetrical. They do not form fours and they do not 1 In its original form, the photo of Perry’s workspace (prev. page) appeared in color, as did several others in the essay.

31. come along in cubes, but you know at once that they are not a mess. A dirty old ashtray full of junk may be a mess but clouds do not look like that. When you look at the patterns of foam on water they never make an artistic mistake and they are not a mess. They are wiggly but in a way, orderly, although it is difficult for us to describe that kind of order.2 Watts observes that elements of the natural world— clouds, foam on water, the stars, human beings—are not messes, though the nature of their order remains inscrutable, and Watts doesn’t try to pin down its precise nature. Mess seems to be somehow a property perceptible only in the presence of human artifacts. Is this the result of some kind of aesthetic original sin on the part of humans, uncanny beings severed from the holiness of Nature? I hope not. “Humans are bad” is 2 Alan Watts, The Tao of Philosophy..

533

Tendrils of Mess in Our Brains

Basement clutter (note: this is not my mess).

a boring answer. We can learn something about order from the mystery of mess. We start here: a cloud is not a mess, but an ashtray full of cigarette butts is a mess. In tracking down why this is so, we will find, through the lens of the mess and the non-mess, a clue to the hidden orders in our minds.

Mess Is Not Shannon Entropy What is salient about mess is disorder. At the outset, we might be tempted to think of mess and disorder as the mere absence of order. But we will see that mess cannot be present without the visual implication of a legible order. In the abstract language of information theory, the kind of disorder called entropy is the lack of structure or compressibility in data. Consider a rectangular field of pixels which can be either black or white. A field of A rectangle of maximum entropy.

that they are not symmetrical and do not come along in cubes, this is a way of saying that the number of bits necessary to specify a picture of the clouds is quite 535

Tendrils of Mess in Our Brains

A proper mess.

31.

pure black or pure white has maximum order in the sense of Shannon entropy: you hardly need any bits to explain how to recreate the image. This is not a mess. On the other hand, consider a rectangle of pixels specified by a random process, with black and white equally likely. There is no way to compress this data: each pixel must be specified separately. It has maximum entropy (within this monochrome, rectangular, pixelated problem space). But it is not a mess. Finally, consider this rectangle of black and white pixels. This rectangle takes fewer bits to specify than the randomly pixelated rectangle. There are repeated letter forms, geometric forms, patches of black and white. There is much more order and compressibility here. And it’s a mess. Consider also the clouds. When Alan Watts notes

Stone ruin (not mess). high. They have high entropy, they contain a lot of information, yet they are not mess. Is it possible for any fluffy white thing in the sky to be a mess? Imagine a skywriter convention, with many planes writing words in different fonts (some in single lines, some in dot matrix style) across the sky. Gradually the wind obscures the legibility of some letters. This seems like a mess. But, again, this sky requires fewer bits to specify: patterns of letters and dots are repeated and may be specified as mathematical shapes rather than pixel by pixel. It seems that human artifacts made from natural materials do not decay into mess, while human artifacts made from highly ordered artificial materials (sheet rock, plastic) decay into mess. Compare rough stone ruins overgrown with moss with the ruins of a rectilinear room made from highly ordered materials: The stone ruin is not a mess, but the rectilinear green ruin is clearly a mess. And again, it would take

us more bits to specify the mossy stone ruin than the crumbling painted interior, with its straight lines and even flat surfaces interrupted by corruption and decay. So here is a mystery: why are tableaux that are apparently more orderly (in the sense of compressibility in the data required to specify them) also more messy? Let me offer a few more hints, in the form of definitions supplied by my friends, before I reveal the answer. Sam Burnstein notes a connection to intentionality: “Messes are low-intentionality as a whole but high-intentionality in their component pieces.” “A mess is a decaying purpose,” says @allgebrah.3 Chris Beiser deconstructs the experience of mess: “Mess is an incomplete aesthetic experience composed of a surplus of objects that produce aesthetic experiences (often themselves incomplete) of vastly different types and durations, without a canonical ordering.” And Daniel Klein hints at the implied user interface of mess in conceiving of “mess as matter deficient in 3 Twitter Oct 7 2016, route hash 784517005772816385.

Artificial construction materials (mess).

side-effect-free interfaces.” And here is the answer: in order for mess to appear, there must be in the component parts of the mess an implication of extreme order, the kind of highly regular order generally associated with human intention. Flat uniform surfaces and printed text imply, promise, or encode a particular kind of order. In mess, this promise is not kept. The implied order is subverted. Often, as in my mess of text and logos above, the implied order is subverted by other, competing orders. The information theory equivalent of a mess might be a chunk of data, pieces of which have been encoded using different symbolic systems, according to no particular order. If we discover the correct encoding for a part of the message, this seems to promise that it will work for the whole thing; but this promise is not kept. Mess is only perceptible because it produces in our minds an imaginary order that is missing. It is as if objects and artifacts send out invisible tendrils into space, saying, “the matter around me should be ordered in some particular way.” The stronger the claim, and the more the claims of component pieces conflict, the more there is mess. It is these invisible, tangled tendrils of incompatible orders that we are “seeing” when we see mess. They are cryptosalient: at once invisible and obvious. Every object and building implies a particular order, rendering some objects incompatible. If these incompatible objects are present, they are “mess.” Some buildings are more “exclusive” than others, aesthetically excluding large classes of objects. These highly ordered buildings are, for this reason, prone to mess. Stewart Brand, in How Buildings Learn (h/t

Tendrils of Mess in Our Brains

539

31.

Graham Johnson), interviews the residents of an austere, rectilinear, highly ordered Le Corbusier house. They note that they have had to get rid of “inessentials” in order to live there, forgoing ornate antique furniture and comfortable armchairs. A maison Corbu strongly projects a particular order onto its space, such that the vast majority of human furnishings are aesthetically excluded, rendered mess. Living within these constraints is a discipline, and “purifies the soul” in the sense of requiring you to live like you’re on a camping trip all the time. Houses with less austere order place more relaxed demands on their contents, including their occupants. That which is “garbage” is aesthetically excluded from almost every visible order. Garbage is mess by its very nature, even if it is not the kind that rots. It must be taken away to where no one will look at it, because the decaying imprints of order it bears interfere with the aesthetic demands of all human spaces. Artists have been interested in garbage for precisely this reason. One of the few examples I have seen of garbage being incorporated into an order that is not “mess” is the nest of a bowerbird that has been decorated with bright blue plastic bottle caps and bright blue plastic straws. Do non-human animals perceive mess? A bowerbird must. In order for the male to build and tidy up the bower (whose only purpose is for display), and for the female to judge it, they must have cognitive access to an imaginary order—a kind of ideal bower—to compare it to. Like humans, some non-human animals exert effort to keep their feces away from their living spaces.

A bower strewn with blue plastic and bottlecaps. (Sociologists call this the “fecal habitus,” in their manner of rendering the familiar alien.) Feces are aesthetically incompatible with human spaces; “mess” is used euphemistically for feces produced in ordered spaces and contexts that exclude them. Presumably, feces exclusion originated in a pathogen avoidance strategy. We keep feces, urine, vomit, and blood away from social contexts (to the extent possible) because they could be sources of highly ordered entities (bacteria, viruses) that will disrupt and conflict with our bodies’ own order. The hygienic function of keeping incompatible orders separate extends into the objects of the mental world. Mess is stressful and uncomfortable; politeness demands that we cover, hide, or mask indications of orders incompatible with our mutually projected social order. At minimum, we must cover our nakedness outside of the intimate sphere. In masking parts of reality, we need not become less ourselves; what is masked forms the background against which the form

31.

of what is not masked is clear and salient.

Masking

541

Tendrils of Mess in Our Brains

When enough snow falls on a city to make everything look soft and white on top, it looks less messy. Limiting the color palette and softening sharp lines renders the underlying order more harmonious. The snow masks the conflicting orders implied by billboards, cars, dumpsters, and concrete sidewalks. A mess photographed in black and white (masking color) looks less messy. Strong composition of a photograph can mask messiness, foregrounding a certain subset of forms that interact harmoniously. In my above example of the “mess” rectangle with overlapped text and logos, if either layer were masked, it would not be a mess. Covering certain aspects of reality is necessary to leave other aspects perceptible. We mask incompatible things from each other in order to prevent mess, and politely mask mess itself. Mess is intimate. How can houses allow for the existence of mess without being a mess? Christopher Alexander’s alcove pattern (in The Timeless Way of Building) is a solution to the conflicting forces of intimate mess and social interaction, using a sort of mask. People want to be together, but they also like to do their own hobbies and activities. The person doing the hobby (say, me knitting) is absorbed in an imaginary order of the future, and only vaguely aware of the visual appearance of tools, materials, books. To observers who are not presently absorbed in this hobby, it looks like a mess. Knitting, for instance, requires not only knitting

needles, but scissors, a tape measurer, a crochet hook, a yarn needle, and stitch markers. Loose ends are clipped off and accumulate, together with the unused remains of balls of yarn. Garments in progress have loose strands hanging off of them. Stitch books must sometimes be consulted. (This is not just my problem: producing containers for organizing hobby supplies of all kinds is a major industry.) An alcove offers a little place to do a hobby that masks the distasteful appearance of mess and allows the hobbyist to be together with others without annoying them. If they all sat in one big room around a big table, the mess would distract and irritate. Multiple hobbyists’ incompatible messes might even flood together into a supermess, and swallow everyone. Clothing in general, and costumes of particular social roles (business suits, priest collars), are like alcoves for our bodies. We take them with us and can interact with others safely within social orders, without getting distracted by the intimate order of the body.

Orders of Strands What is likely to be a mess? I think one of the most common messes is your hair. We should be suspicious of our hair for several reasons: first, humans grow the longest hair of any mammal. Second, no other mammal has our hair pattern of unlimited-length head hair growth and limited-length body hair growth. Third, Donald E. Brown included “hairstyles” on the list of human universals. Long strands, whether curly or straight, are difficult to keep organized. Thread is wound on a spool; rope

Alan Watts said that there is a way to turn any mess into not-mess: add symmetry. The example he gives is a kaleidoscope, in which a mess of incompatible things is turned into a shifting geometric pattern. 543

Tendrils of Mess in Our Brains

The Order of Clouds

31.

is looped; electronic cables are intricately braided; yarn is organized in skeins and balls; hair is brushed, braided, waxed, shaved, dreaded, wrapped around hair donuts, trimmed, dyed, and pinned up. Incidentally, another of Brown’s human universals is the production and use of string, yarn, or a tying material. Humans quickly became virtuosos at organizing fibers. Hair is “a mess” if it has not been ordered according to the standards of one’s culture and situation. To have hair is to have a black hole of ordering effort: merely existing (sleeping, running, wearing a hat, going outside, etc.) disrupts the order of hair. The quality of being “a mess” is perhaps more perceptible in hair that has been carefully pinned up into a complicated style and slept in, than in hair that is merely unstyled and unbrushed. The tattered remains of a hairstyle imply an order incompatible with having hairs sticking out everywhere and being kind of smushed on one side. Merely unbrushed hair only suggests the alternate order of brushed hair. Human hair, then, is a locus for the display of order. Its “natural” state is mess, implying that hair comes with an order deficit, requiring organizational effort to come up to the level of acceptable human. Our minds and personalities are similar.

Basement clutter transformed with a kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope, transformer of messes, adds a particular kind of symmetry. It is not mere bilateral symmetry; Rorschach blots can still be messes. The kaleidoscope produces what Christopher Alexander calls local symmetries: the property of being composed of many overlapping sub-pieces that display symmetry. Watts says that clouds are not symmetrical, and they are not, precisely, but in their forms we can often detect local symmetries (particularly in stratoculumulus clouds). This no longer looks like mess. Shape and form at different levels of scale pop out. Deformed, fragmented, and reflected upon themselves, the components of the mess no longer conflict with each other as much. Conceptually, they are masked; whatever they were, whatever reality they implied, is lost in the new order of geometric forms. “Local symmetries” is the most objective of Christopher Alexander’s Fifteen Fundamental

545

Tendrils of Mess in Our Brains

4 “The Quality Without a Name at the Betsy Ross Museum,” Ribbonfarm, and “The Fifteen Fundamental Properties,” Carcinisation.

31.

Properties, described in The Nature of Order.4 “Alternating repetition” is also a rather objective property, and the kaleidoscope imposes that too (see the alternating arms). In this image, strong centers (perceptible, thing-ish subsets) are formed and support each other. The arms form thick borders. The kaleidoscope transforms mess into non-mess by viewing the mess through a (literal) lens of many of the Fifteen Fundamental Properties. It imposes an organization so strong that it cancels out the whining from whatever garbage or mess you put into it. These are the properties that are found throughout Nature, as well as in beautiful architecture and objects—beautiful not in the sense that they are striking, but in the sense that they produce a sense of inner calm and the ability to recognize one’s self in them. Are there truly no messes in Nature? That it “never makes an aesthetic mistake”? On short time scales, at least, there seem to be natural messes. When a tornado destroyed most of Cathedral Pines in Connecticut, the result looked to residents like a mess. People even cleaned it up, removing fallen trees from the newly-bare ground. The perception of the flattened forest, with trees scattered and dead, conflicted with the remembered order, the ideal, ordinary forest with trees mostly alive and pointing up. An enormous force disrupted the everyday order of the forest; this order repairs itself, but only slowly. The underlying natural order of clouds and stars, Alan Watts says, is difficult to describe. It is a special

order formed of many regular mathematical laws operating on an irregular world. Life exploits mathematical elegance, while making local adjustments everywhere according to the systems it interacts with— wind, water, sun, other life. The Fifteen Fundamental Properties are an attempt to describe, if not explain, the order of nature, which somehow never seems like a mess. Clouds are an image of the interaction between air currents, water, and geography. Each element is a reflection of the others. Animals and plants are reflections of their environments, which change to become reflections of them. Being constantly rebuilt by independent entities and forces at all scales of time and space, constrained by each other, is how the order of nature never looks like a mess (except during tornado season). An irregular world struggling to be regular always achieves a certain level of regularity which is interrupted by unusual configurations created by the very forces that produce the regularity as they act against a framework of three-dimensional constraints inherent in space.5 The properties predict several things about mess. A building or object that displays these properties is likely to retain them as it decays (see the mossy stone ruin), whereas things lacking the properties are likely to decay into mess. And a mess will be more pleasant if it is ordered by the fundamental properties. Alexander gives the example of a typical car repair 5 Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order Vol. 1.

A great deal of our reality is made from imaginary orders we carry around in our heads. We use these imaginary orders to rebuild, navigate, and judge our world. A mess is a visceral clue to the existence of these invisible orders. Perhaps we can braid some threads. A mess is a juxtaposition of components, one or more of which implies an order that conflicts with the orders implied by the other components. In other words, two or more components create incompatible mental projections. A joke (or humor in general) is the surreptitious introduction of a mental projection that is later shown to be mistaken. Incompatible mental projections quickly switch places in time.6 A self is constructed from first-person experience and from mental projections of how others see oneself; these are often in conflict.7 6 See “On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke,” page 467. 7 See “The Essence of Peopling,” page 207.

547

Tendrils of Mess in Our Brains

Imaginary Orders

31.

shop: it appears rugged and even grimy, but it has the kind of “‘messy’ order that has been created by the real everyday needs of the people who work there.” He contrasts this with the superficially orderly, but shallow and sterile, storefront of a restaurant. Just as the bowerbird has some kind of cognitive access to the imaginary way a bower should look, we seem to have access to a mental order hinted at by the Fifteen Fundamental Properties, intuitively if not consciously.

A story or narrative is a mental projection of characters and events embedded in a particular causal logic. Listening to a story seems passive, but in order to process the narrative, the listener must construct a coherent mental world out of the details provided. Unconscious predictions are made, and then winnowed and changed as more evidence is presented and conflicts resolved. The experience bears a strong resemblance to the game, says Nick Lowe (in The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative, text from which is mangled with logos in an image above): I would suggest that these homologies between the two different kinds of model universe [game and narrative] may be more than coincidental: that narrative universes and games are different cultural artifacts of a common underlying cognitive apparatus, originally evolved to interpret real-world experience to an intelligible system of mental representations. As human beings, “projecting and sharing stylized model worlds in mental space” is both our ancestral job and our favorite hobby. The world that we interact in is mostly imaginary, constructed by all of us out of fantasies and guesses. As we get more intelligent, we will get more imaginary.

LABOR & LEISURE Ribbonfarm 2017-2019

BODY PLEASURE Suffering is very serious. Death is very important. Let me instead talk about something else that is becoming both serious and important, as the world gets richer and more awesome: the problem of pleasure. Excessive leisure time is a problem that has only become widespread in the past century. As non-human intelligences get more sophisticated, it may be the case that human work remains extremely important; however, it may also be that humans are faced with increasing leisure. If that is the case, the critical problem facing humanity will be how to enjoy ourselves. If that seems silly, consider your favorite dystopian images of the future: only humans who understand how to enjoy themselves can demand living conditions in which they are able to do so. Let’s get some silly ideas about pleasure out of the way so we can get on to the interesting stuff. First, there is the Puritan idea that seeking pleasure (especially body pleasure) is immoral because it is presumed to substitute for doing good for others. In order to take this seriously, we must construct human effort as (1) an invariable lump (2) that is maximally engaged in doing good. Consider, rather, that energy and effort may increase with increasing pleasure, and that a person who experiences a lot of pleasure may be more inclined to deny his baser instincts (including

laziness) for the good of others. Second, there is the idea that pleasure seeking is necessarily selfish. Two facts undermine this assumption: one, the extreme connectedness of humans, such that they can readily share information about pleasure (especially given pleasure “quora,” meaning wide, if not perfect, agreement among humans about what is pleasurable and how pleasurable it is); two, the special information each person has about himself, such that he is most qualified to make adjustments about his own well-being. A norm in which each person is entitled to devote a certain percentage of his effort toward personal bodily well-being and pleasure is a highly efficient norm for maximizing average pleasure. Traditions like sabbaths, whether or not that is their intent, assign a proportional “floor” of time that must be devoted to loafing, if not precisely to pleasure. Any person who accepts a life of low bodily pleasure and poor affect, even if he does so for beneficent reasons, is failing to contribute to group learning about pleasure, and failing to contribute to a cartel in which humans demand a floor level of bodily well-being—in a sense, scabbing against humanity. And it seems intuitive that happier people are less misanthropic than unhappy people who take no pleasure in life. Third, there is the idea that bodily pleasure seeking is not as important or sophisticated or valuable as pleasure-seeking of an intellectual, spiritual, higher status, or more abstract nature. Is body pleasure low and shameful? Is body pleasure a substitute for higher pleasures? Certainly, the idea that feeling good is a problem is reflected in the fact that “euphoria” is considered a negative side effect of pharmaceutical drugs.

If your goal is to experience more pleasure in the long term, it’s hard to know what to do. Markets are, at best, lurching blindly in all directions—offering 1 Witek et al., “Syncopation, Body-Movement and Pleasure in Groove Music,” PLOS April 2014.

553

Body Pleasure

Following Pleasure

32.

Pleasurable sensations are often packaged with health and spirituality messages (massage, yoga); this provides moral cover for pleasure, but also suggests that physical and “higher” pleasures often go together. Pursuing body pleasure may induce greater pursuit of more social or abstract pleasures. The “groove” of music is a bodily pleasure connected to the more social, abstract pleasure of group rhythmic entrainment.1 Music itself spans the distinction from bodily and personal, to abstract and/or spiritual (mathematics, theology). Fourth, there are unnecessary assumptions typically made about hedonism, such as that agents would maximize short-term selfish pleasure at the expense of total expected pleasure, such as by breaking promises (and thereby becoming a less desirable cooperation partner). But only a very stupid pleasure maximizer would get himself addicted to heroin, trading shortterm pleasure for long-term suffering. What are the best strategies for people who want to maximize pleasure in the long term? What is the best that human life can offer, at a very concrete and foundational level? These questions are little considered, in part because of Puritanical cultural norms, and in part because nobody thinks they are important.

“luxury” goods that are poorly connected to pleasure, and the same old sex toys, and an array of psychoactive substances limited by contemporary prohibition fashion. And there’s no reason to expect that effective pleasure exploits are easy to find. It may be that people have hedonic “set points” and can’t, in the long term, feel much better than their natural level through chemical or behavioral changes. Many body pleasures are themselves connected to maintaining homeostasis. For instance, exercise is experienced as pleasurable for only as long as the body can maintain levels of oxygen and lactate. The body adapts to changes imposed on it, which is why heroin addicts require more and more heroin in order to feel not quite as good. Nociception is the sense of pain; there is, to my knowledge, no equivalent for pleasure. Pleasure is more complicated than pain. It has been popular for a long time to confidently oversimplify pleasure into its supposed chemical substrates: endogenous opioids, endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin, endocannabinoids. However, producing reliable pleasure (as may be reluctantly desired in the case of anhedonia, for example) is not as simple as supplementing, or preventing the reuptake of, these chemicals. Unlike pain, pleasure typically requires an appetite for a particular behavior (eating, drinking, sex, exercise). There is always the potential for pain; the potential for pleasure is more limited. Pleasure may occur during the interval over which this appetite is satisfied, and satiety itself may be pleasurable for a while. Appetites and their correspondent pleasures vary in how intense they are, and in how long they take to reset. Importantly, they also vary in how long the

By bodily pleasure, I mean to highlight pleasures that subjectively feel as if they are embodied—the pleasures of eating, sleeping, exercise, and sex, for example. This is somewhat of an arbitrary boundary; many of what might be called intellectual pleasures are highly interconnected with bodily pleasure. The beauty of the night sky, the smell after rain in the desert, the pleasurable tired-soreness after exercise, massage—these are bodily pleasures, though they may be associated with intellectual pleasures: astronomical awareness, environmentalism, health, high status. Panteleimon Ekkekakis is one of the few scholars to study the relationship between exercise and pleasure (see next section). When scientists attempt to study pleasure, it can be difficult to distinguish extreme scientific distance from personal ignorance. Am I, perhaps, a major outlier, or has the author of this paragraph never experienced exercise? [E]specially among trained and physically fit individuals, a commonly used expression is that vigorous exercise “hurts so good.” Although this 555

Body Pleasure

Domains of Bodily Pleasure

32.

pleasure can last, both at a stretch, and in terms of hours per human week. Pleasurable states that are highly sustainable, potentially taking up a lot of hours that would otherwise be spent in a neutral or painful state, are especially valuable. Intense pleasures that evaporate quickly and take a long time to reset may not be so valuable. And the best pleasures would be ones that increase appetites for complementary pleasures.

may be seen as supporting the notion of independence, an alternative interpretation is that these apparently conflicting responses originate from different levels of the affective hierarchy. The “hurt” may reflect the inherent unpleasantness of the bodily sensations that accompany strenuous physical effort i.e., basic affect), whereas the “good” feeling may reflect a sense of pride i.e., an emotion) sparked by the thought that, by exercising, one is doing something good for his or her health, fitness, or physical appearance.2 Cooling down from a ten mile run last week, I noticed how pleasurable it was to climb stairs, and briefly wondered about the tallest buildings in town, and whether it would be possible to access their stairs. It didn’t feel good in the sense that I felt “proud” of exercising. The pleasure was purely physical; the soreness in my muscles felt as if it were being massaged out with each step. I am left to wonder if there are major categories of pleasurable experience that many people don’t know about. I will briefly outline what I see as the major sources of bodily pleasure. Many of these overlap; just as notes overlap synergistically in musical chords, pleasures can support each other and perhaps reveal better cognitive states. 1. Sex I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that, at this point, most people are adequately informed that sex and masturbation are pleasurable activities. It’s worth 2 “Pleasure and displeasure from the body: Perspectives from exercise,” Cognition and Emotion 2003.

Like sex, eating can only be pleasurable when there is an appetite. Smell and taste can be used to stimulate desire; saltiness, fat, sweetness, umami, or even drug content (as with caffeine) reinforce the act of eating as pleasurable. Desire is gradually replaced with satiety. This limits the amount of pleasure available from eating. Interventions that increase appetite—for instance, exercise—increase the amount of food that can be comfortably eaten. Appetite also increases the pleasure that can be derived from a given food; freezedried pasta, prepared on a peak after a long climb with a heavy pack, is more pleasurable than the most expensive meal at a restaurant. 3. Co-Consciousness Co-consciousness is the social experience of being conscious along with others. Part of what you’re paying for when you get coffee in a coffee house, in 3 Herbenick & Fortenberry, “Exercise-induced orgasm and pleasure among women,” Sexual and Relationship Therapy 2011.

557

Body Pleasure

2. Eating

32.

noting that, while sex and masturbation activities can’t take up a very high percentage of most people’s time, sexual fantasy and sexual display can potentially take up a great deal of time, and add frisson to other activities. Sexual display is part of why dance, costuming, and adornment are perceived as pleasurable, and sexual fantasy can relieve boredom during a period of cognitive surplus, such as waiting in traffic. Even weirder, sexual pleasure can result from patently non-sexual activities even without sexual fantasy.3

addition to caffeine and work space, is the feeling of being in the company of others. Co-consciousness seems to enhance many pleasures—humor, dancing, and all the pleasures mentioned above are typically intensified by co-consciousness. However, an alternative pleasure is that of privacy. Well-designed human spaces allow for a balance between togetherness and solitude, recognizing that different people are most comfortable at different levels of exposure. 4. Muscle Pleasure Pleasure felt in the muscles unifies pleasure from moderate exercise (see also the upcoming section “Exercise Pleasure”), post-exercise movement, stretching (as with yoga), massage, exfoliation, temperature extremes, and rest. Muscle pleasure from stretching, massage, and saunas is most intense and available after moderate exercise. Washing with a salt scrub feels pretty good, but if your muscles are sore from exercise, it feels much more intensely and acutely pleasurable. Walking around is okay, but if you’ve just exhausted yourself, it feels luxurious. Same goes for sitting on one’s ass, or lying in corpse pose. As hinted at in the sex section, there may be a synergy with sexual pleasure as well. Muscle pleasure is one of the strangest pleasures— as hinted at in the excerpt above—because it includes a sensation that’s easily recognizable as a kind of pain. It’s important to note that not all pain feels good in this state: stretching too far, or injuring soft tissue, still hurts; being thirsty is still unpleasant. But the “pain”

Temperature extremes are a common element of leisure and pleasure: hot tubs, saunas, steam rooms, cold plunges, rolling around in the snow, polar bear swims. These technologies either make maintaining homeostasis much easier (as with hot tubs) or challenge the temperature homeostatic process (as with cold plunges) such that the recovery process is enjoyable. I’m not sure why saunas and steam rooms are pleasurable. Sunshine, shade, and water, to the extent that they are pleasurable, are leisure components that help or challenge homeostatic processes.

559

Body Pleasure

5. Temperature

32.

and “soreness” of exhausted muscles, when those sore muscles are stimulated by massage, stretching, low-intensity activity, or exfoliating substances, is experienced as raw bodily pleasure. Massage unites co-consciousness and muscle pleasure. In order to be perceived as pleasurable, stimulation from another, as in Swedish or Thai massage, must be slow, predictable, and rhythmic; or, more rarely, fast, predictable, and rhythmic (as in percussive massage techniques). Massage as a cultural ritual uses techniques to make touch more pleasurable and less intrusively intimate: covering the body, eschewing eye contact, limiting speaking, ensuring that massage strokes are away from rather than toward the breasts and sex organs, etc. Non-human muscle stimulators (e.g., vibrating massage chairs) do not seem to provide as much pleasure as humans, but that may change in the future.

6. Proprioceptive Pleasure Proprioception is the feeling of where one’s body is at. By “proprioceptive pleasure,” I mean the exhilarating feeling of gliding while downhill skiing or ice skating; the pleasure of riding a motorcycle; the pleasure of Disneyland rides, of soaring or weightless falling; the pleasure of hang gliding; the pleasure of swimming underwater. Proprioceptive pleasure is why it’s fun to dance (other than sexual signaling, as mentioned above). Virtuosity, dexterity, and self-efficacy may intensify the experience, as with riding a motorcycle or skiing, but are not necessary, as with rides. 7. Drugs Direct chemical adjustment is not so much a domain of pleasure as a shortcut to pleasure. When drugs are administered regularly, the body typically adapts; physical habituation is an important criterion in the “addiction” model of human behavior. Drugs that are administered too rarely for habituation to take place (e.g., psychedelics, ketamine trials for depression) might be the best candidates for long-term better feeling. Using addictive drugs (such as alcohol, tobacco, and opiates) rarely, or only as needed to relieve pain, is probably a better strategy for maximizing lifetime pleasure. Pain is extremely subjective, however; it’s impossible to know whether another person is genuinely in pain. We are each probably the best custodians of our own bodies vis-a-vis palliative drugs. The one drug I think this doesn’t apply to is cannabis, for reasons outlined in the section “Exercise Pleasure.”

32.

8. Smell, Taste, Visual Beauty

Exercise Pleasure The pleasure domain that I see as undergirding all the other experiences of pleasure is exercise pleasure. Yet most people hate exercising, and associate it with pain. This is because our exercise morality is ridiculous and self-defeating. Exercise morality suggests, with little evidence, that exercise promotes physical and mental health. Based on this, exercise is imposed on people beyond what is pleasurable for them—“no pain, no gain.” Panteleimon Ekkekakis (mentioned above) is a hero simply for demonstrating that people enjoy exercise up to a certain level of intensity,4 which varies for each person. Most people who do low-intensity exercise feel better during the mild exertion. At the point when the body can no longer maintain levels of oxygen 4 Ekkekakis, “The pleasure and displeasure people feel when they exercise at different intensities: decennial update and progress towards a tripartite rationale for exercise intensity prescription,” Sports Medicine 2011.

561

Body Pleasure

I think that smell and taste mostly serve two functions: to motivate disgust, and to motivate desire. In and of themselves, they can rarely cause significant pleasure. Visual beauty is likely similar: motivating appetites, providing intellectual pleasure, but not providing much in the way of bodily pleasure on its own. Mess, I think, is visually uncomfortable; beauty, however, is probably only the absence of this kind of discomfort. Visual beauty is also easily worn out; we quickly get bored of looking at a beautiful view.

and (separately) lactate in the muscles, the exercise becomes so intense that basic affect (feeling good or feeling bad, the lowest-level evaluation of anything) plummets. Everybody feels terrible when they exercise too hard. Once people rest for a few minutes, they start feeling good again. However, this may not be enough such that people evaluate the entire experience as pleasurable. Unfortunately, most on-ramps to exercise are at an intensity too high for previously-sedentary people to find them pleasurable. If people go to a fitness class, or focus on running a particular distance at a particular speed, they’ll likely miss the pleasure zone entirely. Refocusing on exercising only for one’s own individual pleasure, as slowly as one prefers, and only at intensities that are pleasurable, is more likely to motivate repeat and habitual exercising. At that point, the enjoyment of exercise pleasure can build on itself, motivating longer and longer intervals of experiencing the pleasure. I summarize Ekkekakis et al.’s result as: “learn to exercise out of extreme selfish laziness.” Exercise pleasure is particularly valuable because, unlike other pleasures, it can be prolonged to take up a significant portion of waking life—up to hours per day, as would have presumably been the case in our environments of evolutionary adaptedness. It is also complementary with other potentially healthy pleasures, such as sunshine and eating food. If you believe that exercise is “moral” in some sense—good for mental health or weight loss, perhaps—you may be better off forgetting what you think you know, and pursuing exercise only for the way it makes your body feel. It’s an interesting hedonistic paradox.

Just as there are potentially pleasure exploits—ratchets, such as low-intensity exercise, that increase the amount and duration of pleasure—there are potentially traps that decrease pleasure even as people seek to increase it. For instance, consider softness, cushioning, and support. Softness (as with clothing, shoe soles, mattresses, pillows) is comfortable at first; it feels actively nice for a few minutes. However, in the long term, the sensation of softness degrades into no 563

Body Pleasure

Comfort Traps

32.

Probably the only important thing that I have ever discovered is that using marijuana before cardiovascular exercise (running) massively increases the pleasure of exercise, and decreases the time and distance to “runner’s high” to as little as ten minutes and a mile or so (at a slow pace), respectively. At this point, it’s appropriate to be suspicious of claims about endocannabinoids “causing” runner’s high or jump-starting exercise pleasure, but after my own n = 1 research over the past eight years, I think it’s worth letting other researchers attempt to replicate my results—especially as more states legalize marijuana for recreational use. For the same reason that there’s no strong evidence that exercise causes people to live longer or experience less depression, there’s no strong evidence that frequent marijuana use causes people to become stupider. Even if it did, to the extent that marijuana makes exercise pleasure more available—thereby making pleasure from muscle soreness, food appetite, temperature extremes, and sex more available—frequent use may be worth the trade-off for some users.

perception, and even potentially increases the risk of harm by masking sensation. The idea of “support” can be seen in the foundation garments of the 1950s, girdles designed to hold in stomachs and pudgy bits. Unfortunately, this style of garment decreases the need for the muscles of the abdomen to work to support the body (“core strength”). Similarly, shoes that “support” the arches decrease the need for the muscles of the foot to adapt to support the foot. I’m suspicious as to whether soft mattresses and rigid-yet-cushioned running shoes maximize comfort. On the other hand, compressive running clothes (tight tights and sports bras) do seem to improve the experience. They turn the body into a simpler system, such that the jiggly bits fit more smoothly in repetitive proprioception. Part of comfort is simply freedom from pain. The pursuit of comfort alone may reduce pain, but fail to maximize pleasure; from the outside, it’s extremely presumptuous to tell a person he or she would be better off with an objectively different body management strategy. I think that the best we can do is to take pleasure seriously, to share strategies for body pleasure management, and ideally, to increase the ease with which everyone can pursue a pleasurable and painfree life—not just a meaningful life.

LUXURIATING IN PRIVACY In my writing over the past few years,1 I have been somewhat of a cheerleader for group ritual and small group agency, lamenting the capacities and mental states lost in the transition away from a communal, close-knit society, toward an atomized, market-driven society. In reality, the thought of living in a communal, close-knit society, surrounded daily with family and friends, perhaps living in close quarters with many siblings or children, fills me with horror. Here I will allow my own heart its expression, and be a cheerleader for privacy. For something precious has been gained as well as lost in the transition to social modernity. Consider obesity. A stylized explanation for rising levels of obesity since the 1980s is this: people enjoy eating, and more people can afford to eat as much as they want to. In other words, wealth and plenty cause obesity. Analogized to privacy, perhaps the explanation of atomization is simply that people enjoy privacy, and can finally afford to have as much as they want. Privacy is an economic good, and people show a great willingness to trade other goods for more privacy. 1 See “Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture,” page 131; “What is Ritual?,” page 153; “The Essence of Peopling,” page 207; “A Bad Carver” page 519.

Privacy is wonderful in and of itself, and privacy keeps the peace. Consider a finding from the 70s, mentioned in Baumeister et al.’s “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” as an invitation to reflection and introspection. Does physical proximity cause friendship? [N]early every psychology textbook teaches that propinquity breeds attraction. This conclusion is based on the landmark study by Festinger, Schachter, and Back (1950) in which the formation of friendships in a married students’ dormitory was tracked over time. Contrary to elaborate hypotheses about similarity, role complementarity, values, and other factors, the strongest predictor of who became friends was physical propinquity: Participants who lived closest to each other were most likely to become friends. Yet a lesser known follow-up by Ebbesen, Kjos, and Konecni (1976) found that propinquity predicted the formation of disliking even more strongly than liking. Living near one another increased the likelihood that two people would become enemies even more strongly than it predicted the likelihood that they would become friends. Propinquity thus does not cause liking. More probably, it simply amplifies the effect of other variables and events. Because bad events are stronger than good ones, an identical increase in propinquity produces more enemies than friends.2 2 Baumeister, et al., Review of General Psychology 2001.

One thing that people are said to do with privacy is to luxuriate in it. What are the determinants of this positive experience of privacy, of privacy experienced as a thing in itself, rather than through violation? First, aloneness. The exclusion of most or all other people is core to the experience of privacy: to be alone in a room (even the bathroom), or perhaps alone with one’s spouse, or even with friends or family or the other people at a twelve-step meeting. The experience of “luxuriating” in privacy seems most connected to being alone in a room. Second, the room: some kind of permeable enclosure protects one from intrusion—permeable, so that 567

Luxuriating in Privacy

The Positive Experience of Privacy

33.

It makes sense that shoving people together mostly makes them hate each other. Privacy allows us to be free from being annoyed by and intruded on by others. But privacy is a cooperative effort, composed of billions of people individually choosing to mostly leave each other alone. Each one of us is one nosy sociopath away from some level of disgrace, and yet such violation of privacy remains rare. Privacy is a component of well-being, a form of wealth, a luxury even, and the gains from supplying more privacy to a larger number of people must be weighed alongside alleged losses of social capital from atomization. What looks like a loneliness epidemic to a certain kind of observer may look like a golden age of privacy to another. Just as there are mental states that are only possible in crowds or with others, there are mental states that are only possible in privacy.

one is private, not trapped or claustrophobic. Different enclosures offer different levels of privacy: rooms in houses, rooms in hotels, tents, treehouses, cubicles, cars, gazebos. Some enclosures are more conducive to “luxuriating in privacy” than others. Permeability can enhance, rather than detract from, privacy: a window on the outside world reassures one that nobody is there, whereas a windowless wall does not. Ideal privacy is asymmetric surveillance: being able to see outside, but not being visible oneself. Third, there is not just one layer of enclosure, but multiple layers: picture a room within a house, within a lot of “empty” distance with no people in it, surrounded by trees or a bramble of hedges, surrounded by a residential neighborhood. The same room would not be so private if excised from the house and transported to a shopping center. Layers allow greater permeability of enclosures. A window overlooking a private back yard provides a reassuring view and does not impede privacy, but a window looking right into one’s neighbor’s kitchen may. Fourth, the outermost layer of enclosure, an invisible layer, is civilization. Compare the experience of spending an evening alone in a tent in the wilderness to the experience of spending an evening alone in a house in a residential neighborhood. Which is more private? The first experience is a cold and piercing kind of privacy, privacy underlined by adrenaline. Who’s there? What was that noise? The latter affords a warmer and more luxurious privacy, ensconced in a protective field of normalcy, an imaginary field created through the cooperative efforts of everyone nearby.

Luxuriating in Privacy

569

33.

Sometimes civilization is the only “enclosure” necessary to create the experience of privacy. In the order of civil disattention, in which strangers in public politely ignore each other while giving cues that they are harmlessly aware of each other, one can go almost anywhere swaddled in a high degree of personal privacy and anonymity. Fifth, the light is low. Luxuriating in privacy is best conducted in enough light to see (unless one is sleeping), but not in bright fluorescent light or direct sunlight. Generalizing this, privacy is not only freedom from surveillance, but from sensory cues of possible surveillance or intrusion: bright light, loud or sudden noises, vibration, smell. To be in private is to be free from cognitive as well as physical intrusions from others. Headphones and sunglasses act as sensory blockers to help produce the experience of privacy in public. Now consider the Internet. It operates as a window that seems to allow you to see out all over the world, without others being able to see you. Of course, the mirror is not really one-way, nor would it be as satisfying if it were: the ability to display identities and get attention is part of the allure. Satisfying Internet selves are often private, in the sense that, even if not anonymous or pseudonymous, they are distanced or walled-off from one’s socially responsible identity. Internet identities are perhaps examples of the layers of permeable enclosures described above. Besides privacy, another thing people are said to luxuriate in is hot water—a bath, a shower, a hot spring. Part of this is the pleasure of not having to expend energy maintaining temperature homeostasis.

The pleasure of privacy is similar: freedom from having to expend cognitive energy in modeling others and conforming one’s behavior to the standards of public self-presentation, in order to maintain status homeostasis. Privacy is a form of rest. An important aspect of privacy is that it is not absolute, but a matter of degree. Humans have many social selves to express. There are professional selves, one for interacting with clients or customers, one for interacting with colleagues, another for interacting with management. One can “be oneself ” in private with friends, shedding the constraints of professionalism, protected from the attentions of hostile busybodies. And one can “be oneself ” all alone. There is no single bright line between public and private, and efforts to construct one (as with a “real name” policy) deny human nature.3

Privacy and Past Selves Times change. One of the cases mentioned by Warren and Brandeis in their influential paper “The Right to Privacy”4 concerned an actress who was playing a role in a theater production that “required her to appear in tights,” and a devious paparazzo, by use of a flashlight, managed to photograph her thus. She was able to enjoin the publication of the photos. In our own time, tights have become normal exercise and leisure apparel commonly worn in public, and the vigorously contested privacy case of our time involved the 3 See “The Essence of Peopling,” page 207, and “Two Patterns,” page 611. 4 Harvard Law Review, 1890.

571

Luxuriating in Privacy

5 Gawker Media LLC v. Bollea (Fla. 2d DCA 2014).

33.

unwanted publication of a hardcore sex tape.5 At any moment, the self is using social and environmental cues of appropriateness to decide what to do and what to say. Proper behavior in 1890 was different from proper behavior now, because it arose from different informational and societal contexts. One’s behavior at 15 is different from behavior at 35, as it arises from different emotional and developmental contexts. Every action and utterance of a past self was a performance under a particular set of constraints, a particular emotional mood, a particular worldview, a particular set of knowledge, a particular fashion milieu. When past selves’ performances are recorded, as in writing, photographs, or video, the performance becomes frozen in time. Meanwhile, the world changes around it. Fashion and sensibilities change, old knowledge is discarded, cool and uncool shift. A past self ’s recorded performance can thus grow to be very much at odds with present fashion and standards. The past self is improper and uncool, or at the very least different from the present self, and threatens the present self ’s social status by association. Viewed in a vacuum, from the perspective of reputation, it seems like it would be a good strategy to be stable and predictable as a cooperation partner, to establish a highly predictable persona. Evidence of being different in the past not only pokes holes in the persona, but the change itself casts doubt on the sincerity (and durability) of the present self. So perhaps we should self-modify to change less, and we should prefer cooperation partners who have remained stable

and predictable. However, the rapidly-changing self may be better suited to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, and being able to change rapidly is a strong response to increasing complexity. A rapidly-changing self in a rapidly-changing environment will accumulate increasing amounts of recorded performances that are at odds with the present self—especially since part of the changing environment is that more performances are recorded. These can be an albatross around one’s neck, a messy closet that one can never clean out. Privacy—the freedom from making performances, recorded or otherwise—allows one rest from this gradual accumulation of temporal baggage. “Information wants to be free” used to be a cheerful rallying cry against censorship, but now sounds like a curse. As culture changes, new disputes emerge, and sides are taken; the past must be reinterpreted according to the new organizing principles and sensitivities, or written off as mess and hidden. But even if obscure, the mess of the past is there in that closet, that closet that perhaps anyone can access, waiting to be sifted through. Long-forgotten recorded performances of past selves might emerge suddenly to mock the present self. In privacy there is relief from such worries.

Private vs. Shameful Everybody knows that everybody poops. Still, you’re not supposed to poop in front of people. The domain of defecation is tacitly edited out of our interactions with other people: for most social purposes, we are expected to pretend that we neither produce nor

573

Luxuriating in Privacy

6 Roberts, “How Economics Shaped Human Nature: A Theory of Evolution,” Mind and Cognition 2011.

33.

dispose of bodily wastes, and to keep any evidence of such private. Polite social relations exclude parts of reality by tacit agreement; scatological humor is a reminder of common knowledge that is typically screened off by social agreement. Sex and masturbation are similar. But not all that is private is shameful, and not all that is shameful is private. Sleep, for instance, is normally performed in privacy, but it is not particularly shameful or embarrassing. Crying is embarrassing, but seems especially mediated by the presence of others. Privacy means that your behavior is not constrained by other people’s ideas of what you should be doing or saying. It’s tempting to imagine that behind closed doors, everyone is engaged in all kinds of illicit and licentious behavior. However, I suspect that most of what is performed while luxuriating in privacy is more procrastination and laziness than debauchery. In private, people are free to do what they want, and what they want, according to Seth Roberts, is to do the same thing they always do, over and over.6 In private, people watch television, read low-status books, play video games, tweet. Do you want to judge them for it, or say that these things are not the pinnacle of human achievement? Too bad—they’re doing them in private, where your disapproval can’t reach. Privacy allows for the possibility of deep absorption, relaxing the cognitive demands of modeling others and regulating one’s behavior and appearance. Privacy allows executive function to take a break. The more public the persona, the less challenging,

strange, and interesting the ideas presented by it, the more self-conscious and halting its language, and the more excluded it is from intimacy and genuine communion. The most difficult audience to speak to is the public as a whole; this is reflected in the stereotyped and somewhat impoverished communications of politicians and advertisers.

Privacy Gains In the early days of television, televisions were expensive, and a family would usually only have one. Decades later, as electronics became cheaper to produce, it became normal to have a television in every bedroom. Instead of watching television together, people chose to watch in private as soon as they were able to. This is usually presented as a sad fact of modernity, but perhaps we should view it as anything but sad: more people were able to express their preferences. As I wrote in “A Bad Carver,”7 social interaction has increasingly become “unbundled” from other things. This may not be a coincidence: it may be that people have specifically desired more privacy, and the great unbundling took place along that axis especially, in response to demand. Modern people have more room, more autonomy, more time alone, and fewer social constraints than their ancestors had a hundred years ago. To scoff at this luxury, to call it “alienation,” is to ignore that it is the choices of those who are allegedly alienated that create this privacy-friendly social order. 7 page 519.

DEEP LAZINESS Imagine a person who is very lazy at work, yet whose customers are (along with everyone else concerned) quite satisfied. It could be a slow-talking rural shop proprietor from an old movie, or some kind of Taoist fisherman—perhaps a bit of a buffoon, but definitely deeply content. In order to be this way, he must be reasonably organized: stock must be ordered, and tackle squared away, in order to afford worry-free, deep-breathing laziness. Consider this imaginary person as a kind of ideal or archetype. Now consider that the universe might have this personality. There is intense laziness apparent in the natural world (which one might come to understand simply by watching household pets). Christopher Alexander (in The Nature of Order, Volume II) notes many disparate examples of natural “laziness” that hint at an underlying principle (in history of science, the “principle of least action”): a soap bubble minimizing surface area, Ohm’s law,1 the shape of a river’s meander. “Many systems do evolve in the direction that minimizes their potential energy,” he says. “The deeper problem is that we are then faced with the question, Why should the potential energy be minimized?” 1 V = IR, where current (I) is proportional to voltage (V) and inversely proportional to resistance (R).

The Theory of Structure-Preserving Transformations Underneath the universe’s apparent laziness is a deeper laziness: a manner of generation that preserves existing structure. A “structure-preserving transformation” does not impose arbitrary (conscious, legible) order on the system, but takes its cue from the existing structure, and elaborates and strengthens it. One of Christopher Alexander’s terms for this is “the unfolding of wholeness”—but here a picture will do better than words. Above, the diamond shape forms the basis for subsequent transformations. In the two left columns, the diamonds are subjected to transformations that strengthen and emphasize their shape, then to transformations that build off of that new whole, preserving and elaborating the new structure in a lazy but rather effective way. In the column on the right, the diamond is subjected to structure-destroying

577

Deep Laziness

2 Alexander, The Nature of Order vol II.

34.

transformations that impose new, incompatible order and detract from, rather than strengthen, the original structure. The structure-destroying transformations are recognizable as mess: competing orders don’t allow for a coherent, harmonious whole. They are not peaceful to look at, and further attempts at structure-preserving elaboration will only “preserve” an ugly, messy structure. On the other hand, simple as they are, the structure-preserving transformations have a bit of quiet ease. You can imagine going on like that, adding dots here and lines there, just as needed, until it is quite elaborate. As long as each transformation preserves the underlying structure, it will retain its wholeness and beauty. They are not based on any pre-existing image; rather, they are “easy, natural steps which arise from the context.”2 Even decay can be structure-preserving, when the decaying structure was produced by this process: decay reveals underlying levels of organization that are attractively harmonious, because they formed the basis for the elaboration of the whole (e.g. bones, shipwrecks). What is this underlying structure? It is the “field of centers,” made up of “centers,” a Christopher Alexander term I have written about extensively, and about which my thinking changes each time I write about it (hopefully becoming more correct). A center is an aesthetic concept that is somewhere between geometric, phenomenological, and mystical. It is defined recursively—a center is made up of other centers, and in turn makes up other centers (hence the “field of centers” as the primitive). Centers are the basic

building blocks of beauty, except that they’re rarely shaped like blocks. If you look at any beautiful thing, a building or a tree or a hand tool, it will possess strong centers. In the diagram above, the diamond is a center, and each embellishment (and the spaces between, when they form good shapes) is a center. Each new whole, after each structure-preserving transformation, is a center. Centers are “things”—shapes, plants, doorways, furniture, faces, eyes, motifs, bounded spaces, boundaries, clouds. The centers form the seeds for the next structure-preserving transformation. A step-by-step recipe for beauty: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Start with existing centers or create strong ones that harmonize with the environment. Elaborate on this structure in a way that preserves and strengthens it. Elaborate on this NEW structure, which now includes the most recent elaboration. Repeat until done. Repair as above, or allow to decay

This is the laziest way to do things, so that is how the universe does it. Clouds are beautiful and never a mess because they are products of structure-preserving processes. However, humans are capable of performing both structure-preserving and structure-destroying processes. Processes governing the built environment have become more structure-destroying over the past century. These processes have no room for iterated elaboration according to emerging structure, and certainly no room for doing so according to how each elaboration feels. That is too bad, but there’s not much an individual

I recently read a study that made the following claim: “As income rises, people’s time use does not appear to shift toward activities that are associated with improved affect.”3 I’m a bit suspicious of this claim, as the authors don’t seem to count exercise as affect-improving, but there’s clearly truth in it: people seem to be surprisingly bad at using their freedom to feel good, and especially at using it to feel deeply good. Do we need instructions on how to feel good? I think it’s worse than that—we barely know what feeling is, or how to feel, and if we managed to know, it would be impossible to communicate anyway. And there’s so much mess. Certain activities seem wholly incompatible with deep laziness, and they are often unavoidable. It’s possible to clean the bathroom lazily and with an open heart, but it’s harder to imagine going to the DMV, doing taxes, or navigating medical bureaucracy in such a joyous and mellow mindset. Perhaps it is not that we’re too stupid to please ourselves, but rather that we are effectively forbidden from doing so by the demands placed on us. With those limitations in mind, consider what 3 Kahneman et al. “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion,” Science 2006.

579

Deep Laziness

Effective Laziness

34.

can do about it, unless you’re somehow building your house with your own hands this week. However, I think some version of this generative, elaborating process is at the basis of what we do in general: our repertoire of behaviors, the stuff we spend our time doing.

it means to have a behavior in your repertoire. Theoretically, you could do any possible activity at almost any time. In reality, most people tend to do the same things over and over, at about the same times, under the same circumstances, over and over. The behaviors actually performed by a particular individual, especially the ones that take up most time, are a small subset of possible behaviors. What do people do when they are bored? It seems like people typically have about three to five things they do. A person who had ten things they often did when bored would strike me as an adventurous outlier. Somehow, from the ocean of possible behaviors, each human picks mostly a few things to do. Presumably, people choose these behaviors from among the behaviors they are exposed to, finding that they suit their needs well enough at the present time. The behaviors may be triggered by boredom or habit, or arise from appetite (for sleep, food, sex, coffee, quiet, exercise, attention, novelty, etc.). And the behaviors contribute to enhancing some appetites (as exercise enhances appetite for food) and satiating them, in sequence. Again, for each appetite, people usually have only a small number of typical ways of satiating them. I like the image of a lab rate cage, furnished with levers—each lever is a behavior in the repertoire. Some cages only seem to have one lever, and it’s for heroin or something. Other cages have more levers—play video game, send tweet, talk to other rat, cook dinner. As complex as life seems, a typical human’s behavioral repertoire is made up of a small number of behaviors. These few behaviors make up life; they

Deep Laziness

581

34.

determine feeling and meaning, moment to moment, day to day. While these few behaviors are intricately connected with each other, resisting legible top-down plans, the system is small enough that it’s tractable. If you ever meet me in person and want to put me at ease, ask me about running or knitting. These are two of my behaviors, my behavioral centers, and one indication of that is how much I like talking about them specifically. I do feel that there is something special about them, and that they connect to my nature on a fundamental level. In my heart, I think everyone should do mountain running and knitting, because they are the best things. However, all my detailed explanations of my running ritual have been missing the hedonic point. One person’s ritual is all but useless to another, especially a really good ritual. This is because the good ones are repeatedly adapted and elaborated in the direction of providing better fit for the particular person—structure-preserving transformations, where the only test of whether the transformation is structure-preserving is subjective feeling. At the most profound level, the feeling itself is the most important part of the structure to preserve. It is the general method for discovering and elaborating behaviors, and not running tips, that is the important thing. Here is the generative method of Christopher Alexander, applied to the way one spends one’s time, in pursuit of deep laziness:

1. Find the centers. In the context of behaviors, “centers” might be activities, virtues, places, people, ambiances, longings, imaginings, memories, times of day, flavors. A well-developed center will be easy to see; it will produce positive emotion, a feeling of quiet ease, of non-separateness from the world. It will carry many layers of elaboration and generation. It may be completely worked into the fabric of life, touching and intertwining with other centers. But even if strong centers have not developed, there will still be a foundation for elaboration. A whiff of emotion, a whim, a half-joking suggestion, can be the basis for doing a new behavior or elaborating an old one. In visual art and the built environment, a mistake in the elaboration of a center means having to erase it, or risking permanent damage. With behavior, the cost of mistakes is lower, as the trace is more fleeting. New behaviors can be discarded if they don’t fit. You may find that you are in possession of an aesthetic, which guides change by provisionally excluding most behaviors and provisionally including others on intuitive grounds. An aesthetic can help you sort through possible centers. Behavioral “centers” are the things that feel most like reflections of your own self, that seem to connect effortlessly to the underlying wholeness in your life. The most important ones tend to have old roots. If there is too much mess around you to see any structure, you can at least observe the pattern of your own soul, which is axiomatically not a mess, and try to find behaviors in the world that have the same nature.

34.

2. Elaborate the centers

583

Deep Laziness

No one has a routine that works perfectly, unchanged, forever, every season of the year. (If they did, I doubt they’d be reading this.) On the contrary, behaviors and rituals must change and self-repair as the individual and circumstances change. They also become more beautiful, meaningful, full of life, whole, as they undergo these structure-preserving transitions: increasingly stripped of what is superfluous, intensified, made more comfortable, better fitted into the person’s life as a whole. A brief worked example: the time I like to run best is the hour before dawn. During coldest part of winter, it’s too cold at that time to go running (pain from cold is the source of misfit). On the other hand, going without running is another kind of pain. My attempted elaborations included making warmer running clothes (effective at cold but not freezing temperatures), going running in the afternoon (too much traffic, and the gray winter city seems dingy in the winter light), and going to the gym to run on a treadmill (that ended up working). Running on a treadmill isn’t very pleasant, but that was the one that worked during the depths of winter, somehow preserving the essential desirability of the summer dawn run. I further elaborated it with yoga and swinging a weight ball around, and as silly and frankly low-status as that seemed to me in the beginning, it was a very pleasurable elaboration. Now that it’s warm enough to run at dawn again, the treadmill is obsolesced for the season, but I still do the other stuff for the fun of it. Notice the structure, notice the misfit (or just the

lack of elaboration), adapt the structure in a way that strengthens it. “Each smaller thing has been given its shape after, and in relation to, the larger thing that was established first,” Alexander says. “It is that which creates the harmonious feeling, since it is that which makes each part adapted and comfortable.” 3. Repair or allow to decay Some centers will be receding while others increase in intensity. Even those who crave strict, unchanging routines must adapt their routines to life changes; the deeply lazy are constantly adjusting. Sometimes a behavioral center slips away gradually; sometimes it disappears suddenly. The remaining structure must be adapted, through gradual elaboration, to repair the whole. This process—the elaboration of personal behavioral centers—is the ongoing work of a lazy life. In the domain of architectural forms, Christopher Alexander distinguishes “generated” forms (those created by repeated elaboration, that is, by structure-preserving transformations) from “fabricated” forms (those created in a top-down manner from a pre-existing image, without any kind of interactive unfolding). In terms of the behavioral repertoire, equivalents might be “elaborated time” (lazy time, experienced as an unfolding and elaboration of behavioral centers) and “scheduled time” (behaviors legibilized and organized top-down to satisfy a pre-existing image of proper behavior, or the related dread that one has failed at this brutal form of organization). Elaborated time is reached in easy steps, a

Deep Laziness

585

34.

natural progression arising from each particular context. Its essence is doing the most natural, lazy thing that accords with the context of the whole person and all of the accompanying circumstances.

NOTES ON DOING THINGS I have a stupid hippie mantra that my brain says to itself when I’m running and I notice that I’m secondor third-guessing myself over some little decision, like which route to take or how far to go: Body is driving. When my brain says this to itself, it’s using a dualistic metaphor similar to the one Jonathan Haidt uses in his book The Happiness Hypothesis. Briefly, there are two selves, one conscious, introspective, logical, and verbal; the other subconscious, sensory, emotional, and largely non-verbal (therefore relatively opaque to introspection by the verbal self). The elephant1 is apparently responsible for a great deal of behavior. One upshot of this model is that you can’t just do things: you have to somehow get the elephant to do them. The popular tradition of productivity and getting things done is built around techniques for imposing the will of the rider on the elephant. However, I am here interested in another way of looking at the duality, which I think my embarrassing, intrusive running mantra explains concisely: how to give the elephant the ability to do what it wants, sometimes even taking a rest and abdicating on behalf of 1 Haidt refers to the unconscious self as the elephant, and the rational conscious self as rider. See also Hanson & Simler The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, 2018.

35.

the elephant.

The Owner and the Dog

1. 2.

3.

The owner takes a third-person perspective on the self; the dog takes a direct, experiencing, first-person perspective. The owner is capable of a long time horizon (months, years, perhaps millennia); the dog has a relatively narrow time horizon (seconds, minutes, perhaps days). The owner is verbal, expressing itself in language; the dog is largely non-verbal, commu587

Notes On Doing Things

I don’t know much about elephants, but consider how, in reality, we get dogs to work. One way is breeding them such that they naturally take to (and seemingly enjoy) the task that they are expected to do—herding, hunting assistance, sled-pulling, snuggling. Productively, this implies that in order to make our own elephants/dogs happy, we should figure out what they were “bred” (through natural selection) to do and enjoy, and figure out how to let them do that. Beyond this, though, the process of dog training, as I understand it, comes down to exposing the dogs to opportunities to perform desired behaviors, and then rewarding them when the desired behavior is neared or accomplished. Wild canids find their own opportunities to learn fun and useful behaviors; captive dogs, like human bodies, rely on their owners to expose them to experiences. My conceptions of “owner” and “dog” as subselves is distinct from Haidt’s (though I think his model is useful for other purposes). To clarify my model:

4. 5. 6.

7.

nicating with the owner through behavior and emotion. The owner makes plans for the future; the dog experiences life in the moment. The owner is into “getting things done” while the dog is into “doing things.” The owner can increase the behavioral repertoire through innovation and exposure; the dog selects and performs behaviors from the behavioral repertoire. The owner makes obligations; the dog treats obligations as obstructions.

Here I distinguish “getting things done” from “doing things.” The phrase “getting things done,” often used in discussions of productivity, emphasizes the end result of a behavior. Implied is the stressful state of having a lot of responsibilities that one hasn’t gotten around to performing. “Getting things done”2 connotes two things: first, getting stuff done can open up space in which to be calm and relaxed (a very valuable function). Second, “getting things done” means one can check off some kind of box, having done something, often for reasons of maintaining or increasing social status (responding to emails, studying for tests, writing a book, working out in order to have an attractive body). “Doing things,” on the other hand, frames time differently, focusing on the experience of doing things as its own end. The dog in my metaphor is distinguished by not being particularly motivated by the distant social status plans of the owner. (The dog-self may do things that end up being very embarrassing, socially, 2 cf. Perry’s handle @sarahdoingthing.

2.

The dog treats the obligation as damage and routes around it, that is, largely ignores obligations to the degree possible (procrastination); The dog takes the obligation as a challenge, allowing it to be a framework for beautiful structure to emerge. This is the sense of “obstruction” used in The Five Obstructions.3

Even if the happiness of the dog is paramount, rather than the owner getting things done, obligations can still be valuable; the experience of (2) above is highly desirable in and of itself, regardless of the final “product.” Selecting proper obligations is something the dog-self can’t do for itself, except over time and with the help of the owner-self. And it is much more difficult, not to mention unpleasant, to simply come up with obligations and attempt to force them on the dog-self from the “top” down. The owner-self may decide to go on a diet, but the dog-self is the one who has to endure periods of hunger, desire, and stress from relative calorie deprivation. If “getting things done” is the core value of productivity, then “doing things” might be the core value of deep laziness. I will say more later on why (deep) 3 Lars von Trier & Jørgen Leth, 2003.

589

Notes On Doing Things

1.

35.

for the owner-self.) My distinction is primarily one of time: the dog is the moment-to-moment experiencer with moment-to-moment agency (as monitored by the owner), and the owner is the one with long-term projects. The owner makes obligations, scheduling tasks and deadlines and appointments, and the dog takes these obligations as obstructions in two ways:

laziness is distinct from minimizing metabolic costs, but it seems strange on the surface that “doing things” could be lazy. I live in the same town that I went to high school in, and when I go running before dawn, I sometimes see children waiting for the school bus. My high school self would not believe that I’d be doing anything before dawn except sleeping, if I had the choice. But my present self, a nearly completely lazy person with near-total freedom, chooses to head out on ten-mile runs an hour before dawn even when it’s barely above freezing. Here is why this is actually lazy: 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

It’s a structure-preserving transformation of my body in time (milliseconds to years) The metabolic cost incurred helps the body perform structure-preserving transformations on itself, building bones and muscle and dexterity It’s experienced as pleasurable both in anticipation, experience, and memory It’s probably an ancestral thing to do who knows It increases the pleasure of merely sitting around for hours afterwards In the case of each step, when running is lazy, taking the next step feels like less work than stopping or walking

Consider the children I run past. Even though they are not expending any energy waiting for the bus, they are nonetheless in a less lazy state than I, just as they are less free. Their dog-selves have virtually no say over what they do and where they are. Their location and behavior (even their sleep) must conform

I describe the dog-self as largely non-verbal, lacking the capacity to produce language. It must rely on behavior and emotion to communicate with its owner. Come up with a plan in your head. That’s your owner-self. Now notice how you feel about the plan. That’s the dog-self reacting to it. (Its reactions may be different depending on how soon the contemplated thing to be done is.) Consider posting a tweet. That’s the owner-self. Now notice how you feel about it. Perhaps you come up with a revised version; does that feel better? This is not to say that all speech is planned; often, it seems as if the dog-self takes control and forces the owner-self to translate, such as moments of heated emotion. The resulting speech is often nonsensical or “out of character.” If the dog-self is indeed not capable of telling us its needs (like an actual dog), we might expect a certain 4 page 575.

591

Notes On Doing Things

Notes From Disneyland

35.

to a top-down program of behavior created by others, mediated only somewhat by their own owner-selves, who must worry about homework and tests and status. Laziness is not minimizing energy expenditure, though that can be part of it. Rather, deep laziness is about minimizing the effort of the owner-self to conform the dog-self to some consciously-chosen image. In the Christopher Alexander terms I employed in “Deep Laziness,”4 in other words, it minimizes structure-destroying transformations of the dog-self, and allows the dog-self and owner-self to collaborate in elaborating the self in structure-preserving ways.

poverty in the language for personal experience, for “what it is like” to be the experiencing dog-self. We might expect the dog-self ’s interests to be relatively neglected in verbal culture, because its only voice is reactive emotion. I think the moment-to-moment experiencing self should be the main, if not the only, focus of ethics and ultimate value. This, I think, is the intuition underlying measures such as quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and utils (units of utility). However, I don’t think we have come very far in linking up our desire to do good with the moment-to-moment experiencers who endure our efforts. Dog selves are subtle communicators, but not in language. It can take a long time and a lot of failed attempts in order to figure out what they want or enjoy. When I was coming out of the worst major depressive episode of my life, maybe a dozen years ago, I found that I didn’t seem to enjoy anything. I seemed to lose my relationship with the future, in that my dog-self didn’t react with anticipation to any plans I formed. I tried to prod the dog-self for anything it might still like or enjoy, and came up with a shockingly basic answer: Disneyland. I responded to this rather literally, actually getting a season ticket to Disneyland (I lived nearby) and going there frequently with friends. And I did enjoy it. It was a relief to have something to do, to have one single behavior to look forward to and enjoy. Disneyland is still special to me on the object level (see “Frontierland”5). Now, many years and a lot of behavioral repertoire management later, it has become apparent to me what 5 page 319.

Notes On Doing Things

593

35.

the dog-self was after, though it was not able to communicate this in words. When I picture myself at Disneyland, I don’t picture myself on any ride, though my favorite moments of Disneyland are on particular rides. What I picture is the in-between spaces, experienced as if in motion, walking, with freedom to choose experiences (rides, snacks) as I choose. What Disneyland creates is a zone of hyper-agency, where many behaviors are available, all enjoyable, all fun. Disneyland is a self-contained behavioral repertoire that is pre-selected to be enjoyable, protected by civilization and especially the Order of Civil Disattention (moderated by cheerful relaxation of no-talking norms, but with no-drama norms in place for the adults), and united by mostly-good aesthetics (especially the older rides, which themselves mostly hearken back to even older times with better aesthetics), upbeat narratives, a spirit of play, and affect-lifting music. Disneyland is a sort of training wheels for the experiencing self, an easy mode for moment-to-moment agency. One can be swept up in activity and still very lazy. I am able to see this now, because I can see the structure of Disneyland in my own life and behavioral repertoire. To begin with, my main life center, mountain runs, are clearly rides, featuring a flying sensation, lots of scents and sights, the narrative drama of quickly changing biomes, and a cartographic nature. I used to look at the two highest nearby mountains with fearful desire, like looking at the Matterhorn or Splash Mountain or Big Thunder Mountain at Disneyland, but then I climbed them, and now I regard them with affection and a sense of ownership, like a ride conquered. But it is more than that: mountain runs make

up a zone within a greater behavioral repertoire, such that there is almost always a thing to do. Most of my hobbies seem to reflect this structure. I look at maps and plan and anticipate runs with the same pleasure as my 11-year-old self did looking at a map of Disneyland for the first time. I have many knitting projects in various stages of planning and execution—rides within the larger ride of knitting. I look forward to yoga, to cooking and eating, to occasional meetings with friends. The availability of pleasurable “rides” (experiences) allows a positive relationship to the future to exist, through anticipation and planning, and with the past, through long-term progress and expertise. Above, I mentioned that laziness is not simply minimizing metabolic cost. Disneyland’s nature is that not all options are available at once at the same place and time. One must walk to each zone, or take the train, or take some other mode of transportation, incurring a metabolic and time cost and narrowing down the options in the same motion as making them possible. This, it seems, makes the choice of thing more meaningful. To be someplace on a map of possibilities is nicer than to be presented with everything at once. Optimal laziness often means doing difficult things. I don’t know if your dog-self ’s dream landscape looks anything like Disneyland—I’d be surprised if it did. But I think they mostly take the form of zones of hyper-agency, in which a diverse and desirable set of behaviors is available which are, in combination, sustaining and satisfying. (Note that I don’t think literal Disneyland satisfies this; you wouldn’t want to spend all day, every day, in Disneyland for long.) In order to

Earlier, I mentioned that the owner-self takes on obligations, and the dog-self treats them as obstructions (either in a destructive or constructive sense). The dog-self, residing as it does in the present moment and without words, cannot take on obligations. It relies on the owner-self for providing the obligations that provide structure for its behaviors and moments. In choosing obligations, such as work, relationships, community membership, contracts, religious vows, or 595

Notes On Doing Things

The Role of Obligation

35.

move toward this state, it is necessary to increase the behavioral repertoire. Increasing the behavioral repertoire is a cooperative process between the dog-self and owner-self. The dog-self can’t express ideas for things to do in words, but it can tag memories with special feelings of positive affect, or light future fantasies with an emotion of possibility. The dog doesn’t know it wants to go to the park unless it’s been to the park and enjoyed it (especially several times). Similarly, the dog-self must be introduced to new behaviors repeatedly, and find the behaviors to be worthwhile, in order for the behavior to truly enter the repertoire—to become a true option, or even a habit. This model predicts that signing up for a gym membership (owner self) won’t cause people to form gym habits, but going to the gym a few times and trying things until one finds some enjoyable routine or activity (dog self in cooperation with owner self) will cause them to form exercise habits—and that enjoyment and repetition will specifically predict future behavior.

deadlines, the wise owner is mindful of the dog. Good obligations can be the structuring obstructions of a beautiful life, from which structure-preserving transformations are possible. Bad obligations, or a bad lack of obligations, mean stress and misery for dog and owner.

APPENDIX

SYSTEMS OF THE WORLD Ed. Note: Here Perry lays out an alternate ordering and conceptual structure for her work. Page numbers are in grey italics. Martial artist and folk hero Bruce Lee founded the martial art known as jeet kune do, “the style of no style.” Lee said of his style, “True observation begins when one sheds set patterns, and true freedom of expression occurs when one is beyond systems… I hope to free my comrades from bondage to styles, patterns, and doctrines.” Compare my friend David Chapman on the post-systematic system of thinking sometimes (probably misleadingly) called postrationalism: “The systematic mode can, should, must be superseded— not by the communal mode, but by something that combines benefits of both.”1 The systems and patterns that can oppress us are also extremely useful. Growing beyond them does not mean throwing them out. Chapman describes skillful use of systems as piloting nimble watercraft on a sea of meaning. Bruce Lee begins his article with reference to a Zen koan: 1 David Chapman, Meaningness.

“Communal

vs.

Systematic

Politics,”

A learned man once went to a Zen teacher to inquire about Zen. As the Zen teacher explained, the learned man would frequently interrupt him with remarks like, “Oh, yes, we have that too…” and so on. Finally, the Zen teacher stopped talking and began to serve tea to the learned man. He poured the cup full and then kept pouring until the cup overflowed. “Enough!” the learned man once more interrupted. “No more can go into the cup!” “Indeed, I see,” answered the Zen teacher. “If you do not first empty the cup, how can you taste my cup of tea?” A naive reader might expect that Lee would only accept novice students, already-empty cups, free from the shackles of systems. But in fact he generally selected experts in some style of martial arts as his students. This is not a contradiction. Both Lee and the subject of the koan were speaking to those who already have a full cup. People who have not yet absorbed systems are not shackled by them, and have no need of learning ways of navigating them without being hindered. Those who have not yet spent years learning and practicing within systems are not capable of moving beyond them, to a perspective where systems can be held lightly as tools, not clung to as totems. A recent article on demon possession illustrates my point. In this article, a psychiatrist explains why he believes in demon possession, using as evidence cold reading techniques and second-hand reports of parlor

I have said that the hypothesis that behavior is “ritual” is presented when the behavior appears irrational—for example, when resources are sacrificed or behaviors are performed for no visible gain. Categorizing lots of apparently irrational behavior as ritual and analyzing their logic and function, rather than naively condemning them, has been my project in several articles: 1. Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture 131 2. What Is Ritual? 153 3. Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty 481 4. Weaponized Sacredness 233 5. An Ecology of Beauty & Strong Drink 185 6. Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths 301 Viewed as co-evolved expressions of rational human 2 Richard Gallagher, “As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession.” Washington Post 2016.

601

Systems of the World

Systematizing Ritual

A36.

tricks.2 Someone well-versed in rationalism would immediately spot egregious epistemic problems. This is not postrationalism; this is prerationalism. Is belief in demons (and the rituals to eradicate them) interesting and worth studying, as a phenomenon and even as a metaphor? Of course! But accepting the literal reality of demons, and the effectiveness of techniques to eradicate them, uncritically, indicates a basic error. In this piece, I will review my pieces so far (July 7, 2016) on Ribbonfarm and contextualize them in terms of the skillful study and use (and not rejection) of systems and systematizing.

desires, rituals are fascinating and profoundly ambiguous. To embrace ritual as a system does not mean that ritual is always good, or that old rituals must be strictly adhered to. But understanding ritual and the sacred can make us much less annoyed and confused by our own behavior and that of our conspecifics.

Systematizing Social Cognition One of the most interesting things to look at is ourselves, and how we think. Human cognition is special because we are constantly modeling the minds of others, and projecting models of ourselves onto their minds. We see ourselves in both the first and third person. And we understand the world not just through reading and reflection, but through our behaviors alone and together. I have attempted to systematize our cognition in a few posts: 1. The Essence of Peopling 207 2. Ritual Epistemology 173 3. Inequalities 272

Systematizing Wrongness I love Snopes, and I love the study of folklore. It’s extremely useful that a few people go around playing Whac-A-Mole with all the myriad wrongnesses that our culture produces. But we don’t all have to do that. Since some people do that very effectively, the rest of us can look for interesting patterns in the wrongness, and see how it functions and evolves. I have written about deception and the evolution of narrative in a few posts: 1. Cooperative Ignorance 254

Business As Magic 283 The Theory of Narrative Selection online

A36.

2. 3.

Maps are an extremely useful consequence of “book consciousness,” which I have lambasted as our “consciousness monoculture” even though it is awesome and fun. Recently I was running in the mountains at Lake Tahoe, and noticed lots of information: dozens of unused parking spaces painted on the asphalt near a ski resort; still, silent chair lifts; drainage tunnels under a road next to a dry stream. These features give us otherwise-unobservable information about the location at different times: there must be tons of cars and skiers in the winter, and there must sometimes be water pouring under the road. I have written about maps, and how they relate to territories and our cognition, in a few articles: 1. Frontierland 319 2. Cartographic Compression 379 3. Meaning and Pointing 396

Systematizing Jokes, Puzzles, and Farting Around In systematizing humor and puzzles, we are both coming to understand them, and seeing how they undermine our project of total systematization. I have written about humor and puzzles here: 1. Puzzle Theory 341 2. On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke 467 In “Puzzle Theory,” I hoped to demonstrate the playful, nonjudgmental use of systematization, and to 603

Systems of the World

Systematizing Cartography and Stigmergy

point out when rigid systematization fails. I attempted to systematize human recreation and fun here: 3. Free Money online

Skillfully Systematizing Systems Being stuck in any particular system is no fun. It limits our ability to think and act skillfully, and to communicate with others who are not stuck in our system. However, without grounding in things like rationality, science, evolution, statistics, economics, game theory, and even analytic philosophy, we lack the ability to lightly take up and play with systems as the situation merits. Some warn against “armchair” theorizing, but this is only a danger if we are going to be forever beholden to our theories, rather than play a serious game. Bruce Lee includes a parable in his article: It is conceivable that a long time ago a certain martial artist discovered some partial truth. During his lifetime, the man resisted the temptation to organize this partial truth, although this is a common tendency in a man’s search for security and certainty in life. After his death, his students took “his” hypothesis, “his” postulates and “his” method and turned them into law. Impressive creeds were then invented, solemn reinforcing ceremonies prescribed, rigid philosophy and patterns formulated, and so on, until finally an institution was erected. So what originated as one man’s intuition of some sort of

605

Systems of the World

This is the future for what is called “postrationalism,” just as it was the future for jeet kune do at the time Lee was writing, if it should become an institution. But we are not playing in the future; we are playing right now.

A36.

personal fluidity was transformed into solidified, fixed knowledge, complete with organized classified responses presented in a logical order. In so doing, the well-meaning, loyal followers not only made this knowledge a holy shrine but also a tomb in which they buried the founder’s wisdom.

THE LAST OF THE MONSTERS WITH IRON TEETH In all species, the play of the young is practice for the essential survival tasks of the adults. Human children play at many things, but the most important is the play of culture. Out of sight of adults, children learn and practice the rhymes, rituals, and institutions of their own culture, distinct from that of adults. The Western child today is mostly kept inside his own home, associating with other children only in highly structured, adult-supervised settings such as school and sports teams. It was not always so. Throughout history, bands of children gathered and roamed city streets and countrysides, forming their own societies each with its own customs, legal rules and procedures, parodies, politics, beliefs, and art. With their rhymes, songs, and symbols, they created and elaborated the meaning of their local landscape and culture, practicing for the adult work of the same nature. We are left with only remnants and echoes1 of a once-magnificent network of children’s cultures, capable of impressive feats of coordination. Iona and Peter Opie conducted an immense study of the children’s cultures of the British Isles. The Lore 1 Scott Alexander, “Simpler Times,” Slate Star Codex 2014.

The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth

607

A37.

and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) is comparable in richness to Walter Evans-Wenz’ The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911) on the fairy faiths, or to Alan Lomax collections of American and European folk music. These children of the recent past observed what the Opies call a “code of oral legislation”—cultural institutions for testing truthfulness, swearing affirmation, making bets and bargains, and determining the ownership of property—the adult legal code in miniature. These codes universally included a subject absent from adult law, however—that of asking for respite, what we recognize as “calling time out,” and what today’s children reportedly call “pause,” a usage imported from video games. They had call-and-response shibboleths and rhymes about Mickey Mouse and Shirley Temple, but they also performed the rites of a calendar full of ancient meaning. In the northern countryside, they wore oak apples or oak leaves in their buttonholes on May 29 to commemorate the escape of Charles II—on pain of being whipped with nettles by other children. In the south, however, the children spent October preparing bonfires and making elaborate “guys”—effigies for burning on Guy Fawkes Day. These children’s cultures recognized the existence of terrible monsters, and they were able to organize against these threats. In 1954, “hundreds of children in the Gorbals district of Glasgow were reported to have stormed a local cemetery, hunting for a ‘vampire with iron teeth.’ According to press reports at the time, they said that the vampire had ‘killed and eaten two wee boys.’” (Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell, “Hunting the Monster with Iron Teeth,” in Perspectives

on Contemporary Legend Vol. III, 1988). This incident was one of at least eight “hunts,” documented in newspaper articles and interviews, from the 1930s and continuing until the 1980s. Hundreds, or in one case thousands, of children participated in monster hunts that often lasted several nights—militias called up not just against the vampire with iron teeth, but also against such characters as Springheeled Jack, an unnamed banshee, and ghosts known as the “White Lady” and the “Grey Lady.” Adults in 1954 blamed horror movies and horror comics for the vampire hunt (much as video games would be blamed today), but Hobbs and Cornwell trace the children’s adversary back much further. Nineteenth-century parents (and perhaps generations before them) had threatened their misbehaving children with the fearsome Kinderschreck known as “Jenny wi’ the airn teeth,” and her characteristic dentition is displayed by ancient bogeymen from Yorkshire (Tom Dockin2) to Russia (Baba Yaga). In order to develop and express their culture and achieve such feats of coordination, children require time and space apart from adult supervision. In the West today, outside of tiny pockets, this independence is almost exclusively the prerogative of poor children surrounded by crumbling cultures that lack the will to monitor and protect them. Groups of these children still attempt organization and armed resistance3 to protect themselves from ubiquitous violence when adults refuse to do so. Outside of pockets of extreme deprivation, 2 See entry in the Encyclopedia of Fairies in World Folklore and Mythology, ed. Theresa Bane. 3 See This American Life, ep. 488, Act Two, “Your Name Written On Me.” Aired Feb. 22, 2013.

The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth

609

A37.

children’s society is severely restricted by our practice of placing children under the equivalent of house arrest. In only three generations, children in the British Isles as well as the United States have lost their freedom to roam, their independently explorable territories shrinking from hundreds of acres to the dimensions of each child’s own back yard. This is not an accusation toward parents; their decisions reflect their judgments about their children’s safety in the world. Specifically, parents judge that there is no community beyond their doors that they can rely on to keep their children safe. Christopher Alexander’s Pattern 57: Children in the City (A Pattern Language) states that “If children are not able to explore the whole of the adult world around them, they cannot become adults. But modern cities are so dangerous that children cannot be allowed to explore them freely.” Unfortunately, this has become the case not just in large cities, but in small towns and even rural areas. As a result, children’s society has less and less to do with the land around them—land which, anyway, they are unlikely to occupy when they become adults in our hypermobile society. Children’s society exists on the Internet if at all, with raids in video games and chat rooms replacing geographically colocated monster hunts. (This is increasingly the case with adult society as well, which also lacks architectural and geographic support.) It should be noted that the Internet is not the cause of these problems. Rather, the Internet is the precarious reservation onto which culture has been driven, bleak and uncanny, inhuman in scale. And even the Internet is increasingly monitored and reshaped by the same malignant tiling system that

drove culture here in the first place. What will happen to culture when even this frontier is closed? The failure of adult culture, both its physical architecture and its social institutions, has impoverished children’s culture. And in return, children no longer avidly train, in their play, to take over the burden of preserving and remaking adult culture. Somewhere a child alone in his room, wearing headphones, is fighting Jenny wi the airn teeth, a computer-controlled enemy in a video game. But perhaps at least it is a multiplayer game, and he has his fellows with him.

TWO PATTERNS I describe two patterns here, one from the domain of the social, the other from the domain of the sacred. I discuss them together because they are of the same shape; the shape, or form, that they share is also shared with the human self.

Holy Ground This is the visual form of the shape:1

The first pattern1described by this shape is a common (perhaps invariant) form across many cultures for 1 Perry’s illustration, adapted from Alexander’s A Pattern Language (Pattern 66, Holy Ground).

encountering the sacred. Alexander’s Holy Ground, above, calls for the preservation of the sanctity of Sacred Sites (Pattern 24) with a specific architecture: “a series of nested precincts, each marked by a gateway, each one progressively more private, and more sacred than the last, the innermost a final sanctum that can only be reached by passing through all of the outer ones.” This pattern is also seen, to similar effect, in Beijing’s Forbidden City, with its awesome and exhausting approach of nested gates, gardens, and halls, a “magic show” that concealed within a rather mundane group of human beings. The sacred is approached only through successive boundaries of porous exclusivity. This experience may be necessary to facilitate the experience of the sacred. “The organization is so powerful,” Alexander says hopefully, “that to some extent it can itself create the sacredness of sites, perhaps even encourage the slow emergence of coherent rites of passage.” The pattern at least makes it possible for rituals to emerge.

Intimacy Gradient The second pattern, united with the first pattern in its shape, is a pattern in human social organization. It is that people need to be provided with many degrees of public and private, a gradient of intimacy occupied by progressively intimate groups. The binary of public and private is not enough; just as we must have progressively intimate realms to approach the sacred, we need progressively intimate realms to express our social selves. Porous exclusivity characterizes each

Two Patterns

613

A38.

layer of the structure. This meta-pattern finds form in many specific architectural patterns. Pattern 13 (Subculture Boundary) and Pattern 15 (Neighborhood Boundary) define realms of intimacy at the neighborhood level. 98 (Circulation Realms) describes a cognitive reason we might want building complexes in this shape: they are easy for the mind to grasp, and easy to give directions within them. 158 (Open Stairs), 112 (Entrance Transition), and 88 (Street Cafe) provide connection, as well as comfortable porous exclusivity, between the street realm and indoor realms. 36 (Degrees of Publicness), 111 (Half-Hidden Garden), and 127 (Intimacy Gradient) illustrate this pattern within and around residences, down to the room level. These layers of porous boundaries allow overlapping social groups of progressive intimacy to flourish; it is the architecture of comfortable peopling. In low-trust societies that are not functioning well, these layers of porous boundaries must be barred and locked. People are left with a binary choice between a vulnerable “public” that is exposed to all, and a socially dead “private” that is disconnected from others (whether inside a home or vehicle). Unfortunately, the Internet has mirrored the trajectory of the society at large. Beginning as a set of overlapping zones (and communities) with distinct character and porous exclusivity, it increasingly resembles the binary public/ private of our built environment. Search algorithms and unlimited computing resources mean that every communication that is not explicitly private is functionally public, in the most global way that has ever been possible. Facebook and Google+ have features

that rationally appear to be circles of progressive intimacy; the audience for a given communication may be limited to one’s friends, family, or other circle or group. Theoretically, this might support groups of porous exclusivity, but I think the choice to collapse each person’s identity into a single “character” (e.g. Google’s erstwhile “real names” policy) is enough to destroy the pattern. In all social media, the service provider finds many ways to encourage users to add new acquaintances—new watchers, to be ominous—gradually making communications increasingly public. These virtual boundaries are maintained by inscrutable corporations, are constantly changing, and cannot be relied upon. They tend to move in the direction of extreme publicness. Twitter, for years an unexpected jewel of social interaction, has moved toward making its distinct functions—the retweet and the favorite—more like each other, in the direction of the more public retweet. Making one’s account private and speaking via direct messages put one behind a non-porous boundary; the only other option is speaking publicly, and it is increasingly public indeed. It is not the semi-private, high-trust place for the development of ideas that it once was. Are sacred experiences possible on the Internet? Even if the pattern of nested precincts with thresholds is realized (as it is, for instance, in many video games, to great effect), there is still the matter of a source of sacredness to approach. Mostly on the Internet we read, talk to people, listen to music, watch videos, or play games—interacting exclusively with other people and their creations. These activities are not common in sacred spaces, in which something transcending the

The pattern so far described is also reflected in the human self—the human self being literally the reflection of one’s social spheres. According to Philippe Rochat, we are “constrained toward (self-)consciousness” by other people in our environment.2 We must keep others in mind, model their cognition and emotion, in order to monitor our reputation and simulate future scenarios involving them. We see ourselves through the eyes of others, adding a third-person perspective to our first-person experience. And the self, properly located, exists not deep within us, but in between ourselves and others. The social context—the role we are in, the others we are interacting with and exposed to—determines the information, memories, and behaviors our minds have access to. This is revealed in word-completion tasks, but may sometimes be detected through introspection. We are different selves with different minds depending on the audience. If there is a unified authentic self, it exists between and among these many context-adapted selves, in the transformation from self to self, rather than in any one of them. To 2 Others In Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness, 2009.

615

Two Patterns

The Self

A38.

merely human is sought. But in many of our minds, perhaps, suggestions of mystical power still attach to the old-fashioned notion of Cyberspace. Perhaps enough minds secretly expect an inhuman, nascent intelligence to look back at us (though preferably not quite slouching toward Bethlehem to be born). To experience the sacred requires mystery.

collapse the many selves into one is not to realize authenticity, but to destroy oneself. With selves, as with the architecture they exist in, the binary choice between public and private is not adequate. A completely public self is a play-acted character; more intimate selves, performed for closer circles, are more crucial to the project of peopling. More public selves, while more “porous” and open to making new connections, are also more vulnerable to criticism and other negative information about themselves. Negative information about the self causes painful shame (even seeing oneself in the mirror for the first time—see Rochat), forcing one out of the idealized first-person perspective of the self and toward a much harsher third-person view of the self. It is no exaggeration to say that the present generation experiences more of this socially-reflected negative information about the self than any generation that has previously lived on earth. Roy Baumeister has argued that the shameful weight of the modern self— unprecedented pain of self-awareness—drives us to try to escape ourselves though hobbies like alcoholism, suicide, sadomasochistic sex, evangelical religion, and binge eating. Can any guidance be found from deep within the self, as is our modern expectation? Unfortunately, the innermost sanctum, in this case, is quite empty. Christopher Knight, the man who lived without human contact in the Maine woods for 27 years, agreed with Rochat that the experience of the self seems to exist only in relation to others: “I did examine myself,” [Knight] said. “Solitude

3 Michael Finkel, “The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit,” GQ 2014.

617

Two Patterns

Most of us could not stand austere, complete freedom like this. We require social interaction, and to accomplish this, we need social forms that can connect us together without collapsing us individually. The world inside the mind reflects the world outside the mind. We can’t have ancestral lives (nor would we necessarily want them), but if we can incorporate ancestral patterns into our strange new lives through ostension, these patterns may help us coordinate with each other as well as manage the weight of our own consciousness.

A38.

did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”3

THE MOUNTAIN The mountain is a natural, physical, geographic pattern that offers itself as a hard-to-fake measurement of human effort. Its ritual and cognitive significance is difficult to understand without climbing it, but I will offer an account of its place in the human order as best I can. Many places occupied by humans (including my current home) have no mountains at all. In A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander et al.1 provide a system of asterisks next to patterns, with more asterisks indicating a pattern that is universal, necessary, and irreplaceable. A pattern with zero asterisks is very possibly not a universal pattern. The mountain, taken literally, would likely have zero asterisks next to it as a ritual pattern. But after exploring the meaning of the mountain, and the cognitive experiences and “ritual vitamins” it provides, I will suggest that the mountain may be seen as a metaphor for other patterns. Physical mountains are still extremely important, but I hope to show the place of figurative “mountains” in human motivation, organization, and cognition. In the lectures of William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, an amusing number of the transcendental experiences reported by his informants 1 Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein, Jacobson, Fiksdahl-King, Angel 1977.

A39. The Mountain take place while climbing mountains. The lectures themselves I will turn to later as an example illuminating metaphorical “mountains” and their relationship to the terrain they overlook. I am not a mountain climber in any serious sense. I have climbed mountains in the Eastern Sierra of California and the Idaho panhandle, backpacking often for many days, since I was a child, but I have not climbed any really difficult mountains. For many years I specialized in running up and down the modest hills and mountains within the city limits of Los Angeles, California, and it is those experiences which I wish to condense and relate here. For orientation purposes, here is a hand-drawn map of the three sets of hills and mountains that I 619

have spent the most time running up and down. Probably the best, most fun hill run in Los Angeles is the one I completed earliest, and the one I ran over and over again, many dozens of times. It is the run from Hollywood, beneath the famous sign, up through Bronson Canyon to the Griffith Observatory, and back down to the east through Griffith Park. You might start at the Bourgeois Pig, a coffee shop on Franklin Avenue. From there, head north up Bronson Avenue until it becomes Canyon Drive. This is a shady neighborhood with many trees and 1920s architecture, very quiet despite its proximity to the city streets. Canyon Drive enters Bronson Canyon-Griffith Park through an iron gate, and continues up through the park, past playgrounds and picnic tables, eventually becoming a dirt road open only to foot traffic (and dogs). You can make a sharp right and visit the bat caves if you like, adding only a few hundred feet to your trip. The main trail follows the drainage of a creek, which is often full of tall, bushy strands of fennel and poison hemlock. Eventually you cross the creek and enter the most challenging part of the run: the exposed, shadeless dirt road cut into the west side of the eastern slope of Bronson Canyon. The sun is hot, the slope is steep but runable, and the terrain is boring and monotonous. One season I saw tomato plants, obviously being tended by someone, on the side of the slope. Often there are people walking dogs. When you make it to the end of this leg, the trail shifts west and levels out briefly to a view point jutting out on the south side of the Hollywood Hills. Take a moment to look at the canyon, streets, and smog below, and continue up a few hundred more feet.

The Mountain

621

A39.

Here you intersect a larger dirt road, used as a bridle path by groups of tourists on horseback that you might have to dodge. To the west is the incredibly boring and thankless Hollywood sign; to the east is the goal, Griffith Observatory. Continue east on this dirt road until it turns into soft black asphalt. Here, the empty road curves around back toward the city to the south. This is the most glorious part of the run. After ascending on rough, rocky dirt, now you gently ascend on wide, clean asphalt before— wonderful surprise!—gently descending as the road curves. I find it very difficult not to stick my arms out airplane-style on this part of the run, out of pure joy. There are trees on this part of the run, offering some shade. And all of a sudden, as the road curves around the southernmost part of the mountain, you get your first view of the observatory. Eventually the road meets the parking lot for the observatory. Here you can either run up the sidewalk, if it’s not too crowded, or climb up to the trail that goes all the way up Mt. Hollywood (which is not the boring mountain with the sign, but the peak just to the north of the observatory). Head left (north) and run up the switchbacks to the peak, if you like—I usually don’t, as I don’t think it adds much to the experience. Head right (south) toward the observatory and the first of its rewards—the drinking fountains. I avoid carrying water because running with water removes some of the proprioceptive beauty from the experience; it’s necessary on the other peaks I will describe, but it’s not necessary here. When you’ve gorged yourself on water, stroll across the courtyard of the observatory, touch the monolith

with names of scientists carved into it, and admire the smoggy view of the city below. On a very clear day you can see the ocean, but this is so rare that it’s wholly surprising when it happens. If you’ve arrived during normal business hours, climb down the western stairs to the café and eat a rice crispy treat and milk. (Sometimes the caterer makes the rice crispy treats out of other cereals, such as fruit loops or cocoa puffs.) When you’re done, walk over to the eastern side of the observatory and begin your descent. It begins gently, but quickly gets steep, so that maintaining a running pace requires full concentration, frequently producing the mental state known as “flow.” It is the most thrilling part of the run, resembling what I imagine to be the experience of steering a Star Wars air motorcycle through the forest. The trail descends into Griffith Park near the Greek Theater, with stonewalled trails, trees, and more drinking fountains. Finally, you hit Los Feliz Boulevard just as it is about to turn south and become Western. As this happens, the road steeply declines, offering another view of the grid of Los Angeles, and the sunset, assuming it’s that time of day. Turn west onto Franklin and run until the street becomes so busy that you must stroll instead. I think the loop is about eight miles, give or take, with around a thousand feet of elevation gain (you go a bit above Griffith Observatory on the highest parts of the run). I have covered this run in much more detail than I will cover the other mountain ranges, because it is dearest to me and I have done it so many times. The other runs are less narrative and varied, more difficult,

The Mountain

623

A39.

steeper, longer, and more “mountainy” in general. The Verdugo Hills (or, more grandly, Verdugo Mountains) are just to the north of the Hollywood Hills; between the two sets of hills is the San Fernando Valley, known as the Valley, as in Valley girls. Burbank and Glendale sit between the two mountain ranges. There is no water at the top of the Verdugo Hills, and the runs up and down are around twelve miles, so you have to carry water. The most elegant solution for this is to carry a small running backpack that holds a bladder of water with a hose to your face, known by brand as a CamelBak. It’s not as nice as running free without carrying anything, but it’s worth doing. (I did it without carrying any water once, in July I believe, and while I value the experience, I would not wish to repeat it.) Suburban roads through residential districts approach the mountains from all sides—from Sun Valley to the west, Glendale and Burbank to the south, and La Crescenta to the north. At the lower view points close to the city, the rocks are covered in graffiti tags, and the ground is littered with shattered beer bottles and green medical marijuana prescription containers. Fire roads connect these points, passing through somewhat monotonous terrain, offering only benches with fine views, the fire department’s eucalyptus grove, and a view of the Burbank Airport to break things up. At the peak is some kind of radio tower surrounded by chain link fence, usually populated by mountain bikers resting and looking at the view. From the peak, elevation about 3000 feet, you can look down on Mt. Hollywood as well as the surrounding neighborhoods.

The final mountain is the only real mountain in Los Angeles, Mt. Lukens, or Sister Elsie Peak, in the southern part of the San Gabriel Mountains. The peak is over 5,000 feet in elevation, making Los Angeles the large city with the greatest difference between its highest and lowest points in the United States. Approach it from Dukmejian Wilderness Park, or below, from Foothills Boulevard, to add miles and elevation, if you like. Again, there is no water at the peak, so you must carry a great deal of water. Your phone will probably not have any signal. There are snakes and cougars, as well as tiny frogs and deer. The trail climbs through forest and over a small creek, eventually meeting the fire roads, switching back on the south face of the mountain. High up on the mountain, not quite at the peak, the trail extends very far to the south and offers the most important moment of the climb. (The peak itself is about as ugly as a peak can be, littered with communication towers and chain link fence.) At this point, all of a sudden, looping out southward, you can see the entire basin. You can see both of the smaller sets of mountains, the Verdugo Hills and the Hollywood Hills, far below. If you have spent many months or years walking, running, driving, and bicycling around the neighborhoods and towns and hills, connecting the different points and forming a sense of place, this view offers a jarring, visceral insight into why everything is where it is. You can see why the streets and highways and neighborhoods are where they are, why there are blank spots on the map, the spread of the three-dimensional geographic and urban reality sweeping out toward Pasadena.

The Mountain

625

A39.

Everything becomes crystal clear, even through the distinct and geographically understandable patches of smog, beyond communication in words. The mountain itself offers its insights only in relation to the surrounding terrain. A new visitor may find the view breathtaking, but will not get the thrill of understanding and connection that an experienced Angelano has access to. For every human domain, there is a terrain, and an ascending set of peaks. William James refers to the “terrain” as the “apperceiving mass”—the raw material, reports of experiences, through which one can perceive the insights available from the “peaks” of theory. Darwin’s astounding insight is perhaps most meaningful to those, like him, who spent long years understanding the terrain of biology, its specimens, fossils, distribution, and variety. I am suspicious of learning the clear, cold insights of economics, for instance, without a strong grasp of the terrain of human transactions. William James’s lectures, I think, form a sort of mountain—the difficult effort of reading them is required to effectively ascertain the understanding contained within. I do not think they are capable of a satisfying tl;dr. A summary of main points is possible, but it can never be as satisfying or convincing if it eliminates the terrain—the apperceiving mass—from the experience. Ascending a mountain, alone or with a group, is a fine thing. It is one of the best rituals I have ever experienced. Insight and theory are also fine things. But the true value of the mountain, perhaps, is in the descent—and what is brought down, whether it is

Mountain trigram Moses’ stone tablets, or Darwin’s theory of evolution, or, more likely, something much more modest. This is how the mountain gains its relation with the surrounding terrain, which provides it with context and meaning. The I Ching trigram “mountain” (read from the bottom up) is yin, then yin, then yang at the top. Two of these trigrams together gives the hexagram Mountain. I have called the I Ching an epistemic failure magnet (perhaps using slightly more vulgar language), for its sparse binary structure allows any information at all to be projected onto it. It is, perhaps, a mountain that has lots its terrain, and since the terrain that it condenses has been lost, if it ever existed, its insights must have limited value. But the I Ching is also very beautiful. Its binary organization begins with a duality, and a binary duality is a very satisfying pattern, as I’m sure my fellow Ribbonfarmer Venkat, samurai of 2x2 matrices, would agree. Binaries are satisfying ways of imposing meaning on the world. A continuum is one way of making the duality pattern more complex and meaningful; another way is to arrange instances of the binary along a dimension, such as time.

627

The Mountain

2 Nigel Richmond, Language of the Lines: The I Ching Oracle, 1977.

A39.

I like Nigel Richmond’s somewhat counterintuitive and unorthodox explanation of yin and yang, as change and no change, respectively. In this interpretation, yin is activity, the receiver of change; yang is stillness, the provider of change. (I think of them as corresponding to the Myers-Briggs types ESFJ for yin and INTP for yang, rather than to object-level male and female.) Yin is activity without thought, yang is thought without activity.2 A fun game, along this vein, is to listen to songs and classify each song and each bar by the trigram of stillness and motion that it represents. It is a game of applying a satisfying, beautiful duality to a random sample of human art, and the practice of this game can provide both pleasurable and cautionary understanding of how much similar “games” are played in human cognitive domains. The mountain trigram, again read from the bottom up, presents a picture of a mountain, and a temporal picture of the process by which the mountain is formed—geological activity pushing up, then more, then stillness. It is also a picture of the process of ascending a mountain. The full hexagram, then, may be seen as a portrait of ascending the mountain, and then descending it: activity, activity, and then the stillness of the peak; then activity, activity, and then the stillness of integrating the insights of the peak with the population of the surrounding terrain. Climbing mountains is a beautiful ritual, valuable for its own sake. If the world were about to end, it is one of the things I would want to be doing. And insight and understanding are beautiful and valuable

for their own sake. But to be useful, and for their beauty to be shared, these patterns must be integrated in relation to the surrounding terrain. The value of what is carried down may only be measured once this final, difficult step is completed—in the stillness after the descent, and in what follows. Patterns may be valuable in and of themselves, but their value is limited unless they can spread. And this is a great challenge.

FOLK CONCEPTS “Folk concept.” You may have never heard the phrase defined, or even used, but you probably already know what it means. Consider this list: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Luck Bayes’ rule Ghosts Vitamin C

Which two are folk concepts? If you were able to instantly see that luck and ghosts are folk concepts, then you are already in possession of the folk concept of the folk concept. The descriptor “folk” invites the hearer to a conversation about less sophisticated people, behind their backs. The slick Latinate precision of “concept” underlines the humor: can you imagine common folk having concepts? While the phrase is not always used as a pejorative, the connotation is slightly negative, and social distance is implied. Connotation—the emotional valence of words—is a crucial element in grasping folk concepts. Many disciplines use the concept of the folk concept, including anthropology, sociology, botany, and psychology (not to mention folklore and history of science). Each discipline likely has its own special meaning for the term that, if not explicitly defined, is encoded in usage. The term “folk concept” is rarely

defined, even by scientists studying folk concepts.1 This is not necessarily a fault; definitions may not get us any further than example usage and hermeneutics. An anthropology textbook gives this: A folk concept is a notion that has a general, popularly understood meaning particular to a sociocultural grouping, but which has not been formally defined or standardized.2 This definition is consistent with most usages I’ve seen (across disciplines), and seems broadly correct. It’s interesting, however, that there is no word or concept in the sentence that the definition does not itself apply to. Folk concepts are often imprecise and vague (healing energy, true love). If the phrase “folk concept” is also imprecise and vague, if its referents shift over time and context, if it presents a hand-wave-y spectrum rather than a hard category, then it shares the nature of the things it describes. I implied above, for instance, that vitamin C is not a folk concept. However, consider the belief that vitamin C prevents colds. It is a substance that has been formally defined and standardized to a high degree within the specialized domains of chemistry and medicine. However, “vitamin C” also has an existence as a folk concept: it helps your immune system and prevents colds (though, as far as I know, this is not in accord with current systematized scientific evidence). There are many instances of a formally defined, 1 See Malle & Knobe, “The Folk Concept of Intentionality,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 1997. 2 Bernstein, J. H., “Folk concepts,” 21st Century Anthropology: A Reference Handbook 2010.

631

Folk Concepts

Science often begins with everyday concepts and assumptions (plane geometry was based on the assumption that the earth is flat). As science progresses, however, the original concepts and assumptions can change or even disappear. For example, when ancient people exerted force, they felt muscular strain as they pushed or pulled. This feeling of strain was central to the concept of force in ancient physics. Jammer (1957) described the slow and jagged path that the concept of force traveled from its origin in everyday thought through a series of scientific proposals and then to its role in modern physics. Over that history, the word force covered a variety of phenomena, and some theorists called for abandoning the concept. In modern science, force remains, but is understood in a way qualitatively different from its origin. A different fate is seen in the concept of constellation. When ancient people in different parts of the world looked at the night sky, they saw constellations of stars. Early astronomers studied constellations, and the concept of a constellation remained central to astronomy for centuries. But, constellation is not

A40.

standardized scientific concept gaining a second life as a folk concept as it filters through society. For instance, the ego, superego, and id were originally scientific concepts, originated by a particular scientist; now they are only popular folk concepts, to all except historians of science. Widen & Russell give these historical examples of the systematization of folk concepts:

a scientific concept in modern astronomy.3 “Force” is still in use as a scientific concept and as a folk concept (much like “gravity,” which, literally, means heaviness). “Constellation” is still in use as a folk concept, useful for entertainment, navigation, and feeling at home in the universe; however, it is not in use in current efforts to formalize scientific understanding of extraterrestrial objects. So far, folk concepts seem to vastly outnumber things that aren’t folk concepts. Only a tiny minority of concepts have a claim to formal, scientific status, and that claim is often short-lived. Folk concepts are the ordinary background reality, and formal scientific concepts are the rare exception. Almost everything that is interesting, important, or deeply meaningful to human beings is a folk concept—including interestingness, importance, and meaning itself. There have been a few approaches toward folk concepts in the scientific literature. One approach is dismissive of folk concepts as inherently unscientific, to be eradicated and replaced with formal precision. For example, Cunningham (1961) says: Over the years the sociologist has learned to be properly skeptical of “folk” definitions of social phenomena. For example, concepts such as “crime” and “insanity” have proven useless in most types of scientific analysis of deviant behavior. “Leisure,” it may be argued, is also just such a folk concept. We have an intuitive feeling of what is subsumed under this rubric but find the 3 Widen & Russell, “Descriptive and Prescriptive Definitions of Emotions,” Emotion Review 2010.

4 Kenneth R. Cunningham, “The Meaning of ‘Leisure’: An Analysis of Community Studies,” The Family Life Coordinator 1961. 5 Malle & Knobe 1997.

633

Folk Concepts

In this view, without scientific formalization, the folk concept is “useless.” Unfortunately, folk concepts often refuse to be eradicated. Attempts at formalization often result in a proliferation of folk concepts, rather than tidy causal models with predictive power. Some researchers take a different approach: they study the folk concept itself. For instance, Malle & Knobe investigate the “folk concept of intentionality”—that is, they study what judgments people make about whether actions are intentional, rather than attempting to study the neurological underpinnings of intentionality (whatever that is). They find, among other things, that people mostly agree that sweating is unintentional and inviting someone to lunch is intentional. Interestingly, their research suggests a logical inconsistency (or cognitive bias) in judgments of intentionality: at least in responses to carefully-constructed vignettes, an action with a bad result is perceived as more intentional than an action with a good result.5 This started a small trend, with scientists interrogating the folk concepts of free will, emotion, respect, and causation. This approach presupposes that intuitions and tacit knowledge are appropriate subjects for scientific inquiry. The botanist Harley Harris Bartlett exemplifies the rarest approach: a comparative and synthetic analysis of folk science and regular science. Writing in 1940, he traces the origin of binomial nomenclature to

A40.

concept a virtual Pandora’s box when it comes to formal definition of the phenomenon.4

pre-scientific ways of describing plants, and emphasizes that folk concepts of genera and species of plants remained more accurate than the classifications of early systematizers for hundreds of years: The tendency to group plants into named genera, so generally characteristic of human thought and language, reflects the fact that there are not enough different words in the living, current vocabulary of any language to supply each closely similar plant with a basically distinctive name. We, for example, apply the name oak to many different trees, but so long as we stay in our own proper north-temperate habitat, our generic feeling for the oaks is true and consistent. As a matter of fact, Greene has shown that the generic idea “oak,” as held today, was really borrowed by scientific systematic botany from the folk science of the English pioneer settlers in temperate America, who extended the English folk concept of “oak” to cover the various widely different American oaks. In the eastern United States we distinguish white oak, burr oak, chestnut oak, live oak, scarlet oak, black oak, shingle oak and others, having a perfect binomial nomenclature for them in English, and, from the literary record, we may be sure that these designations owe nothing to scientific botany. They were in use in folk science before the botanists with their imperfect materials had anywhere nearly as good an idea of the oak species as the English colonists in the

One of the mysteries of psychology is how it has been possible to define and construe emotion in such apparently incompatible ways, from biologically fixed modules similar to reflexes to attitudes to cognitive structures to socially constructed roles. If emotion were a well-defined natural kind with different theories of emotion competing head to head over the same territory, then scientific scrutiny should have rejected the false alternatives long ago. If, instead, the word emotion refers to a heterogeneous cluster of loosely related events, patterns, and dispositions, then these diverse theories might each concern a somewhat different subset of events or different aspects of those events. Theories about different things are not in competition, and empirical scrutiny could easily find evidence

6 Bartlett, H. H., “The concept of the genus: I. History of the generic concept in botany,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 1940.

635

Folk Concepts

Bartlett does not claim that folk concepts in botany are perfect or ideal. He merely argues that they are quite good for their purpose, including human linguistic and cognitive limitations, and that they remained more accurate and precise than the scientific state of the art for a long time. James Russell, writing on emotion, adds another complication: “secondary concepts,” which bridge the gap between folk concepts and technical concepts. However, folk concepts remain problematic. Russell says:

A40.

American woods.6

for each.7 A lot of science is about how to get ideas to fight each other. Vague ideas can’t really fight; they must be rendered sufficiently precise (systematized) in order to be pitted against each other in empirical trials (in psychology, mostly by having undergraduates fill out questionnaires). Folk concepts, useful as they are in everyday life, are often not precise enough to do battle in scientific terms.

Scientific Success: Technological and Narrative “Getting ideas to fight each other” is a gloss on the concept of falsifiability: that a theory is scientific only if it is capable of being falsified by observations, and that scientific experiment aims to falsify theories. I don’t want to retrace the entire history of the concept of falsifiability in history of science, but merely to point out that falsifiability is a popular and useful (if imprecise) concept for non-specialist understanding of science. In other words, even though it may have precise meanings and implications within the specialized domains of science and history of science, it lives as a folk concept outside of those domains. But scientific theories don’t only fight themselves or each other. They also fight against the material world, and against social reality. A theory is successful against the material world when it cashes out technologically— in navigation, DNA testing, electronics, agriculture. Technological success of a theory is when it works to solve some problem that is important to humans, or 7 Russell, “Core Affect and the Psychological Construction of Emotion,” Psychological Review 2003. Emphasis Perry’s.

637

Folk Concepts

8 See Kevin Simler, “Ads Don’t Work That Way,” Melting Asphalt, which argues that ads don’t work through subconscious emotional conditioning (“Pavlovian”) but rather by manipulating the cultural landscape of associations that is sometimes called “fashion.”

A40.

otherwise increase human capabilities. This success is memetic, in a sense, because technology reproduces (though not in words) the knowledge that led to the technological proliferation. The technological success story is common in hard science domains that are more in contact with the material world than the human social world. They are rare, however, in psychology and other social sciences. It’s rare that a psychological theory has cashed out technologically (and no, advertising is not a particularly strong example).8 Rather, ideas in psychology and the social sciences have achieved success in social reality: narrative success. Some psychological ideas, often paired with a memorable study or experiment, have become popular “folk concepts.” They successfully reproduce themselves, not in technological application, but in conversation: non-specialists use them to describe, explain, and predict the behavior and emotions of other people (and ourselves). The “classic” experiments in psychology are mostly so because they make a good story, and they have clear morals or judgments that can be abstracted away from them. The Stanford prison experiment, the Asch conformity experiments, Rat Park, and Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority pair memorable stories with clear morals. Terms such as “learned helplessness,” “implicit bias,” “cognitive dissonance,” and “Dunning-Kruger” have entered the lexicon as folk concepts, separate from their existence as technical concepts.

The amount of evidentiary support for or against a psychological theory does not seem to be predictive of a theory’s popularity. In terms of the effect it has on the world, the social sciences may be studied as domains of folklore as much as domains of science. This is not at all to say that they are necessarily unscientific, or that their findings are wholly unrelated to truth and completely the product of narrative selection. It is that theories that are not material-world-facing enough to reify themselves in technology can still affect human affairs through their use and spread in language.

PUBLICATION HISTORY Excerpts from The View From Hell (in order of inclusion): 3.23.08  3.07.09  7.25.08  5.08.08  5.27.08  6.05.08  4.28.08  9.11.13 

An Introduction Inflicting Harm & Inflicting Pleasure on Strangers The Moral Effect of “Being Glad It Happened” Benatar’s Account of Value (It’s Not Nihilism) Velleman’s Sorrow of Options Tort Law & the Harm of Death Procreation & Suicide Experience Machines & Their Ratification, no. II-V: Friendly Neighborhood Experience Machines; Aesthetics & Religions, a Minor Distinction; A Sneaky Dualism; The Evolutionary Biology of Experience Machines

Living in the Epilogue The View From Hell, December 8 2010 Interview Review the Future, January 20 2015 What Is Intelligence? Carcinisation, July 15 2014

Toward the Synthesis of Flourishy Forms Carcinisation, July 22 2014 Beauty is Fit Carcinisation, August 11 2014 Why Cultural Evolution Is Real Carcinisation, November 22 2015 Ritual & the Consciousness Monoculture Ribbonfarm, January 8 2015 What Is Ritual? Ribbonfarm, February 11 2015 Ritual Epistemology Ribbonfarm, November 5 2015 An Ecology of Beauty & Strong Drink Ribbonfarm, December 3 2015 Cringe & the Design of Sacred Experiences Ribbonfarm, January 11 2018 The Essence of Peopling Ribbonfarm, April 8 2015 Weaponized Sacredness Ribbonfarm, May 7 2015 Cooperative Ignorance Ribbonfarm, July 16 2015

A41.

Inequalities Ribbonfarm, March 3 2016

Publication History

Business As Magic Ribbonfarm, April 7 2016 Dares, Costly Signals, & Psychopaths Ribbonfarm, May 5 2016 Frontierland Ribbonfarm, August 6 2015 Puzzle Theory Ribbonfarm, July 4, 2015 Cartographic Compression Ribbonfarm, September 3 2015 Meaning and Pointing Ribbonfarm, October 1 2015 Something Runs Through The Whole Thread Ribbonfarm, December 7 2018 Social Media Consciousness Ribbonfarm, December 7 2012 After Temporality Ribbonfarm February 2, 2017 Feeling the Future Ribbonfarm, December 7 2018 641

Rectangle Vision Ribbonfarm, December 7 2018 On Some Possibilities of Life as a Joke Ribbonfarm, January 7 2016 Gardens Need Walls: Boundaries [...] Beauty Ribbonfarm March 4 2015 Interview Suspended Reason, December 30 2016 A Bad Carver Ribbonfarm November 3, 2016 Tendrils of Mess in our Brains Ribbonfarm January 5, 2017 Body Pleasure Ribbonfarm August 3, 2017 Luxuriating in Privacy Ribbonfarm March 1, 2018 Deep Laziness Ribbonfarm April 6, 2018 Notes on Doing Things Ribbonfarm May 10, 2018

A41.

APPENDIX

Publication History

Systems of the World Ribbonfarm, November 3 2016 The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth Carcinisation, October 4 2014 Two Patterns Carcinisation, August 29 2014 The Mountain The View From Hell Yes, March 24 2015 Folk Concepts Ribbonfarm, November 16 2017

643

INDEX abortion aboutness-extraction Abrutyn, Seth abundance

56, 61 92-94, 382-383 125, 525 8, 275-276, 484-486, 522-523 adultery 401 aesthetics 42-45, 64, 95, 186, 188189, 192, 197, 199, 227, 259, 265, 317, 362, 383, 465, 467, 478, 498, 500502, 506, 531, 533, 537, 539, 545, 561, 577-578, 582 Aethercircuit 9 Africa 116, 188, 310, 462 aggression 142 agriculture 124, 131, 189-190, 274, 337, 407, 461, 491, 523 alcohol 48, 193-194, 270, 313, 560 alcoholism 49, 139, 195, 616 Alexander, Christopher 10, 98, 100, 102, 104, 127, 177, 199, 217, 227, 329, 440, 483, 486-487, 498, 508-510, 524-525, 541,

544, 546, 575-577, 581, 584, 591, 609, 611-612, 618 ambiguity 143, 176, 241, 288-289, 294, 342, 345, 352-363, 373, 376-378, 440-442 Amish, the 20, 183-184, 195 Anarchy 42 ancestral (environment) 16, 115, 140, 149, 191, 195, 272, 274, 485-486, 498, 504, 522, 548, 590, 617 anhedonia 554 Anthropology 135, 164, 629-630 aphasia 399 Arendt, Hannah 506 art 104, 323, 326-327, 338, 418, 462, 477, 502 authenticity 18, 142, 317, 326, 332333, 335-337, 616 baking 114, 439 barbiturates 49, 62, 71, 74 Barnes, Andrew 148-149 Baudrillard, Jean 332, 335-336 Baumeister, Roy 137-139, 212, 219, 229230, 400, 402, 408, 507, 566, 616 Bayes Theorem 8, 173, 629 beauty 51, 54, 95, 104-107, 186188, 197, 217, 230, 317, 383, 443, 465, 498, 501502, 555, 561, 577-578,

621, 628 537 7, 17, 120, 150, 173-174, 182, 184, 201-202, 230, 250-251, 265-266, 269, 287, 290, 350, 374, 507, 606 Benatar, David 25, 29-30, 37 benzodiazepines 55 bicameralism 131 Bitcoin 74-75, 337 bonding 43, 147, 162, 166, 192, 215, 237 Borges, Jorge Luis 506 bottom-up 10, 15-16, 465 bowerbird 539, 547 Boyd, Robert 94, 111, 113, 121-122, 264 brains 38, 62, 80, 131, 187, 211, 216, 350, 386, 425, 442, 447-448, 450, 456, 510, 512, 514-515, 517, 586 Brand, Stewart 337, 538 Brown, Donal 142, 281, 303 Burnstein, Sam 9, 75, 537 Burroughs, William 44 business 283-300, 306, 325, 520, 542 caffeine 557-558, 580 California 190, 233, 333, 372, 392, 619 cannabis 49, 55, 80-81, 511, 517, Beiser, Chris beliefs

560, 563, 623 Capgras Delusion 212 capitalism 110 Carcinisation 10, 75, 89, 98, 100-101, 203, 545 Carse, James 14 categories 157, 412-413, 556 celebrities 86, 219-222, 227, 381382, 304-305 censorship 144, 572 ceremony 154, 158, 162, 168, 176, 178-179, 181-182, 184, 293-295, 298, 520 chain letters 116-118 Chapman, David 17, 174, 338, 599 charity 160 Chesterton, G.K. 15, 484 children 27-28, 41, 53, 64, 73, 78, 83, 112, 114, 127, 141, 145, 167, 191, 226-227, 273, 276, 279, 303-304, 307-308, 314-317, 352, 380, 402, 412, 492-493, 497, 565, 590, 606-610 church 64, 151, 165, 174-175, 182, 192, 200, 221, 307, 407, 495, 497, 510 clocks 133, 389, 526 clothing 168, 310, 425-426, 435, 456, 501, 564, 583 clouds 534 cocaine 193

cockfights cognition

168 87, 95, 122, 141, 208-212, 221, 226, 264, 266, 287, 292, 349, 353, 358, 374379, 383, 400, 430-431, 436, 457, 468, 602-603, 615, 618 coincidence 250, 345-346, 349-353, 355, 376-377, 404 comfort 50, 160, 162, 215, 245, 378, 412, 434, 564 commerce 208, 498 common knowledge 209, 224, 444, 573 complexity 18, 92, 94-95, 98, 100, 105, 107-108, 229, 274, 287, 299, 324, 342, 382383, 397, 404, 416, 429, 470, 479, 486, 572 compression 96, 383-384, 535 Confucius 525 connoisseurship 505 conservatism 15 Constantin, Sarah 8 Constitution 243 Corbusier, Le 539 corporations 165, 226, 505 costly signaling 154-155, 160, 169, 186, 214, 238, 255, 265, 306, 618 court 158, 167, 178 courtship 186 cringe 199-201, 203-204

CRISPR 508 cryptocurrency 75 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 514 cultural evolution 10, 14-15, 43, 109-111, 113, 116, 118-123, 125126, 160, 185, 499 curiosity 270, 287 currency 58, 322, 325, 337 dancing 140-142, 216, 363, 408, 558 dares 303-308, 313-314, 316318, 418 Darwin 109, 625-626 dating 263, 268, 527 daydreaming 146 decoupling 16, 293-294, 297 Degh, Linda 288 dementia 219 democracy 74, 242, 323-324, 494495, 509 Dennett, Daniel 346, 362, 467, 471-472 depression 139, 403, 420, 445, 447, 452-454, 458-459, 496, 512, 560, 563, 592 derealization 396, 404, 408 Descartes 209 Dewey, John 417, 466 Dick, Philip K. 362, 369-370, 373 disgust 308 Disneyland 319-321, 325-327, 329330, 332, 335, 337, 388, 391, 560, 591-594

disorder 458, 534 dissociation 151 dissociatives 306, 459 dominance 190, 305 Dreyfus, Hubert 420, 422-424, 426-427, 434 drugs 12, 19, 49, 54-56, 60-62, 72, 74-75, 79-82, 149, 193-196, 270, 290, 313, 331, 458, 495-496, 511, 513, 517, 552, 554, 560, 563, 623 Dunning-Kruger 637 Duquette, Gabe 11, 523 Dworkin, Gerald 32 Dylan, Bob 359 egalitarianism 278 Egan, Greg 82 ego-loss 147 empathy 73, 317 Enlightenment 19, 140, 320, 333, 336 epistemology 7, 175, 179, 259, 353, 478, 515 Escher, MC 106 ethnomethodology 20, 513 euthanasia 34, 36, 65 Everett, Daniel 135, 142 Every Cradle Is A Grave 8, 59, 73, 79, 85 experience machines 12, 42, 44-46, 79-81 exploration 113-115, 133, 393, 401, 431, 449, 507, 514, 609 Facebook 211, 422, 510, 527, 613

Fairies fashion

352, 607 49, 138, 208, 375, 424, 501-502, 554, 571, 637 fencing 166-167, 358, 514 fentanyl 62 fertility 126, 421, 508 fiction 341, 363, 371, 374, 494, 523 first-person 135-136, 213, 235, 547, 587, 615-616 fit 98-100, 102-108, 127, 155, 199, 214, 220-222, 226229, 244, 252, 283, 287, 487-488, 494, 497-498, 500-501, 515, 521, 524, 528, 555, 564, 581-582 Five Obstructions, The 500, 589 Fleetwood Mac 497 folk concepts 458, 629-636 folklore 288, 437, 602, 608, 629, 638 Francaviglia, Richard 319, 321, 391 freedom 19, 35, 251, 322, 453, 491, 564, 569-570, 572, 579, 590, 593, 599, 609, 617 freedom of speech 14, 250-252 free-riders 192 friendship 169, 566 frisson 557 frontiers 319-326, 330-334, 336338, 342, 610

Future Primaeval, The gambling games

174 54, 56, 389 14, 52, 85, 92, 98, 103, 141, 166-167, 255, 260, 297, 303-304, 314-317, 331, 337, 357, 376, 412413, 424, 427-428, 430, 443-444, 451, 468, 488, 523, 548, 573, 607-609, 614, 627 game theory 96, 173, 223, 254, 384, 443-444, 604 gardens 217, 317, 346, 348, 470, 472 Garfinkel, Harold 19 gender 477, 526 genitalia 426 Gervais Principle, the 220, 296 Gian-Carlo, Gian-Carlo 105, 219 glossolalia 166, 174, 511 Goffman, Erving 268, 280 Golden Rule, the 28 Gonzales, Laurence 490 Goodman, Felicitas 150, 174, 511 Goodwin, Charles 397-398 gossip 169, 171 Greeks, the 52 Guantanamo Bay 289 Haidt, Jonathan 7, 141, 161, 237, 263, 288, 401, 586-587 hair 168, 426, 517, 542-543 Hanson, Robin 8, 586

Harvard 329, 570 healthcare 491 hedonism 78, 127, 354, 377, 554, 581 Heidegger, Martin 448, 466, 512 Henrich, Joseph 10, 16, 111, 113, 121-122 hermeneutics 359 Herzog, Warner 298 Hofstadter, Douglas 106 Hollywood 620-621, 623-624 Holocaust 341 homeostasis 554, 559, 569-570 human universals 101, 122-123, 142, 168, 281, 303, 542-543 humor 95, 317, 346-348, 353-355, 374, 383, 467, 471-475, 477-478, 547, 558, 573, 603, 629 hunger 272, 312, 589 hunter-gatherers 11, 274 Hurley, Matthew 95, 346, 348-350, 352, 362, 374-375, 467, 471472 husbandry 237, 246 hypnotism 85, 146 ignorance 64, 161, 254, 256-260, 262-263, 268-271, 288, 317-318, 363, 401, 527, 555, 602 incentives 194, 306 induction 140, 201 inequality 278, 282

infohazards 17 insitutions 15, 272, 290-292, 295297, 521, 604-605 intelligence 91-96, 105, 115, 136, 160, 173, 183, 284-286, 291, 297, 369, 381-383, 461, 467, 531, 615 Interestingness 632 Internet, the 85, 88, 126, 132, 135, 137, 171-172, 196, 222, 286, 300-301, 303, 343, 353, 362, 407, 409-410, 419-424, 426-433, 435, 466, 505, 513, 527, 569, 609, 613-614 intimacy 143, 215, 329, 574, 612614 islands 10, 97, 187-189, 387, 481-482, 507 Jacobs, Jane 509 James, William 153, 198, 364, 618, 625 Jaynes, Julian 11, 131, 362, 511 jealousy 39, 425 jewelry 520 Johnstone, Keith 144, 146, 265 journalism 390 judicial system 158-159, 167, 176-178, 181, 192, 196, 243, 315, 357-358 justice 159, 176-178, 181, 192, 196, 315 Kahneman, Daniel 579

kaleidoscopes 543-545 Kant, Immanuel 143 Kaufman, Andy 467, 477 Kavanagh, Friar Aidan 17, 64, 164-165, 200, 202 Kegan, Robert 17 ketamine 496, 560 Kierkegaard, Søren 427-428, 434 kinship 168, 525 Kubrick, Stanley 341-342, 363, 466, 515 Kuran, Timur 234-235, 241, 245, 249251 labyrinth 342, 507 Lakoff, George 468-469, 471 language 93, 95-96, 111, 131, 134, 142, 157, 169-170, 191, 210, 214, 227, 264, 358, 360-361, 365-366, 368369, 379-380, 382-383, 398-400, 406-407, 413, 436, 446, 450, 468-469, 475, 502, 509, 534, 574, 587, 591-592, 626, 629, 634-635 Lascaux 462-463 laughter 169, 216, 266 laziness 349, 552, 562, 573, 575576, 579, 581, 589-591, 594 Lebovitz, Nancy 8 legibility 385-387, 465-466, 536 legitimacy 158, 271, 284-286, 290295, 299

leisure 327, 551, 559, 570 LessWrong 8-9 Liberman, Kenneth 19 libertarianism 14, 38, 84 liberty 83, 324 life-as-joke 467 life-as-journey 471 life-extension 76 Ligotti, Thomas 58, 323 liminality 514 Linklater, Richard 396 Liposuction (Lipoblog) 523 Los Angeles 48, 174, 233, 333, 336, 372, 619-620, 622, 624 loyalty 155, 201, 291, 406 luxury 112, 135, 554, 567, 574 maps 157, 379-398, 405-406, 411, 619 marriage 41, 181, 192, 235-236, 246, 263, 421, 468 masks 144, 335, 540-542 Maslow’s hierarchy 247, 369, 484-485, 509, 522 mathematics 93-94, 104, 407, 553 McGoey, Linsey 254, 257-259, 270 medicine 31, 183-184, 226, 261, 270, 561, 630 meditation 12, 82, 146, 148 Melville, Herman 418 Memento (2000) 58 memestuff 109-110, 115, 118, 121,

123, 125-126, 187, 191, 409, 637 memory 93, 219, 269, 346, 373375, 381, 437-439, 449454, 459 mentalism 174 mental models 220, 514 metaphor 185, 395, 412, 467-471 metonymy 96, 383, 411, 454 military 131, 141, 315, 483, 504 mirrors 18, 135-137, 212, 505, 569, 616 Moby Dick 418 modernity 51, 125-127, 134-135, 137-140, 143, 154, 159, 181, 183, 194, 197, 207, 214, 216-217, 229, 272, 278, 281, 327-329, 336, 411, 413, 431, 459, 478, 486, 498, 501-502, 522, 524, 565, 574, 606-609, 616 money 107, 117, 159-160, 168, 173, 183, 222, 244, 272, 276, 278, 280-281, 299, 315, 322, 325-326, 334, 365, 389, 418, 520, 604 mood 134 morality 44, 137, 177, 230, 287, 289, 525, 561 Mormonism 192 mortality 51-53, 66

mountains

322, 392, 394, 406, 408, 470, 507, 593, 603, 618619, 623-624, 627 movies 218, 337, 341, 353-354, 364, 427, 430, 432, 434435, 515, 523, 608 museums 327, 333, 545 music 49, 94-95, 103-107, 106107, 111, 140-142, 146, 169-170, 196, 227, 317, 329, 360, 383, 497, 553, 593, 614 mutation 102, 110, 112, 117, 131, 185, 241 Myers-Briggs 627 mythology 270, 287-290, 293, 296299, 327 Nabokov, Vladimir 371, 518 narrative 47-50, 85, 101, 246, 285, 288, 319, 325-338, 294, 429-430, 435, 471, 478, 548, 593, 602, 636-638 Nasrudin 179-180 natural selection 96, 110, 185, 384, 587 nature 104, 273, 369, 432-434, 461, 464, 472, 533, 545546, 575 neighborhood 42, 504-505, 529, 568, 613, 620 neighbors 277, 483 Neolithic, the 120, 462 Netherlands 261, 303

networks 274, 280, 492, 505, 606 Nevada 332-334, 389 Newsome, Will 154 newspaper 528, 608 New York 442 niches 189, 191, 194, 495 Nietzsche, Friedrich 17 nonsense 356, 360-361, 371, 474 normalcy 568 numinosity 156 Nussbaum, Martha 50, 53, 57 nutrients 115, 384, 494 nutrition 125, 523 obesity 115, 421, 485, 491, 494, 522, 565 organizations 124, 194-195, 224, 259, 270, 287, 294, 298-299, 510 originality 146, 317, 470-471 orthodoxy 64, 236-239 Orwell, George 269 pain 12, 30, 48-49, 62, 69, 73, 86-87, 141-142, 162163, 445, 478, 554, 558, 560-561, 564, 583, 616 parasitism 45-46, 107, 112, 126, 186, 188, 491 parenthood 41, 73, 118-119, 126-127 passivity 196 patterns 16, 43, 45, 94, 96, 100101, 106, 120, 193, 207, 216-218, 224, 227-228,

329, 384, 390, 397, 409, 486, 492, 497, 499, 500, 506, 517, 520, 522, 533, 536, 599, 602, 604, 611, 613, 617-618, 628, 635 peopling 101, 207-208, 210-212, 214, 216, 221, 225, 227, 229, 231, 247, 377, 450, 455, 613, 616 Phaedrus 486 phenomenology 219, 424, 428, 446-447 Phoenix, Joaquin 473, 477 photography 137, 177, 410-411, 417, 456, 571 phylogenesis 118-119 Pinker, Steven 111, 510 Pirahã, the 135, 142 placebo 159 planning 193, 315, 329-330, 437, 442, 445-446, 591, 594 pleasure 12, 14, 24-26, 29, 49-50, 53-58, 87, 107, 147, 150, 161, 186, 192, 260-261, 317, 327, 347-348, 364, 382, 430, 445-446, 478, 513-514, 551-564, 569570, 583, 590, 594, 627 poetry 50-54, 123, 144, 468-470 pointing 242, 256, 379, 390, 396409, 475, 603 poker 444 politeness 244, 271-280, 316, 524,

540-541, 569, 573 496 9, 17, 173-174, 182, 295, 512, 599, 601, 605 potlatch 154, 274-275, 278 pottery 120, 379, 519 prayer 151, 154, 221 predators 188-189, 311, 313 prediction 92, 120, 196, 233, 236, 362, 347, 357, 374, 448449, 451, 457, 548, 559, 633 preferences 188, 234-235, 237, 239, 243-244, 246, 249-250, 252-253, 574 prefrontal cortex 78, 146-147, 447, 451-452 prestige 19, 137, 192, 272-275, 278-282 primates 169-170, 187, 492, 510 privacy 135, 170-171, 177, 217, 558, 565-570, 572-574 procreation 27, 41-42, 73, 402, 526 programming 424, 488-489 prohibition 55, 60-61, 63, 70, 75, 193-195, 495, 554 psilocybin 18, 150, 496 psychedelics 18, 24-25, 150, 496, 526 psychopathy 308, 311-314, 317 puberty 120 punishment 41, 234, 254, 265, 271, 451 puzzles 353-354, 360, 364-365, Pollan, Michael postrationalism

369, 371, 373, 376-377, 603 Pynchon, Thomas 377 racism 109, 401 randomness 92, 526 Rao, Venkatesh 295-296, 386, 409, 465, 484, 506, 626 refactoring 493, 525 refrigeration 428 religion 8-9, 13-14, 17, 44, 54, 113, 125, 137, 139, 141-142, 153-155, 157, 173-174, 184, 198, 230, 288, 323, 325, 409, 520, 525, 616 reputation 134, 168, 264, 283-284, 286, 304-306, 308, 571, 615 revolutions 234-235, 243, 251, 523, 525 Ribbonfarm 8, 10, 15, 116, 129, 141, 198, 205, 293, 296, 339, 385, 419, 422, 465, 479, 484, 545, 549, 601, Ridley, Matt 110-111 Ridley, Matthew 110-111 risk taking 24, 53-55, 260-270, 301318, 451-453, 501 ritual 7, 9, 11-12, 14, 17-19, 82, 85, 125, 132, 140, 142143, 148-163, 165-171, 174-179, 181-185, 187, 191-199, 201-203, 214,

216, 221-224, 227-230, 251, 264, 266, 282, 289, 299, 304, 323, 326, 331, 333, 358, 406, 408, 481, 484, 505-506, 510-511, 513, 559, 565, 581, 601602, 618, 627 ritual clearcutting 185, 193, 197 Rochat, Philippe 83, 135-137, 139, 208209, 213-214, 507, 510, 615-616 romanticism 504 running 82, 146-147, 511, 514, 543, 562-564, 581, 583, 586, 603, 618-628 Russia 235, 608 Sabbath, the 158, 195, 240 sacredness 7, 20, 73, 160-161, 164, 170, 198, 200-201, 231, 236-240, 242, 244, 246, 251-252, 263, 270, 288289, 295, 406, 477, 521, 524-526, 530, 602, 611612, 614-615 sacredness warfare 237, 251-252 sacred, the 7, 12, 64-65, 68, 73, 129, 154, 156-157, 159-162, 164, 170-171, 173, 177, 198-204, 231, 238-239, 242, 263, 270, 288-289, 295, 357, 401, 521, 524526, 528, 530, 602, 611-

612, 614-615 53, 133, 154-155, 157161, 167-171, 304, 326, 354, 526 sadomasochism 139, 616 salvia 306 Schank, Roger 47-48, 93 Schegloff, Emmanuel 362, 364-366, 369, 377 Schmidhuber, Jeurgen 10, 107, 382, 466 seasteading 509 self-awareness 83, 96, 210, 454, 461, 616 self-deception 138-139, 266-268 self, the 11, 47, 132-133, 135-136, 138-139, 208, 210-213, 231, 245-246, 402-403, 436, 447, 449, 453, 452, 456, 507, 512-513, 547, 571, 587, 591, 615-616 self-worth 230-231, 400, 403 selves, future 260-262, 438 serotonin 554 sex 28, 49, 55-56, 136, 158, 246, 331, 408, 514, 526, 554-559, 563, 573, 580, 616 sexuality 39-40, 53, 136-137, 139, 155, 186-189, 210, 236, 311, 364, 445, 526, 557558, 560 Shakespeare, William 430, 471 shame 136, 139, 160, 191, 222, sacrifice

264, 285, 310, 312-313, 552, 572-573, 616 Shannon, Claude 534-535 signaling 9, 44, 71, 154-157, 160, 162, 183, 187, 192, 223224, 240, 255, 264, 266, 287, 304, 306, 308, 406, 408, 513-514, 517, 560 Simler, Kevin 141, 169, 182, 213, 272, 278, 317, 586, 637 Simplicio 9 simulations 60, 82, 85-87, 210, 214, 319, 335-336, 442-443, 445-446 sincerity 18, 142-143, 157-158, 238-239, 333, 337, 571 Sisyphus 474 SlateStarCodex 392 smartphones 395, 417, 528 social media 407, 419-424, 427, 429433, 435, 614 sociopathy 265, 295-297, 567 Socrates 467, 476-477, 521 solipsism, Cartesian 209 Sontag, Susan 199 Sorenson, E. Richard 132, 134-135, 163-164 sorrow of choice 34, 36 spectacle 140, 177, 497 speech 142, 156-157, 180-182, 237, 239, 250-252, 266, 308, 361, 406, 450, 521, 591

spontaneity 146 sports 52, 154, 166-167, 227, 231, 331, 358, 407, 409, 412, 430, 504, 514, 561, 564, 606 standards 194, 203, 226, 284-285, 543, 570-571 status 156-157, 211, 229, 236, 262, 268, 271-272, 275, 277-278, 342, 555, 571, 588 Stephen King 342 strangers 214, 310, 569 stress 98, 531, 540, 580, 589, 596 St. Rev 9, 93, 196, 233, 240, 348 structure-destruction 576-578, 591 structure-preservation 576-578, 581, 583-584, 590-591, 596 Sublemon, the 9, 161 subsistence 191, 272, 274-276, 279, 281, 337, 492, 524 substitutes 168, 194, 196, 398, 454, 498, 551-552 Suchman, Mark 290, 292-293 sunlight 216, 434, 464, 494, 505, 559, 562, 569 superorganisms 272-274, 278, 282 surprise 106-107, 234, 259, 310, 341, 345, 351, 374, 378, 515 surveillance 135, 568-569

Suttles, Wayne symbol

274-276, 278 94-95, 237, 251, 280, 289, 326, 328, 350, 379, 383, 446, 538 systems 13, 31, 34, 41, 45, 61, 72, 81, 97-98, 100, 104107, 153, 175-176, 178, 181-184, 192, 196, 201, 210, 223, 272, 274-275, 278-279, 281, 290, 292, 324, 346, 375, 386, 431, 469, 472, 481, 488, 490492, 495, 506, 512, 528, 548, 564, 576, 581, 599, 601, 604, 609, 618, 630 Szabo, Nick 133, 159, 265, 281, 519, 526 taboo 160, 259, 270 Talmud 175 tattooes 264 television 171, 212, 226-227, 332, 341, 358, 372-373, 419, 429-430, 458, 477, 573574 Tenenbaum, Josh 350 terminal illness 33-34, 56-57, 72-73, 256 terminal value 273 terrorism 289 textiles 119, 162, 276, 286, 412, 415, 449, 462, 517, 524, 582 theater 17, 49, 200, 319, 401,

Thurston, Haley tiling structures tobacco trade-offs tradition Traven, B tribes Trier, Lars von trolling Turchin, Peter Turing test Turner, Frederick TVTropes Twitter Unabomber, the unbundling uniformity utilitarianism vaccines Velleman, J. David Venus of Willendorf violence

428, 430, 570, 622 161, 203 11, 13, 216, 223, 227, 464-465, 488, 492-494, 501-502, 504, 609 260-261, 560 94, 107, 133, 158-159, 273, 501, 563 9, 39, 106, 137, 164, 174, 198, 209, 500, 552, 586 518 43, 119, 136, 175-176, 201, 484, 504 500, 589 173, 333-335, 473-477 123-124, 274, 406-407 93 321-325, 336, 469-470, 514 101, 341 9-10, 80-81, 108, 154, 182, 191, 245, 342, 407, 422, 425, 527, 537, 614 524 521-523, 574 483, 492, 501, 538 9, 24, 26, 217, 592 76, 159, 249, 526 31-36, 64-65, 256 519-520 166, 168, 177, 234, 495, 608

vitamins 114-115, 474, 629-630 Viznut 493-494 voluntariness 7, 41, 43-44, 76 Vonnegut, Kurt 71, 231, 363 war on drugs, the 61, 80, 495-496, 506 weaving 119, 276, 286, 462, 517 weddings 181, 308, 408 weeds 189-190, 237, 309 well-being 110, 126, 133, 141, 233, 278, 280, 322, 420, 485, 491, 522, 552, 567 wilderness 324, 432-434, 474, 568, 624 Winn, Peter 176 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 412-413, 417-418 Xenosystems 110 Yudkowsky, Eliezer 8-9 zoom 410-412, 417