Aporia

Simen and I disagree about whether there can be anything “objective” about art. As a Popperian, I believe that the distinction between the objective and the subjective (or the relative) has been misunderstood and hyperbolized. Perhaps nothing is objective, but that does not mean that all is subjective. Newton’s proposed laws of motion were, for centuries, “objectively” true; confirmed by all experimental tests, they formed the basis of thousands of discoveries in physics and other fields. These discoveries were themselves experimentally tested, and themselves led to thousands of discoveries in the exponential fashion to which we’ve become accustomed.

But Newton was wrong; his laws were inaccurate. In David Deutsch’s terms, they were very, very good misconceptions, just as Einstein’s better ideas are very, very good misconceptions that will eventually be replaced by even better, more accurate, deeper ideas that explain more with less. This process is progressive: science gets better and better, even though it is purely the creation of “subjective” human conjecture —imagination— tested against reality for utility. We might say that the history of human knowledge is one of conjectures which are never complete or objective but which are ever-improving. To be ever-improving, they must be moving towards something; if they cannot reach it, they approach it as an asymptote does a line. Science asymptotically approaches objective, complete truth, never arriving but getting closer and closer (¹) . It is not objective —as the work of humans, how could it be?— but neither is it aimless or subjective.

But what about art? We do not tend to think that art is progressive. Indeed, the attitude of the age treats art as a private utterance, as pure subjectivity, or at best as a personal religion of some entertaining use to others. One epistemological consequence of the democratic ethos, unmoored from axiomatic values, is that we struggle with the idea of objectivity in anything, although we incoherently exempt the sciences from our anxious doubt. But this is a temporary phase, a confusion. It is not the case that art is purely subjective, aimless, without teleology or purpose; it is rather the case that art, like science, improves over time because it asymptotically approaches something. It happens to be the same “something” that science hews to: reality.

Consider the following work of art from tens of thousands of years ago:

From Chauvet, this depiction is among the earliest instances of art; it features a range of animals including, most prominently, cave lions. From tens of thousands of years later, in the 19th century, here is the head of a lion painted by Théodore Géricault:

It’s obvious that this is a better depiction, in part because we can reasonably assume that the intent of these two artists, across so much time, was similar: to capture and convey something essential about the lion. This intent was almost certainly inexplicit for the ancient artist, and may have expressed itself in other ways which recur throughout the history of art. For example, artists have occasionally conceived of their mission in ceremonial, religious, or supernatural terms, imagining that by performing acts in concert with images they might control reality (²). In later centuries, they might consider their art in more subtle religious, political, pedagogical, ideological, or emotional terms. But a sufficiently abstract definition might cover most cases:

Art seeks to virtualize phenomena for human benefit.

By “virtualize,” I mean only that what art offers us it offers on our terms. One can experience tragedy when a loved-one dies; one can know the awe and power of the lion when one sees it enter a cave in which one’s family is camped. Art seeks to make these phenomena, and the meanings they provide, available to you apart from the uncontrollable and contingent world, for a variety of reasons. Through art, we are enriched by experiences with less risk of suffering or injury; experiences are made more portable and reproducible, and are freed from temporality; we can begin at least to portray what we imagine, even if we cannot yet build it; and so on. Art, then, supports the same accelerated development of knowledge that consciousness, metaphor and language, and reason support, and all are related. Whereas we once built knowledge accidentally and slowly, when the inexplicit knowledge of environment and utility embodied by genes would lead to those genes’ replication and spread, we now have a range of means for building knowledge rapidly and at little cost. We can, at our discretion, experience alternative modes of being, the lives of others, worlds we’ve never seen; we can be taken deep within ourselves or so far away that we can no longer remember our names.

And from this, we learn. From art, from the virtualization of phenomena far removed from our practical realities, we derive values, politics, and purposes, in addition to whatever assortment of facts and information the art carries with it. Some essential values we seem incapable of arriving at any other way, especially in the absence of axioms or authority: compassion and empathy, for example, depend on the recognition of the humanness of others but are hardly logically compulsory propositions; art is unparalleled at conveying, in experiential and therefore broadly-intelligible terms, the bases of such moral notions, even to the ignorant and resistant. (³) Art is where we find meanings we cannot reason and experiences that we cannot otherwise have; that we recognize the value and utility of these experiences and meanings but cannot yet rationally justify them doesn’t mean that they’re purely subjective. The fact that our ancestors didn’t understand the stars by which they navigated didn’t make those stars subjective either. They were simply little-understood, but their utility was evident to all. The same is true of art and culture, emergent phenomena we dismiss because of weaknesses in our contemporary philosophies. What we cannot reduce we pretend doesn’t exist.

The consequences of purpose

If we say that “art seeks to virtualize phenomena for human benefit,” we can begin to critique art apart from distracting historicisms. This liberates us from, among other traps, referentiality and academic preoccupations. We can attempt to discuss art concretely in terms of its aims:

• Does the work virtualize phenomena well? Does it use the best forms for the phenomena it pursues? Does it use effective available techniques for their virtualization? Are the relevant parts of the phenomena captured and expressed? Does the work have a purpose, and are its aesthetic choices suitable for that purpose?
• Is the work novel? If it isn’t, it won’t “work,” for just as sound science that discovers what science already knows is redundant and contributes nothing, repetitive art with cliched expressions, moribund forms, or a derivative purpose is redundant and contributes nothing. Novelty is what permits consciousness to attend to phenomena, and is therefore a foundational value in art.
• Do humans benefit? The benefit may be to the artist alone, which is perfectly fine but should be understood as an extremely narrow sort of aim, like a scientific discovery that extends the life of a single human. The tension between an artist’s desire to express himself purely and without calculations about reception and the fact that art must benefit humans or be pointless is irreducible and beneficial, itself a metaphor for the paradox of selfhood.
• Art that is about art is as science about science: useful for practitioners but insufficiently universal in scope. Art that is about artists is as science about scientists: likely to be worthless where it cannot be generalized, and where it can it is hardly about individuals anyway.

An important note: art makes virtualized reality possible both for external sense experiences like seeing a lion or a landscape and internal, phenomenological experiences like emotional states or even qualia. The virtualization of meaningful human phenomena might involve nothing representational —music often does not— or taken from the world outside of us. A work of art which captures, provokes, or explores something like sorrow, hope, love, or fear might be highly abstract, impressionistic, unusual, just as our internal life is.

Artists are technologists

I’ve mentioned qualia twice, once implicitly noting that some do not believe they exist and once by noting that art captures them well. Qualia were first described by C.I. Lewis in 1929:

There are recognizable qualitative characters of the given, which may be repeated in different experiences, and are thus a sort of universals; I call these “qualia.” But although such qualia are universals, in the sense of being recognized from one to another experience, they must be distinguished from the properties of objects.

Another way of putting it: when you look at a red sign, the “redness” you see doesn’t exist anywhere. The sign is an almost entirely-empty latticework of vibrating particles. Photons bounce off of some of these and enter your eye at a wavelength, but that wavelength is a mathematical description: it has no color in it, and photons themselves are colorless. Your mind experiences “redness,” but you might also say that it “creates” or “invents” redness when prompted by certain light phenomena which themselves have nothing to do, now or ever, with “redness,” which doesn’t exist. Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel-prize winning quantum physicist, put it thus:

The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so.

That one of the founders of modern physics didn’t believe a physical or physiological explanation for qualia would be forthcoming is arresting. But more to the point, while scientists and philosophers try to determine what “redness” or “sorrow” really is, as a quale, artists are virtualizing qualia and catalyzing them in audiences. Indeed, much of the personal quality that art has consists in its relationship to deep, individuated qualia we ourselves hardly comprehend.

For millennia art outstripped the sciences in its ability to understand and recreate qualia, virtualize reality, and provide ennobling, edifying, educational, and entertaining simulations for humans. Indeed, art pushed science, demanding better technologies which required deeper understanding in dozens of fields. The demands of art pushed architecture, and therefore engineering and chemistry and materials sciences; art required new resources for colors and sculptures, shaping societies economically; the musical arts were constrained awfully until technology turned music from vanishing performances into enduring, widely-distributed works.

All of which is to say: artists are natural technologists. Historically, they’ve pursued the newest and best techniques, materials, and forms. When the methodology for achieving perspective became clear, few resisted it on the basis of a calcified iconographic style considered to be “high art,” or if some did they’ve been suitably forgotten. And had new inks, better canvases, or some unimaginable invention given superior means to the impressionists to capture washes of light and mood —like, say, film— they’d have used whatever was available. The purpose of painting isn’t paint, after all; nor is the purpose of writing a book. (⁴)

The purpose is instead to virtualize phenomena for the benefit of humans. The best techniques for doing so do indeed change; the schools of thought that shape artists wax, wane, wear out; intellectual movements, critical and popular reaction, and technology are all part of the contingency in which we work. But the orientation of art should not be towards the ephemeral (except in exploring ephemerality itself, permanent and vexing) but towards deeper, universal, clarifying aims.

In elementary school, we were taught about Europe’s cathedrals. Centuries of fatality- and error-filled construction and engineering innovation on the edge of recklessness produced spaces intended to virtualize the experience of heavenly light, spiritual elevation, credence in the sacred. A peasant from the fields could enter one and immediately understand; he’d not know Suger’s theories or the tradeoffs involved in the buttresses, but the purpose and effect of the art were somehow not lost on him. The same would likely have been true had he seen Michelangelo’s David or been permitted to hear Mozart or Hildegard of Bingen. With exceptions, of course, art has aspired to universality.

The extraordinary present circumstance in which art is not expected to be intelligible, to have any “benefit” beyond the meaninglessly subjective “enjoyment” of the “consumer” is an aberration. That art is denied its progressive success at virtualizing greater and greater parts of reality, conveying ever-more phenomena with ever-greater fidelity to ever-more people, is the result of a philosophical disruption and a subsequent error. We found God dead; we asked what had god-like authority and reeled to realize that nothing can. But we’ve accepted that somehow, science exceeds merely moody paradigms. It works. It gives us control over the universe and ourselves, reduces contingency and accident, allows us to be what we think we should be.

Art is part of the same process, and can be evaluated similarly. In allowing us to virtualize and experiment with realities and phenomena, and, gradually, to live in those realities, it is part of the same epistemological and creative process as science. We are simply at an earlier stage, and just as someone might have surveyed the globe in 500 CE and concluded, “There is nothing objective about the so-called sciences; it appears that every culture and every society simply invents its own ideas and none is really any better than the rest,” so we now struggle to understand how aesthetics and morality might someday be understood teleologically, nor as expressions of “taste” but as forms of knowledge-generation, experimentation, and even reality-building.

Perhaps we are transitioning from artists-as-depictors and artists-as-catalyzers (⁵) to artists-as-world-makers. To create something, you must first understand it; to create a world for humans to experience, you must first understand how humans experience the world. Once you can reliably replicate any sense-perception, you must think of how such sense-perceptions are experienced in the mind: as qualia. Then you must think of how to generalize or objectify qualia, or how to catalyze them. This is not a task for science alone, though whether it is not yet or not at all I cannot say. It will involve art, however, particularly in the form it takes when it wants to extend itself into life: design.

Design is art which cannot ignore the outcome it pursues, which uses every technology or tool it can conjure to succeed, and which accepts the judgement of audiences. In this way, one can understand why so much of the vitality of art now resides in the commercial space: there, the artists still care about audiences, still have aims apart from themselves, still seek resonance, utility, universality. My anxieties about art stem mostly from this concern: if purposive, deliberate, universal art becomes the province of commercial design, art’s values will gravitate towards market values. The hope: those values will evolve intelligently through self-correction. But it seems safer to me to have a cultural space which accords art precisely the same sort of respect we pay science so that the arts can pursue their ends purely —ends far deeper than markets, capitalism, any historicism, incidentally— just as science exists apart from technology and its commercialization. But I doubt whether such a space is possible so long as we insist that all art is subjective, no teleology is imaginable, and there is no such thing as progress. Such an insistence is, in my view, both materially incorrect and snobbish, arising more from nostalgia for older forms or aristocratic art-culture than any real analysis of the present. We live in a world in which more people read, listen to music, and experience works of art than ever before. This is both art’s triumph and a prelude to its expanding role. From its earliest efforts to virtualize reality through its portrayal and later attempts to produce specific experiences in audiences, art aspires to the creation of worlds. As it converges with technology —in video games, for example— these worlds will grow to support the range of experiences and meanings humans desire, as art always has.

Quantum physicist and philosopher David Deutsch describes a fantasy of instrumentalism: an extraterrestrial computer like an oracle which can predict the outcome of any experiment:

[I]magine that an extraterrestrial scientist has visited the Earth and given us an ultra-high-technology ‘oracle’ which can predict the outcome of any possible experiment, but provides no explanations… How would the oracle be used in practice? In some sense it would contain the knowledge necessary to build, say, an interstellar spaceship. But how exactly would that help us to build one, or to build another oracle of the same kind — or even a better mousetrap? The oracle only predicts the outcomes of experiments. Therefore, in order to use it at all we must first know what experiments to ask it about. If we gave it the design of a spaceship, and the details of a proposed test flight, it could tell us how the spaceship would perform on such a flight. But it could not design the spaceship for us in the first place. And even if it predicted that the spaceship we had designed would explode on take-off, it could not tell us how to prevent such an explosion. That would still be for us to work out. And before we could work it out, before we could even begin to improve the design in any way, we should have to understand, among other things, how the spaceship was supposed to work. Only then would we have any chance of discovering what might cause an explosion on take-off. Prediction —even perfect, universal prediction— is simply no substitute for explanation.

Similarly, in scientific research the oracle would not provide us with any new theory. Not until we already had a theory, and had thought of an experiment that would test it, could we possibly ask the oracle what would happen if the theory were subjected to that test. Thus, the oracle would not be replacing theories at all: it would be replacing experiments. It would spare us the expense of running laboratories and particle accelerators. Instead of building prototype spaceships, and risking the lives of test pilots, we could do all the testing on the ground with pilots sitting in flight simulators whose behavior was controlled by the predictions of the oracle.

The oracle would be very useful in many situations, but its usefulness would always depend on people’s ability to solve scientific problems in just the way they have to now, namely by devising explanatory theories. It would not even replace all experimentation, because its ability to predict the outcome of a particular experiment would in practice depend on how easy it was to describe the experiment accurately enough for the oracle to give a useful answer, compared with doing the experiment in reality. After all, the oracle would have to have some sort of ‘user interface’. Perhaps a description of the experiment would have to be entered into it, in some standard language. In that language, some experiments would be harder to specify than others. In practice, for many experiments the specification would be too complex to be entered. Thus the oracle would have the same general advantages and disadvantages as any other source of experimental data, and it would be useful only in cases where consulting it happened to be more convenient than using other sources. To put that another way: there already is one such oracle out there, namely the physical world. It tells us the result of any possible experiment if we ask it in the right language (i.e. if we do the experiment), though in some cases it is impractical for us to ‘enter a description of the experiment in the required form’ (i.e. to build and operate the apparatus). But it provides no explanations.

The universe is an oracle to which we can submit any properly-phrased question and receive an answer in the form of uninterpreted data. I think that’s a lovely feature of our world. However: it is only the creative, synthetic interpretation of data —the generation of explanations, a form of knowledge constructed so far as we know only by humans— that makes this useful.

Data-collection, testing, experimentation that takes place without meaningful explanations is a popular sort of ignorance in some fields; it accords with the uninterrogated ascent of the quantitative over the qualitative. But experiments derive from explanatory knowledge, not the other way around: and while an experiment can falsify an explanation, it cannot create one or even confirm one in any final sense.

Nice things to consider: our universe is an oracle that will answer any question we put to it; and conjectural creativity is essential for the formation of explanatory knowledge (which catalyzes more questions to pose to the universe, and therefore more explanations to conjure, test, explain…).

Perhaps there is a relationship between how interiority defines consciousness; how artificial intelligence has thus far failed to even approach consciousness and how it’s not even clear how it might; and how technologies that insist on the exteriorization of self reduce a sense of self. 

Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, 2009 (quoted by the excellent Carvalhais):

“Being conscious means that a particular set of facts is available to you: that is, all those facts related to your living in a single world. Therefore, any machine exhibiting conscious experience needs an integrated and dynamical world-model.”

Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture, 1948:

“[W]hoever philosophizes takes a step beyond the work-a-day world and its daily routine. The meaning of taking such a step is determined less by where it starts from as by where it leads to… just where is the philosopher going when he transcends the wold of work? Clearly, he steps over a boundary: what kind of region lies on the other side of this boundary? … No matter how such questions could be answered in detail, in any case, both regions, the world of work and the “other realm,” where the philosophical act takes place in its transcending of the working world —both regions belong to the world of man, which clearly has a complex structure…

It is in the nature of a living thing to have a world: to exist and live in the world, in “its” world. To live means to be “in” a world. But is not a stone also “in” a world? Is not everything that exists “in” a world? If we keep to the lifeless stone, is it not with and beside other things in the world? Now, “with,” “beside,” and “in” are prepositions, words of relationship; but the stone does not really have a relationship with the world “in” which it lives. Relationship, in the true sense, joins the inside with the outside; relationship can only exist where there is an “inside,” a dynamic center, from which all operation has its source and to which all that is received, all that is experienced, is brought… [A world can be] considered as a whole field of relationships. Only a being that has an ability to enter into relationships, only a being with an “inside,” has a “world”; only such a being can exist in the midst of a field of relations.

Consciousness is, in part, a matter of there being an “inside” which is not part of the outside world, although it can relate to it. One reason it is difficult to imagine, even in principle, how artificial intelligence could achieve consciousness is the fact that there is no inscrutable interiority to a programmed machine: there is no “inside,” only commands from without in the language of an external world.

It is not clear, of course, how the interiority of human consciousness works, but whether it is some combination of deterministic and stochastic processes which produce an emergent, irreducible phenomenon or an even less-understood mechanism —for example David Deutsch’s ideas about the role quantum computation might play— it is made obvious by the depressing absence of progress in AI research that we have no notion how to reproduce it.

A more pressing question is: how do technologies which demand the exteriorization of what is “inside” affect consciousness? Is it the case that part of why it seems more difficult to achieve real connection —real relationship, in Pieper’s sense— is that we increasingly reside online, where our selves are shaped by systems which cannot support our interiority? There can be no “inside” on Facebook or Twitter (save, perhaps, for DMs and messages which, it should be noted, are where our most sincere and authentic interactions occur); there can be no monetization of interiority, nor even its capture; it is not a post type nor data we can share.

Artificial intelligence cannot achieve consciousness without interiority and a “world” of relations; we ourselves are creatures of consciousness living on systems incapable (both technologically and because of business incentives) of permitting interiority. Perhaps this accounts for our increasing artificiality.

In a chapter on political systems in his remarkable book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch notes that

…compromises -amalgams of the policies of the contributors- have an undeservedly high reputation. Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally, as I have explained, bad policies. If a policy is no one’s idea of what will work, then why should it work? But that is not the worst of it. The key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it.

Recognize at once one of the magical qualities of the American political system! Despite the fact that we live in the laboratory of the real -we can present the universe with any meaningful, properly-phrased question and reliably receive an indisputable answer- neither party ever believes that its policies have been falsified. 

Often, this is because our democracy -such as it is- requires compromise. In ten years, when America’s health care system is still a hideous, tragic mess, Republicans will believe that this is due to the faulty premises of Democratic legislation, while Democrats will believe that the legislation was fatally weakened by obstinate Republicans. While we can of course reason our way to our own hypotheses, we will lack a truly irrefutable conclusion, the sort we now have about, say, whether the sun revolves around the earth.

Thus: a real effect of compromise is that it prevents intact ideas from being tested and falsified. Instead, ideas are blended with their antitheses into policies that are “no one’s idea of what will work,” allowing the perpetual political regurgitation, reinterpretation, and relational stasis that defines the governance of the United States. 

The Autocratic Artist

There has been recent occasion to recall an odd organizational fact: the putative democratic spirit notwithstanding, it is nearly always the case that real artists are autocrats. Collaborative creativity isn’t an exception to this rule; typically, in bands for example, each collaborating artist is dictatorial within his domain, and whatever the extent of his partnership with his peers, there is rarely compromise.

This is not to say there is no persuasion. But persuasion is a radically different epistemological process:

• to compromise is to treat competing ideas as mathematical sums whose average might be equal to (or, more preposterously, greater than) the individual ideas themselves; while
• to persuade is merely to convince others of the soundness of an idea, often without the cost of instantiating any of the competing ideas.

Pondering the inexplicable, even disheartening superiority of the auteur over the democratic committee -considering one’s favorite tyrannical director, or weighing Google’s chances against Apple- one wonders: why do compromises not embody an aggregate of the intelligence of constituent ideas (or policies)? Why do compromises typically produce wholes pitifully less than the sum of their parts?

Deutsch’s book suggests that the real surprise is that anyone should imagine they would do otherwise. As a simple matter of epistemology, there is no reason why the blending of competing ideas would produce a better idea. Imagine if someone had proposed to Galileo and the Catholic Church that they compromise and agree that neither the sun nor the earth revolve, or that they somehow revolve around each other!

This seems obvious enough in science and other fields whose ideas we regard as being predictive, or isomorphic to physical reality in some quantifiable way. But it is no less the case in artistic and creative endeavors.

This is because creative ideas are types of explanations, and every explanation involves whole constellations of interdependent notions, speculations, assertions; a well-developed creative idea -a design, a song, a poem- is not an assembly of fungible units. It is a complete hypothesis unto itself about what will work for a given human purpose.

So while it seems perfectly natural, even morally preferable, to involve many voices and subject creative ideas to the scrutiny of committees, the result tends to be disastrous: the writer knows that his diction depends in part for its effect on his syntax, his punctuation on the typography in which it is rendered; the photographer knows that the same scene shot in a more commercially-appealing way is no longer beautiful but is now banal; the designer knows that the entire premise of his layout is undone by the substitution of a compromised header; etcetera.

That is: creative ideas embody whole explanatory and speculative matrices, even in their minor details. Compromises dilute the implicit, interdependent elements which account for the form and content of creative ideas, introducing new elements (from others, from committees) which derive from wholly different notions about the problems being solved, the relations between the elements involved, the speculations which are justified by experience and evidence, and so on.

Worse: compromise makes it impossible to sort out precisely which elements, or which implicit premises, were responsible for the success or failure of any given creative idea.

The Fault

When people discuss why small companies are more innovative than large companies, or why dictatorial creative thinkers -who are often terribly unpleasant people- produce better work than assemblies of talent, they often talk about speed, about “nimbleness,” and about bureaucracy.

But the essential problem is philosophical: creative ideas must be understood as hypotheses about certain sorts of problems. For the writer, the painter, the designer are all trying to solve a specific problem, and their hypotheses cannot be averaged anymore than Galileo’s could. While persuasion and collaboration are perfectly sensible, the real advantage the best innovators and creators have is that they understand that compromise is epistemologically invalid and procedurally fatal.

So why does compromise have its “undeservedly high reputation”? I believe it is because we are discomfited by the philosophical implications of the fact that some ideas are objectively better. We exempt science from our contemporary anxieties because its benefits are too explicit to deny, but in most creative fields we are no longer capable of accepting the superiority of some solutions to others; unable to sustain confidence in the soundness of the artistic problem-solving process, we will not provoke interpersonal or organizational conflict for the sake of mere ideas.

This sad, mistaken epistemological cowardice turns competing hypotheses into groundless, subjective opinions, and the reasonable course of action when managing conflicting, groundless opinions (about, say, what to order at a restaurant) is to compromise, because there is no better answer.

But the creative arts are not so subjective as we tend to think, which is why a talented, dictatorial auteur will produce better work than polls, focus groups, or hundreds of compromising committees.

So David Deutsch argues in The Beginning of Infinity, his breathtakingly profound and impossibly affecting new book. He continues:

Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not of prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress… If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.

A disciple of Karl Popper and a quantum physicist, Deutsch is everywhere concerned not with positive absolutes but with the process of conjecture, refutation, and the gradual improvement of our explanatory understanding of the world, as well as the corresponding ability to control it. Amidst his many lucid, remarkably direct assertions about what we can know, what we can do, and the moral repercussions which follow therefrom, he tentatively offers only one moral imperative: “…the moral imperative not to destroy the means of correcting mistakes is the only moral imperative… all other moral truths follow from it…”

If optimism is “a way of explaining failure,” it is because of another of his pronouncements, which he advises humanity to chisel on stone tables: problems are inevitable; and problems are soluble. That is: there is no possible stasis of sustainability for humanity, or any other species, within any ecosystem or civilization. Only a continuous process of problem-solving will suffice to ensure our survival, and not only our survival but our gradual triumph over evil.

Evil! It is not a word he uses often, nor is it a word often-used today, although I suspect this is less because any of us denies the existence of evil -death abounds, injustice abounds, the suffering of the innocent abounds- but because we deny the existence of the good. In any event, discussing evils caused by insufficient knowledge, Deutsch writes:

If we do not, for the moment, know how to eliminate a particular evil, or we know in theory but do not yet have enough time or resources (i.e., wealth), then, even so, it is universally true that either the laws of physics forbid eliminating it [or not]… The same must hold, equally trivially, for the evil of death -that is to say, the deaths of human beings from disease or old age. This problem… has an almost unmatched reputation for insolubility… But there is no rational basis for this reputation. It is absurdly parochial to read some deep significance into this particular failure, among so many, of the biosphere to support human life -or of medical science…

That humanity has not yet conquered death is due to one fact alone: that we have only been engaged in the critical, open-ended creation of knowledge for a few centuries, since the Enlightenment. Before it, fits and starts of such knowledge-creation are well-known, but none were sustained; all fell, all halted, some due to authoritarian political developments, some due to reactionary religious awakenings, and others due to happenstance accidents of history. Above all, Deutsch maintains, those societies in which proto-Enlightenments occurred tended to have a sense of optimism about the solubility of problems and the value of progress, an optimism more fragile than it appears, an optimism easily damaged.

He describes two heartbreaking interruptions in detail: Sparta’s defeat of Athens and Savonarola’s campaign against the Medici’s Florentine Renaissance- before concluding his chapter on optimism with a paragraph I will never forget, particularly when considering the real value of different cultural and political systems:

The inhabitants of Florence in 1494 or Athens in 404 BCE could be forgiven for concluding that optimism just isn’t factually true. For they knew nothing of such things as the reach of explanations or the power of science or even the laws of nature as we understand them, let alone the moral and technological progress that was to follow when the Enlightenment got under way. At the moment of defeat, it must have seemed at least plausible to formerly optimistic Athenians that the Spartans might be right, and to the formerly optimistic Florentines that Savonarola might be. Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

I will never forget this. Conflict between those who critically examine, creatively conjecture, seek understanding and technological mastery and the atavistic and retrograde elements who believe in some holy antiquity or some savage’s noble edenic idyll is a real one, a suprapolitical one, and it has real victims. All of us who will die count among this number.

Jack July is Will’s brother. Those who know Will are discomfited by his perfection and the modest ease with which he inhabits it, and his brother is more or less the same (but angrier!): a genetically-faultless, brilliant, and thoughtful human being who makes me want to open my wrists and pour my inferior life out all over the concrete before any girls come by and see how much shorter I am than they are.

That is how I’m going to introduce Jack July, who showed us around Oregon and now has a tumblelog. I am also reblogging his incredible note about Christian Bök.

I have written about Bök before; he wrote one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read: Eunoia. Working within ludicrous enabling limits beyond the overall restriction, Bök completed a book in which each chapter can use words with only one vowel: A, E, I, O, and U. The other requirements are as amazing.

Jack July alerts us that Bök is “striving to engineer a life form that becomes a durable archive for storing a poem, and a machine for writing a poem — a poem that can survive forever.”

[Bök] was inspired by a researcher at the PNWNR Lab in WA who recently enciphered the Disney classic It’s a Small World (After All) into bacteria, allowed them several rounds of division, and then retrieved a regrettably no-less putrescent copy of the song…

Anyway, this poet, who has enlisted the help of a no-doubt Rush-loving libertarian Canadian scientist from Calgary, thinks that perhaps an efficient means of first contact (in case the Vulcans can’t detect our warp trail) is the colonization of other planets with bacteria that encode campy publicity stunts.  In his interview with Nature, he says, “…My project is analogous to building a pyramid and then leaving undecipherable hieroglyphs all over it: later civilizations may not understand the language, but its presence will testify to the enduring legacy of our own civilization.”  Thanks for the explanation.

Bök’s desire to encode poetry into life is itself poetic, but beyond its lyrical or symbolic appeal it reminds me of the suggestion made by David Deutsch from the work of Richard Dawkins and Karl Popper that life is best thought of us encoded knowledge: processual knowledge, adaptive knowledge, even a sort of experiential knowledge (non-individual, of course). This is how the universe expresses knowledge: in life, which responds to and reflects the laws of time and space and matter and energy.

That poetry is the knowledge chosen here is all that’s odd; otherwise we might remark that Bök’s idea is already manifest: every organism is a code of abstracted knowledge, its DNA a high language directing low functions. Life seems to be the best and most durable way we have of coding, demonstrating, preserving, and developing knowledge, which in any event is so synonymous with life that neither exists apart from the other.

In other words: life is self-animating, self-propagating, self-extending knowledge. If anything, Bök’s plan is at most a variation on what already is.