Stories are about metabolizing meaningful change
Part 1/10 in the AI + speculative fiction series
In Media Res is monthly, with rare exceptions that will be clearly communicated.
We'll launch the newsletter with a ten-part series, adapted from a talk I gave to a small group of AI thought leaders through the Henderson Institute, BCG's internal think tank.
I'll walk us from my high-level understanding of what a story is, all the way down to an application of this understanding to one of my stories in particular, the recently published novella THE EXPERIMENT HIMSELF. Along the way, we’ll touch on various genres and sub-genres, including an in-depth look at how AI shows up in popular science fiction, and my take on why. The posts comprise a single cohesive narrative, but here on Substack we have the luxury of giving each of my fairly dense slides a little more breathing room. This is the director's cut of my talk.
Inevitably, we will finish each post having scratched the surface of ideas worthy of dissertations (for my fellow practicing authors and other experts, I welcome your objections, clarifications, and elaborations.) The greatest value of the series will lie in the connections between ideas that we'll build across posts, and the foundation this will set for the newsletter going forward. You will come away with:
An understanding of the philosophy that animates my ten-year plan and my creative ambitions in general,
A powerful framework for categorizing and discussing all your favorite AI characters across the entertainment landscape, from C3PO to Klara and the Sun and beyond,
A sense of how science fiction can constrain our real-world thinking about AI, and what this means for our current moment and collective future,
The DNA that makes THE EXPERIMENT HIMSELF both timely and timeless, and precisely why, despite everything else clamoring for your attention, you should buy and read this short gem of a book right now,
And more.
Let's begin.
Recommended Mindset: As you read this post, please conjure a story that has deeply resonated with you (a favorite book from childhood, a movie that brought you to tears, a Biblical narrative, a true story so compellingly told that it sticks with you to this day…). Hold the feeling it gave you close at hand, a reminder that the abstract ideas discussed here are only worth discussing because they cash out in the most tangible magic of your everyday life.
Stories are about metabolizing meaningful change.
Change, after all, is the only constant. At the highest level, stories can be thought of as depictions of characters (people like us, whether real or imaginary) reckoning with this inescapable aspect of our reality. Curated encounters with the blooming buzzing confusion, the flux into which we’ve been thrown.
But we have some serious unpacking to do. What do we mean by “metabolizing,” and what distinguishes “meaningful” change? Who counts as “people like us,” and why is a reckoning required at all?
Our existential situation
I type these words from the labor & delivery wing of Northside Hospital, the paint still wet on my uncle status and my sibling’s nursery. For my newborn niephling1 everything, literally everything, will be brand new.
But they are not a blank slate. They are already wildly complex. They’ve inherited, at minimum, a healthy dose of curiosity, a propensity for pattern recognition, a basic set of desires, a cute nose…
There is even a noticeable preference for some stimuli over others guiding their attention, particularly human voices and faces. You should’ve seen their first moments with my mom, eyes surprisingly bright and alert for 30 minutes old, so rapt by Grandma’s voice that they’d forgotten why they were crying.
Then they slept like a baby (they sleep so soundly, I think, because they are metabolizing their first influx of meaningful change.) For several quiet hours they were passed among cooing adults who have all experienced this very thing, and have all forgotten.
As they wake from their first nap, they will learn that this strange experience (experience itself) continues, sometimes after long interruptions of unconsciousness. Life goes on, whether they want it to or not. It wasn’t all a dream.
It will be hard.
It will be, it already is, magical as well. But no matter how well-resourced and well-loved the baby, growing up will be hard. The constant overwhelming flow of multi-sensory information on day one is hard enough, and will be complicated by the increasing self-awareness, the proliferation of desires, and the formation of a worldview. Then life will stay hard, though the nature of the difficulty will shift.
There is a specific sense in which life is hard that will concern us as storytellers, stemming from the double-edged sword of all that inherited complexity.
We are complex enough to have self-awareness, desires, and a model of the world.
Complexity is relative and multi-faceted. For our storytelling purposes, I have in mind a general psychological complexity (though psychological complexity will inevitably depend on physical complexity, it is the psychology we’re ultimately focused on). Within psychology, too, there are many distinct facets (the specific three in the title of this sub-section were chosen for a reason), but pretending we can plot them all on the same axis will do just fine for our purposes.
Complexity
If we wanted the axis to be comprehensive enough to include just about anything we could name, we might start on the far left with a featureless, dimensionless point in space, the theoretical simplest object. We'd move rightward through photons and electrons and other simple particles, pass through a stunning range of atoms and molecules, and eventually hit our first macroscopic objects, including, say, rocks.
We tend to dismiss rocks as simple objects, the pebbles in my backyard more or less interchangeable and unremarkable, even though (and this gets at what I meant by “complexity is relative”) we know each one is a unique combination of dozens or hundreds of elements and compounds, a rich internal patchwork of metals and minerals, highly structured crystalline regions abutting more jumbled portions, all of it formed from congealed sediment or cooled lava in a journey as long as the age of the planet…
But rocks have no psychology to speak of. They don't share the existential situation of storytellers like us.
Let's take another big leap rightward on our axis, past viruses, to the simplest uncontested living things: bacteria. (Notice that complexity does not necessarily correlate with size.)
Single-celled organisms have no psychology either.
But they represent a step change in the right direction that's worth noting.
A bacteria is greater than the sum of its parts, to a far greater degree than a rock is. (This, by the way, is another way of defining complexity on our axis—the further right you go, the less useful a laundry list of parts becomes in describing the full reality of the whole.)
With a rock, if I were to detail every molecule that comprises it, and their relative positions at a snapshot in time, you would have the gist. That’s pretty much what a rock is—a conglomeration of rocky stuff.
But if I detailed every molecule and their positions in a bacteria at a snapshot in time, we’ve only just gotten started. There's quite a bit of activity within bacteria, which also tend to move around, change shape and size, navigate an environment… all seemingly of their own accord. A cell is a dynamic system. It may be better understood as a process than a singular inert object. To encompass the full reality of a bacteria, we’d need to describe its behavior.
To describe a bacteria's behavior, even the most committed materialist, careful to avoid attributing design or purpose to blind nature, will likely find themselves using somewhat teleological language. The bacteria prefers warm environments over cold. It is drawn toward (or repulsed by) the light. It thrives at such and such salinity levels. As we observe the cell duplicating its DNA and other essential organelles, we might say it is gearing up or preparing for reproduction. Reproduction is the cell’s intention in that context, the point of all that coordinated activity. The bacteria seems to have some interest in its own survival, can take action (crawling or swimming in a particular direction, eating, attacking or defending) to make this more likely, and in any given situation, among the small portfolio of actions available to it, the bacteria may make something vaguely resembling a choice.
New concepts have come online on this part of our axis. Actors have walked onto the stage of nature for the first time—actors in the literal sense of beings capable of action. Bacteria have agency. They seem to be doing something, rather than merely passively obeying physical laws.
Everything bacteria do does obey physical laws, of course.
Just like everything we do does.
But even if, strictly speaking, we can do away with the teleological language above, and describe bacteria in purely physically reductionist terms (e.g., the bacteria moves in the direction of warmth and away from cold, just as a rock moves in the direction of the net force applied to it…), well, when it comes time to study the storage, transmission, transcription and translation of genetic information encoding countless proteins whose folded shapes catalyze specific reactions within interlocking chemical pathways that all float within the aqueous spherical bag of a protective lipid bilayer… when it comes time to investigate which compounds are allowed into the semipermeable membrane, which ones are allowed out, which ones shall not pass, and more to the point, why…
…Referencing the functions of these cellular elements within the whole will become, not merely a convenient shorthand, but the best, most accurate framing for making sense of what’s really going on. There’s a reason biologists use this sort of language in their work, as terms of art. It is the ends, rather than the means, that are often most effective for explaining, understanding, and predicting in the domain of life.
So let’s embrace the magic. It happens to be a feature of our natural world, that purpose and functions and reasons for action can arise from purposeless inert matter, when that matter is arranged according to the right sort of complexity.
And this must be the case, if we believe that humans form intentions and pursue goals, as we do daily. The axis simply admits that these attributes may be a spectrum, with our oldest evolutionary ancestors exhibiting rudimentary, pre-psychological versions of some of our most essential traits.
I like how the recently deceased Daniel Dennett puts it in From Bacteria to Bach and Back, a book-length treatment on how minds evolved from an initially mindless universe:
“Evolutionary processes brought purposes and reasons into existence the same way they brought color vision (and hence colors) into existence: gradually. If we understand the way our human world of reasons grew out of a simpler world where there were no reasons, we will see that purposes and reasons are as real as colors, as real as life. Thinkers who insist that Darwin has banished teleology should add, for consistency’s sake, that science has also demonstrated the unreality of colors and of life itself. Atoms are all there is, and atoms aren’t colored, and aren’t alive either. How could mere large conglomerations of uncolored, unalive things add up to colored, living things? This is a rhetorical question that should be, and can be, answered (eventually).”2
The “eventually” takes 500 more pages and most of an academic career, but is more or less successful in my opinion. Here’s my attempt at a one-word summary:
Complexity.
Earlier I wrote that characters in a story are “people like us.” Obviously, characters can be literally anything, including bacteria or rocks. Pixar’s winning formula involves bringing to life one charismatic inanimate object after another.
Off the top of my head, Ann Leckie's standalone fantasy novel, The Raven Tower, is told from the POV of a rock (who happens to be a god). I experimented with bacteria as characters in my flash fiction story, “Oxygen Holocaust,” which you can read for free here. I just finished Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-winning novel (much-deserved!), The Overstory, which opens in the voice of a forest:
“Trees even further away join in: All the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal—are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.”
Anything can be a character in a story. But the further to the left that thing lies on the complexity axis, the greater the anthropomorphizing required (the greater the departure from reality, the greater the suspension of disbelief asked of the audience, OR the greater the translation effort required to shoehorn the non-human perspective into human language) to give it the minimum psychological characteristics required—namely self-awareness, desires, and a model of the world.
So let's jump to the right again, finally, to us.
Self-awareness, desires, and a model of the world
Your desires are the sum total of everything you want.
Your model of the world is the sum total of everything you believe.
If your model of the world includes a “you are here” sign singling out one special entity as the self, then you have self-awareness.
When there is a mismatch between your desire (to eat) and your model of the world (there's no food within reach), you experience the gap between the two as lack.
If your desire is strong enough to galvanize action, we'll call the desire a motivation. You are motivated to address your lack, to close that gap (get off the couch, hit the drive-thru).
Your self-awareness includes some knowledge of your capabilities—the actions available to you for pursuing your desires, and how each of those actions will affect the world.
I imagine each of us with a mental control panel. Right now, my niephling spends some meaningful portion of their waking hours just mashing buttons at random. We learn through trial and error, and observation of others, and eventually some intentional practice, how to work these bodies we’ve ensoulled.
The thing is, we never learn our entire control panel. The damn thing goes on for miles. Eventually, pragmatically, we all tend to stop mashing buttons as we age. We discover some powerful combos that we return to again and again. We shift toward exploitation over exploration. There are buttons collecting dust just beyond the glow of our gaming lamp.
Much of the ebb and flow, the push and pull of human life can be understood as the interplay between these three psychological categories. We run around, trying to bring the world in line with our desires using whatever capabilities are available to us, to the best of our knowledge. We try and fail and learn and succeed.
We can play with the three psychological characteristics to design meaningful character arcs. The most extreme mismatches among them become blueprints for some of the most memorable, dramatic stories:
Models of the world
If everyone’s model of the world is literally completely wrong, you get something like The Matrix—humanity fed a bullshit reality wholesale.
On a smaller scale, but no less extreme or compelling, think of Room, Emma Donoghue’s novel (also adapted for film) about a boy who spends the first 5 years of his life in the room of his birth, unaware of the outside world or any social reality beyond Mom. The entire story is conveyed in first person from the boy’s perspective, allowing us to feel the mismatch between the character’s myopic world-model and our own, generating a tension that makes for riveting reading. (My pipeline novel, MANDARIN CHAMBER, is directly inspired by Room.)
Self-awareness
Self-awareness can be completely miscalibrated, as in the tried and true epic fantasy trope of the humble farmer destined to save the world (see also Star Wars, every bit as much as The Wheel of Time). Unknowingly being born with a high Midichlorian count or the ability to channel the One Power (i.e., magical powers!) must be quite the shock. We can think of this as the most radical possible expansion of the mental control panel, where you thought you only had a few casual buttons (plant corn, harvest corn), but actually you could level cities and command kings.
And I don’t mean to imply that larger-than-life stakes or characters are required to make this stuff work. Imagine a shy high schooler with low self-esteem, who for the first time, on a whim, makes a joke out loud in class. Everyone laughs, even the teacher. Her peers throughout the school, popular and otherwise, look at her with a newfound respect. They see her. Suddenly she finds herself with actual power over what other kids do, think, say, and feel. Imagine—really imagine—the rush of that.
Any quantum leap in your understanding of yourself and your role can be just as jarring and intoxicating as learning to fly, however mundane. Coming into your own is magic. (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World plays with this insight by depicting the mundane drama of a lame Canadian kid as a Street Fighter-style arcade game—very cute.)
Desires
You can desire something impossible, or nearly so. There are tragic and triumphant versions of this setup.
Tragically, if you can’t be happy without approval from—or revenge on—your deceased father figure, you’re pretty much screwed.
Or what if you don’t want to die? Imagine the self-centered emperor so desperate to escape mortality that he sells his soul and bankrupts the kingdom and still only manages to take everyone down with him.
More triumphant is the typical sports story, in which the underdog faces “impossible” odds, then succeeds through heroic effort (and a bit of luck and a lot of support from the right mentors). Unlike the epic fantasy heroes mentioned above, the emphasis here is less on inherited destiny and more on earned outcomes, which can make for uniquely satisfying and inspiring storytelling (though, to be clear, there’s typically some innate gift to begin with, as in The Queen’s Gambit’s emphasis on Anya-Taylor’s savant-level mathematical reasoning in childhood, which she must then spend the season honing). Here we watch Rocky or the latest karate kid actively transform themselves into something they were not, into someone worthy of stepping into the ring with Apollo Creed, onto the ice with the Soviet Union. More generally, any training montage is essentially the sped-up process of a character constructing additions to their control panel—additions they’ll need for even a prayer of fulfilling their desire.
It gets more complicated, if we’d like it to. (Our complexity has layers upon layers!)
For one, desires can be incompatible. Sometimes my baby niephling is about to fall asleep, milk-drunk, eyelids heavy and drooping after hours of stimulation… and then they’ll jerk themselves awake, visibly fighting to squeeze in one more moment of interaction with whoever’s holding them. In other words, they’re already capable of FOMO, and it’s wild to watch that adorable tug of war between two incompatible desires within them—one bodily and one social. I think most of us can relate.
The tug of war never ends. More hands are added to the rope. And more ropes, too. You may be pitting your desire to reduce your workload against your desire to push for promotion, while simultaneously pitting your desire for more cake against your desire to get in better shape. You may commit to one life partner in the interest of cultivating a unique kind of intimacy, and spend the rest of your life resisting your attraction to everyone else.
One of the more insidious (but completely commonplace) incompatibilities that trips us up is incompatible desires across time. That is to say, what you want now is different than what you’ll want later, and only one can be fulfilled. The famous marshmallow experiment conducted on children is an archetypal example of this (one marshmallow now or two in ten minutes… if you can wait that long!) But at almost any given moment, most of us face some temporal tradeoff (splurge now or save more for retirement…). Finding some balanced way to enjoy the present while honoring our future selves (yes, plural), who do not yet exist to advocate for themselves but may suffer when the time comes… well, it’s very much part of our existential situation, and can be quite the mindfuck.
Giving characters incompatible desires is Drama and Conflict 101. Immediate and sustained tension can be generated in a story this way, if the internal conflict is clear and compelling enough for the audience. For example,
The Americans
In the pilot of The Americans—an underrated FX drama that I would compare favorably to Breaking Bad—two undercover Russian spies move into a DC suburb in the 80’s. In somewhat Mr. and Mrs. Smith fashion, their marriage is one of duty, between functional strangers. Their two children do not know their true identities. And due to bad luck or poor planning, their next-door neighbor happens to work for the FBI, tasked with rooting out, um, them. All of this is established in the first episode, and sets up a complex cesspool of clashing desires and moral ambiguities that unspools masterfully over six seasons of prestige television.
The spies want nothing more than to keep their children safe, though their mandate constantly puts them in danger. They would like to share their language and culture with their kids, but this is forbidden. Despite the training meant to turn them into cold killing machines, they desire genuine companionship, and so struggle emotionally with the secrecy and impersonation mediating every relationship in their lives, including with their neighbor, and to some extent with each other. And as the title of the show suggests, there’s an identity crisis at the heart of all this—despite the anti-Western propaganda that was their birthright, one of them is deeply sympathetic to the comforts and optimism of US culture, coming to desire the very American Dream he’s been ordered to destroy.
Bridgerton
Bridgerton is chock full of conflicting desires, as any well-structured romantic melodrama must be. I particularly enjoyed the season three arc of Lady Whistledown (I’ll refrain from spoiling her identity) struggling to balance her double life as anonymous gossip columnist and lonely woman on the ton desperate for the attention of her life-long crush. The genius here is in the timing (yes, the contrived timing, the beautifully contrived timing) of the plot points that keep these two juggled identities in direct tension with each other.
There’s a representative moment in the first episode of the season. Lady Whistledown has written off the aforementioned crush as unworthy of her, because of some typically masculine foolishness. He surprises her in the garden with some impressively mature humility that repairs their budding relationship and makes him, suddenly, a genuine prospect again. Just as the audience is reveling in this newfound romantic possibility, our stomachs drop—we realize alongside the character that the next Whistledown pamphlet drops today, right now in fact, and contains reputation-ending, vengeance-inspired gossip about the well-meaning boy who just left the garden, liable to end any hope of her two dreams co-existing in the same manor.
YOU
No, not you. The show, YOU.
A psychological thriller like YOU is the perfect wrap for our discussion on the three psychological characteristics. Like most great serial killer fiction, its whole raison d’etre is to twist the psychology into knots, and wring out every drop of skin-crawley goodness.
We have a young man who desperately wants to protect the woman he “loves” at the moment, but is himself always the most dangerous thing in her life (incompatible desires). Who is unable to see that what he calls love is more like a paternalistic obsession triggered by a deeply anxious attachment style he developed during multiple childhood traumas (self-awareness). Who seems to believe, tragically, that the most important thing in life is to find the person you’re meant to be with and run away with them, thus justifying any and every action in pursuit of this goal (model of the world.)
It’s a whole vibe to be immersed in that perspective for hours on end, so intimately hearing Joe’s thoughts in voiceover, the audience just as voyeuristic in our own way as the troubled man we’re watching. It’s wild to be party to every rationalization, to slip back and forth between reasonable and unreasonable impulses and recognize the porous boundary between them, to watch the flawed structure of desires and world-models and self-awareness (or lack thereof) maintain and defend itself, seemingly unscathed even after everything blows up in each season finale, ready to renew the pattern. It’s scary and creepy and morbidly fascinating and suspenseful and dramatic. It’s familiar and quintessentially human.
Yep, it’s complex, because for better or worse, it’s about people just like us.
But we are not complex enough for our models of the world to approach completeness
The more detailed and accurate your model of the world, the more knowledgeable you are.
The more detailed and accurate your model of yourself (a model within a model, a special subset of your world model) the greater your self-awareness.
But no matter how knowledgeable or self-aware you are, your models will remain hopelessly incomplete.
All men by nature desire to know, apparently (so said Aristotle)3. Perhaps some women do as well (sarcasm). The philosopher’s statement manages to be both too general and too exclusive (he really was a genius).
Nonetheless, he was onto something. Knowledge is simply accordance between reality and our model of the world. Our discussion above makes the value of a more accurate world model abundantly clear, as we and our favorite characters stumble around in the dark, groping for our objects of desire. We require a map of the territory, the more accurate the better.
Consider the dream of perfect knowledge, a Theory of Everything. Consider Laplace’s Demon, on the far right pole of our axis of complexity.
Completeness
Omniscience is the defining characteristic of the far right pole of our axis. Here lie beings whose models of the world are perfect—comprehensive and accurate down to the finest detail, identical copies of the world itself.
Pierre Simon Laplace famously posited such a being in 1814, articulating some implications of causal determinism that were very much in the air following the success of Newtonian mechanics and the scientific revolution more broadly.
He asked us to imagine an intellect who knows the exact position and momentum of every particle in the universe at a given moment, knows the laws of nature, and has effectively infinite capacity for analyzing this information. “For such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past could be present before its eyes.”4
Perfect omniscience entails perfect self-awareness, a two-for-one.
What about desires? I have no idea what such a creature would want. Presumably, they would have an unfathomable sense of what is good and what is beautiful, perceiving aesthetic properties we can’t appreciate. I suppose omniscience does not make them immune to incompatible desires, so like us they might have to make tough choices. But unlike us, they would not have to make choices under conditions of uncertainty. They would have perfect knowledge of the relative strengths of their own needs and wants, exactly what their priorities are and how they will evolve over time, and any regret they may feel. In fact, they would know ahead of time every choice they’ll make and its ultimate outcome. Could such a creature truly be said to choose at all? Would they rail against their apparent lack of free will? Or would omniscience be accompanied by a deep sense of acceptance and enlightened unattachment, an inability to fantasize in any maladaptive way—an inability to take seriously any desire for things to be other than what they are?
Acceptance is the path suggested by Ted Chiang’s depiction of the inscrutable heptapods in “The Story of Your Life,” who perceive time simultaneously rather than sequentially. After linguist Louise Banks begins to perceive in this way through her study of the heptapod written language, she says,
“What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?”
And
“For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place.”
And
“What distinguishes the heptapods’ mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history’s events; it is also that their motives coincide with history’s purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology.”5
In any case, these beings are decidedly not “people like us.” What might be their relationship to storytelling? Hate? Indifference? Might they find mortal stories cute or quaint, consume our cultural products in a patronizing way? Might they prefer tales we wouldn’t recognize as stories at all, including a level of detail we cannot process, leaps and cuts that assume superhuman causal reasoning, and ironic allusions to an eclectic mix of future events? Might they include very little detail, and no cause or effect whatsoever—a respite from omniscience, the cathartic thrill of uncertainty? Might the great unfolding of the universe itself be the only story they are willing to recognize, every subset of that a pale imitation?
The God of the Bible seems to be into stories—there’s plenty of narrative in His best-selling book—but that may say more about us than about Her. There’s a reasonable chance that any god communicating with us through story is doing so because, in their infinite wisdom, they’ve noticed that’s the best way to reach us. For all we know, Yahweh merely tolerates storytelling. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”6
In many ways, the poles of the axis of complexity are the least interesting parts. I'm biased, but far more interesting is the broad spectrum in between, one chunk of which includes storytellers like us.
So who’s between us and God? What lies to the right?
For the intellectually curious and the science fictionally inclined, the mere posing of this question carries an immediate frisson. You can just feel the endless stories and mind-blowing ideas on the other side of it.
This intuitive excitement is borne out by the sub-genre of sci-fi that features human enhancement, from Limitless to Flowers for Algernon (the former is fun, the latter is heart-rending and thought-provoking and stays with you forever.)
Think of our bacteria from earlier, with its rudimentary versions of our most cherished sentient characteristics (goals, agency, action, choice, behavior, etc.).
Now imagine a creature whose complexity dwarfs ours to the same extent that ours dwarfs the bacteria’s.
Now realize that the axis of complexity is not drawn to scale, not even close. I’ve placed “storytellers like us” in the center of the image, symbolically, because we are the topic of conversation—we tell stories to and for each other. But I suspect we are far, far closer to the left pole than the right. As enamored as we tend to be with our intelligence relative to that of our evolutionary siblings, it would be silly to assume we represent anything like a peak in the theoretical limits of such a trait—not unlike assuming we are at the center of the solar system, or the cosmos. When it comes to the full range of psychological sophistication possible in this universe, most of the spectrum lies between us and God.
Remember how new concepts came online at certain points along the axis of complexity? How as we moved to the right, instead of a smooth and predictable increase in a single characteristic called “complexity,” there were milestones that marked the emergence of brand new phenomena, qualitatively distinct from what was possible to the left (living agents with the first bacterial cells, culture and art and language with humans).
Along the expanse between us and God, there could be any number of similar milestones, each by definition impossible to imagine. At one such milestone, experiences are possible that are as unfathomable to us as basketball is to the bacteria. Call this “experience set A.” At the next milestone, experience set B includes activities that even beings familiar with set A cannot fathom. And so on and so forth, to Z and beyond.
Most of the axis is beyond our ken.
The fact that it’s impossible to imagine milestones to the right of us hasn’t stopped us from trying.
We can attempt to do so conceptually, using frameworks to describe what we can't imagine by drawing logical connections between it and what we can imagine (e.g., an axis of complexity). In this way, even if we can't experience or understand the thing itself, we can understand how it relates to something we do know, and thus have a kind of… indirect understanding (or at least fool ourselves into thinking we do, which is also fun).
We can attempt to do so poetically, relying on the analogic power of language and the flexibility of meanings to evoke what cannot be known.
This is the power of poetry and philosophy.
In Chiang's story about superhuman intelligence, “Understand,” the protagonist undergoes a progressive series of leaps in cognitive ability. The largest qualitative milestones is marked by a jarring interruption in the text. There is a scene break, and sandwiched between two lines that run the width of the page is the phrase,
CRITICAL MASS.
Throughout the story, we are treated to the character’s ongoing first-person narration, which becomes increasingly frenetic even as its diction grows more elevated. You get the sense that he is speaking as technically and plainly as he can, but doing so demands that he speak poetically. He speaks mostly in abstractions but you wonder if he’d speak more concretely if only words existed for the details. The effect is both unsettling and intoxicating. And if it weren't for his impressive results, we'd wonder if he wasn't simply going insane.
“Blinding, joyous, fearful symmetry surrounds me. So much is incorporated within patterns now that the entire universe verges on resolving itself into a picture. I’m closing in on the ultimate gestalt: the context in which all knowledge fits and is illuminated, a mandala, the music of the spheres, kosmos…”7
And this might be exactly how some superhuman intelligence would show up in our limited perception—as mental illness.
A certain yearning, or hunger, is palpable in many of these stories of superintelligence.
In “Understand,” the character seems almost to have an addiction. He isolates himself from human society to the greatest degree possible, holed up in his room to focus on… getting smarter. With each jump in intelligence, his project of discovering the comprehensive structure that encompasses all knowledge (“the gestalt”) only becomes more urgent to him.
It also recedes further from him, or appears to. With each epiphany he is realizing more clearly how far he's been from his goal all along—as far as each of us is from Laplace’s demon, with all of those qualitative milestones along the way, each one awe-inspiring enough from the wrong side (from the left side of the axis) to seem like the final destination, only to reveal itself as a threshold. From A to Z and beyond.
“My mind seethes with expletives from ancient and modern languages, and they taunt me with their crudeness… I cannot complete my artificial language; it’s too large a project for my present tools. Weeks of concentrated effort have yielded nothing usable. I’ve attempted to write it via bootstrapping, by employing the rudimentary language that I’ve already defined to rewrite the language and produce successively fuller versions. yet each new version only highlights its own inadequacies, forcing me to expand my ultimate goal, condemning it to the status of a Holy Grail at the end of a divergent infinite regress.”
This is an element of the yearning pattern. This insinuation that there's a sense of incompleteness or lack inherent in the experience of intelligence, so that more of it, instead of filling you like you expect, may leave you feeling more empty.
Flowers for Algernon is a story defined by yearning. Charlie Gordon grew up desperate to be smart, despite or because of his cognitive handicaps. He is chosen for the experiment because of his diligence in cultivating what little potential he has. After gaining the intelligence he always wanted, the disillusionment he experiences over the reality of his prior life is devastating. His friends were not his friends, his happiness was propped up by what now appear to be lies.
The news that he will lose his newfound intelligence is akin to a terminal diagnosis. The latter half of the book amounts to a grieving process for an impending loss of self so great that it is a death. And he must return to his old life with holes in the shield of his ignorance.
Poor Charlie gets it from both directions. Too dumb to get what he wants, too smart for his own good. This may explain the story’s staying power—the distilled dual curse of one universal human superpower.8
So we crave knowledge and intelligence, for their own sake or because we think they'll solve our problems (fill in our world-models, better fulfill our desires).
And we hate knowledge and intelligence, because we can never have enough to solve our problems, and we feel tortured or teased by what we know—or by what we know we don't know—often enough that we wonder if ignorance might not be bliss.
This has brought us back to our existential situation.
We are complex enough but not complex enough. We are caught awkwardly in the middle of the axis (or the middle-left, which may be part of the issue). It's just kind of a confusing, frustrating place to be.
Our existential situation requires a coping mechanism
So we desire to know it all.
But we invariably know relatively little.
How on Earth will we cope?
In the next post, we'll pick up where we left off and finish walking through our slide (it will be post 2 of part 1, or post 1B in our 10-slide, *roughly* 10-post series).
Gender-neutral for niece/nephew, out of respect for the mother’s preference
Daniel Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, section titled “The death or rebirth of teleology?” pg. 37 of 477 in the Kindle edition
The opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
Ted Chiang, “The Story of Your Life,” included in the collection, The Story of Your Life and Others
Isaiah 55:8-9
Ted Chiang, “Understand,” included in the collection, The Story of Your Life and Others
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon