A LUCILIUS PARABLE: EYE ON THE PRIZE

March 28th, 2021

Through the music, with his eyes closed, Lucilius could see the movement of fingers, the fall and press of keys, the jump and slide of hands.  The notes fluttered into the silence, each with their individual, practiced strength, and Lucilius enjoyed as he judged.  The melody slowed, perfectly and wound down to it’s last notes, the sweet sound lingering in the air, blurring that invisible border between memory and sensation.

Lucilius opened his eyes to the little boy looking at him in hopeful expectation.  Lucilius slowly nodded, the fresh mellifluous memory washing over his mind.

And when he finally failed to say anything further, the boy prodded.  

“Well?”

Lucilius met his eyes and paused before saying just, “Perfect.

The boy’s face lit up, as he was instantly primed to explode with happiness, his body becoming tense with the hope that he might jump up and cheer.

“Really?”

Lucilius just casually nodded.

“What are we going to do?” The boy asked.

“What do you mean?” Lucilius asked.

“Are we going to celebrate?”

Lucilius leaned back and looked off for a moment, breathing in deep as though the question actually did require a thoughtfully considered answer, as though there was something to figure out, to weight and wonder.  His eyes darted back to the boy, hinting, just hinting at the possibility that he might now join the boy in a proper congratulatory celebration.

“No,” Lucilius said.

The boy’s face remained primed with it’s joy, but now tinted with a veneer of confusion.  Surely, Lucilius was making a joke.  

But he was not.  Lucilius squinted a little and nodded his head slowly from side to side as though trying to suss out a measurement.

“Maybe…” he said slowly, “.. maybe after you’ve mastered your third song,  or maybe your fourth.  I’m not sure.”

The boy’s face relaxed, realizing that it wasn’t a joke.

“But why?” The boy asked.

Lucilius smiled.  “Do you want to learn how to play the piano or do you just want to know how to play one song?”

The boy was a little dejected.  “Shouldn’t I celebrate success along the way?”

Lucilius wagged his head a bit from side to side.  “Every once in a while, sure.  But for now let’s keep our eye on the goal.”

Years later, when the rapid and precise rattle of notes slammed perfectly into the end of the song, Lucilius was the first to stand among thousands, to applaud for the truly superlative performance.

LIMIT OF LANGUAGE

March 27th, 2021

How many words have you invented?  At the very least this is a game that all children seem to stumble upon at some point, smashing syllables together in strange combinations and then stitching meaning onto them.  But how often does this sort of thing hold?  We don’t vote words into usage, they join our practical lexicon organically, through no conscious consensus, and more importantly, through no conscious design - it just happens.

The troubling conclusion here is about control.  Do we control language?  None of us have a choice about which language we first learn.  We do not get to research the semantic differences, weighting the strengths and weaknesses in order to figure out which language might best serve us.  No, we are given a language, and it is the cost to play.  But embedded in that cost is a set of constraints that can be very very hard to see.   What plays more of an active role: our control and design of language, or language’s control and design of how and what we get to think and communicate?

One wholly dictates the other, and we are left at the whim of communal organic design, which has not conscious intention behind it at all.  The constraints of language can only be hinted at by way of negative space.  For example:  what can you experience that is impossible to communicate in words?

Poets and writers over the centuries have been praised for their ability to tip toe into this ineffable territory, but no matter how much progress is made on this front, there still must remain area outside the capture of language.

There are a few token experiences that consistently escape the grasp of language, and which default to fairly uniform and therefore flat methods of description.  The experience of love, for all it’s songs and poetry is probably a good one.  But beyond this, religious experiences, and psychedelic experiences are consistently represented by language in ways that are barely two dimensional.  The reason, at least with psychedelic experiences may be that the compounds involved are directly effecting the very source of language - the parts of our brain that produce and process it.  Though if this were the whole case, it’s imaginable that we might be able to dutifully convert the memory of the experience into language, but the result here too is woefully lacking.  

Are there experiential places that we as humans can go where language cannot follow?  Is it possible to phrase with language the directions for how to get to such a place?

Language inherently collapses experience and concept, by converting something that exists on many dimensions into fewer dimensions.  Language can prattle on in a spiralling knot, attempting to weave an insidious net through the memory of experience in order to tie it down discretely, but it’s that very nature of language, that of discreteness, which prohibits it’s success.  

But language does grow.  There was a time when humans were experiencing everything without language to capture any of it.  But then some structure of sound and rhythm wiggled into life and started latching on to the most tangible aspects of our experience, and from there it has grown, and it continues to grow.  The best example of this is the explosion of terminology in scientific fields.  As we discover more categories into which the universe can be sensibly atomized, we name each box and method.

This growth spurs a wonder about the future of language.  What will it be like to talk in a few decades when we have more memes and more words?  What about a few centuries?  What might language look like in millions of years?

Language is a technology, and technological process has a fairly reliable habit of replacing the technologies it finds with new ones that are often very different.  The car replaced the horse, and the two are about as different as you can get, though they achieve much the same thing as a technology of transportation.  Given enough time, language might become a quaint memory, maybe even a hobby if we graduate to some sort of conceptual and experiential telepathy.

But in the meantime, language is here to stay, and it can still grow, at it has here with this episode.  There might not be any new words in this little piece of writing, but the searching tendrils of language have attempted to feel out new surfaces in that realm that spurns its touch.   

Words are a function of common experience.  Two people both have to have some sort of experiential correlate to a word for it to function in communication.  If only one person has had the experience then a word for that experience just doesn’t hop the divide between people.  It’s a bittersweet tragedy that a unique experience can only be communicated through it’s non-unique attributes.  And we are all having unique experiences.  

This paradox feels like it could be at the heart of existence: how is it that you and I are both stuff of the same single universe and yet there is this intractable gulf between us?  How funny is it that I am trying to bridge that gulf with this fundamentally primitive technology of words?  As infinite as this gulf might be, hopefully something has managed to make it to the other side.

SPEED OF CREATION

March 26th, 2021

One way to define technology is the discrepancy between creation and imagination.  More specifically the speed at which each comes to fruition.  

Good ideas are not rare.  In fact, they are as common as coffee.  Regular and unremarkable people have good ideas everyday.  But execution is everything.  Imagination is the human superpower, our birthright to the future - one that might be spectacular, strange, but at the very least, very different.

But the speed at which that brilliant or terrible new future arrives is not dependant on imagination, it has everything to do with execution, with execution, and innovation and technology is what speeds up that process.

It was only a few years ago that an entire room of draftsmen were required to produce schematics for a three dimensional machine.  Now that sort of thing can be generated at comparatively warp speed by a single individual who knows a cad program inside and out.  Proficiency in the program isn’t even necessary.  A few years ago I had an idea for an item that I could knock together in a 3d printer and had the thing materialized in a cad program I’d never used within about twenty minutes.  The longest part of the process from idea to using the actual product was the shipping time required to receive the 3D printer.

This is what technology does - it extends our ability to manifest imagination faster and faster.  No code platforms make the same promise.  Even a phenomenally talented coder requires a good deal of time to throw together a complex app, but even this will get faster  as time goes on and technology invents a better ratchet to tune itself with.

While predicting the future is a finicky business, one thing we can be fairly confident about is that our abilities will increase, and they will grow faster with time, meaning that even if we do head down a dark pathway, our ability to pivot toward something radically better, much faster will come with that trembling territory.

MODES OF SELF

March 25th, 2021

Have you ever had an argument with yourself?  Surely we’ve all been in this position.  But, if it’s possible, then, who exactly is the other person?

We talk about multiple personality disorder, but doesn’t the concept also imply there is such a thing as multiple personalities that are properly ordered?

Each of us have the experience of being a different version of ourselves in different circumstances, be it the company of an old friend who brings out a childhood version of our personality, or a boss from work who evokes a more professional one.  The most likely interpretation is like a tint.  Each ‘version’ isn’t really a different entity, but simply viewed or expressed through a slightly different flavor or tint.    However, what’s the likelihood we are just comforting ourselves with a metaphor that reassures our sense that there is one immutable ‘person’ at the core of it all?  What is there really are substantially different people bundled up in who we are?

If our versions really were just subtle variations on the same thing, would we really be able to surprise ourselves?k. Who exactly is getting surprised?  And doesn’t a surprise imply that there. Was something hidden?  Something unavailable?  This implies a pretty significant division between who we are consciously, and who we find ourselves to be through action.  

Another way to approach this shaky sense of self is to ask what percentage of your body is aware of you as the person identified by your name.  Are the skin cells on the back of your hand aware of the person you think yourself to be?  Most likely, not.  Only a tiny subset of neurons in your brain are likely aware and even responsible for the fact that you even know your name and that it’s frivolously connected to the haze of notion you have when you think of yourself.  

What if the idea of ‘self’ is simply a bad term, one that is conveniently vague enough for everyone to map it on to ineluctable experience.  A term with similar vagueness is ‘god’.  Even ask people of the same religious faith what that term means and the explanations will be as varied as the people themselves.  We may even find that the two terms are more closely related than we might first realize, and that one is simply a mode of the other, and each can have many modes, depending, of course, on who you ask.

BUNDLING

March 24th, 2021

Software eats the world.  We hear this, but what exactly does it mean? We hear about our ‘data’ being gathered, used, sold, and worry about an obscure relation to privacy.  We hear about automated jobs and the cries of Neo-luddites.  But what what exactly is the main mechanism which software consumes right now?

The most common and one of the most useful forms of software consumption is best understood through the idea of unbundling and re-bundling.   Take Instagram for example.  Where did all our photos exist before Instagram?  Or rather, how many places did our photos exist before Instagram, and how accessible were those places.  The answer, of course is that photos existed in endlessly numerous places and had virtually zero accessibility.  But that set of photos still represents a particular human dataset.  It just wasn’t organized, and it was scattered.  What a platform like Instagram does is it unbundles that dataset, that is it creates an incentive for that data to be gathered, and then it re-bundles that data in an organized and very accessible way.  

Most software eats the world by unbundling an unorganized or inaccessible analog dataset and re-bundling it into an ultra-accessible form that is highly organized, often in conveniently flexible ways.

While everyone is looking for ‘the next great idea’, the digital revolution is probably better thought of as an episode of spring cleaning for the human species.   We are slowly unpacking the messy closet and reorganizing it in a way that doesn’t take up so much space, and most importantly, makes all that stuff at lot more useful.

The brilliant marketing slogan for the iPod perhaps encapsulates the whole idea the best:

1,000 songs in your pocket.