The New Mysterian Myth

"Our internal computers are powerful but unknowable."

Read this on an unrelated site, coming from the mouth of a reporter. Is New Mysterianism actually a popular "pop" neuroscience hypothesis these days? I find it inane to conceive that the brain somehow is incapable of understanding a system as complex as itself - when has that ever been the case in any other discipline - who would say that the endocrine or the lymphatic systems are too complex for the brain to understand, for example? What is the objective measure of complexity, really? And even if the complexity of the brain is such that human scientists had difficulty understanding it, can't we summarize our knowledge of portions of the brain such that we can preserve knowledge of all its essential functions using models that are simpler than the natural reality?   


Of course I may be putting words in the mouth of the author of this line. Maybe they mean that the brain is unknowable for other reasons. It would be more plausible to think that the brain is unknowable because of the type of thing that it is, perhaps. One could argue that there are sorts of things in this universe that the human mind is not particularly suited to understand, and it could be a cosmic irony that our own CNS falls into one of those areas. Still, the power of metaphorical thinking is vast, and everywhere we look with science we seem to make progress. Perhaps these areas of expertise which are not amenable to human understanding are also unknown unknowns, so that even our ignorance is hidden from us, but human research is driven not by sighting down the easiest avenues of pursuit. Rather, our engine has always seemed to be necessity, as the cliche goes. 

I realize now that this post is actually somewhat tangentially related to its prior. We could conceivably measure rate of evolutionary change via changes in the complexity of organisms, but that would get us nowhere for a variety of reasons - the most pertinent of which is that complexity has no measure. Complexity can manifest as a function of the scale of inquiry - a simple baseball seems complex on the atomic level. Complexity can manifest as a function of the sort of inquiry - the baseball is chemically simple, but the physics of its trajectory and attitude from the pitcher's hand to the catcher's glove appear to be dynamical. 

(Probably Unoriginal) Hypothesis: complexity is not so much a property of things as it is a property of inquiries about those things. The brain is not complex, it is the degree to which we want to know it that is complex. Didn't Glieck say as much in his book on chaos, Chaos? 

Granted, that's chaos, but then chaos is intimately related to complexity. This much I do remember about that book. One, perhaps the one, objective way to measure the complexity of a thing (not the inquiry into it) is to look at how well you can reproduce the thing using abstracted patterns that describe it. This is not possible for all things; measuring how well a thing is reproduced is often only discernible by means that, it immediately becomes obvious, are essentially qualitative. Yet it is possible for some things; you could measure the complexity of a statistical model that way; by how closely its abstracted pattern reproduces an observed distribution.  

How you could ever measure the brain's complexity using that metric is beyond me. And how much of what we understand as humans is the same as the brain in this way? We don't understand the actualities of our surroundings; we don't have objective, un-biased/skewed/anthropocentric knowledge of our existence. That much (and only that much) of postmodernism is true. Yet we do science, and even beyond that, we execute simple heuristics that somehow tell us when the patterns and metaphors we use to represent our existence are close to the mark.  

The reason for that kind of bizarre ability is kind of simple, probably. And I think I've already touched on it here: The complexity of the universe we interact with is tamped down by our physical size, our mental limitations, etc. The arbitrary facts of our existence determine a sort of baseline for us to work against, which has made it much easier to apply metaphors and patterns to the universe that model it (the way we experience it) pretty well. Think how much more intuitive newtonian physics are than quantum physics. It's when we are able to gain insight into scales and ways of looking at things which are not normal for humans that it gets difficult; our pattern-making and metaphor-jumping starts to get messy. Not impossible, but a more difficult grade. It would be a mistake to call this hill a cliff, as the New Mysterians do.
I have no idea of the worth of this concept, but one thought does now occur to me. It serves the wonderful purpose of making epiphenomenalists look silly. They seem to have lost their ability to fight with the pantheists in their effort to exclude consciousness from the Great Causal Chain, as it were.  

Postscript: While I'm on the topic of the brain, I might as well write down something I was thinking about. My head is exploding right now, which is not a good sign (it's another one of those subtle indicators that tells me I'm far out of my depth), but I wonder whether it is wise to confine attribution of sentience to living things only. A rock is not alive; how do we know it has no experience? Nagel asked "what is it like to be a bat?" I want to ask "what is it like to be a rock?" Isn't this something practically religious and unscientific? Well it may be, but then the skeptics, so abhorrent of the unproven that they revile conscious sentience as an "epiphenomenon" are basically giving this illogical idea a helping hand. To call sentience consciousness an epiphenomenon only strengthens this pseudo-religious idea of "pansentience," let's call it. If it has no effect on the brain, conscious experience could just be something that all matter does, stuck in a non-causal loop off to the side of everything else, generated by, but not itself generating, anything at all. Maybe we're just the only lumps of stuff in this big lump of stuff we call the world to emergently gain the ability and the will to communicate our consciousness and make it known to others. How would a rock do that? Would it even want to do that? Does this mean that when we die our conscious experience does not go away, but rather undergoes a transformation? Was our birth into this world the opposite reaction? 

Seems to have at least one good use going for it - pansentience makes the epiphenomenalists look like goobers. When you completely sideline conscious experience, you make it impossible to find evidence of absence in something like a rock. That rock might be experiencing things, but you'll never know, because its experience never has anything to do with anything you might observe!

  

Worldbuilding: the Hidden Subgenre?

One of the things that you realize after you read/watch/play/create alot of SF is that plot, characterization, message, and imagery are all great, but if you don't have a nifty setting it just seems like a rehash of something else that probably did it better years before.

This makes sense from the standpoint of Lit Crit - there are only a certain number of plots and they have been categorized, analyzed, and grouped. Same goes for characters - if you don't believe me check out TVTropes.org. As for the message, SF seems to be especially undiversified in that area. Sure, it does a heck of a job investigating nuanced questions of ethics, morality, theology, philosophy, and the sciences via the quasi-magical deus ex machina of Technology, but the fact that it reuses that deus ex machina so often means that some messages inevitably reappear far more often than we would like as consumers or creators of the genre.

In particular, I'm thinking of the dichotomous Technology Is Evil / Technology Is Good message. It sounds like what it is - works of SF inevitably seem to take the stance (implied or overt) that the technology enabling the situations discussed is either Good or Bad. This pratfall can be, and sometimes is, avoided by artists who take care to show that the enabling technology of their work can be used for Good or Bad by Free Agents, but we are speaking in generalities for now, and generally speaking, SF work can be split into these two camps - a fissure that often runs along the similarly deep divide between utopian and dystopian SF.

That leaves imagery and setting. Imagery is great, but what does it usually rely on? The sweeping vistas, vast stretches of time, and colossal armadas made possible by the SETTING. So if you are looking to liven up your SF, you look for a good setting.

The process of constructing this setting is known, in the parlance of the people who do these things, as worldbuilding - and it is a lot of fun. So fun, in fact, that many artists fail to ever begin their actual narrative and instead get stuck in a kind of obsessive, recursive loop.

Take, for instance, Dinotopia, by James Gurney. This series of books and its accompanying website together construct the universe of an undiscovered island of Earth where humans and intelligent dinosaurs live in harmony. A strange excursion into utopian worldbuilding, the Dinotopian universe is especially notable because most of the books that comprise its canon do not so much center around a narrative as they do around a detailed depiction of this setting. Certainly, a simple plot develops and runs to its conclusion, but one gets the sense after reading these books (and looking at their astoundingly detailed illustrations and diagrams) that the story was merely an atrophied vehicle to drive the exploration of the universe. Indeed, it seems possible that if Gurney had thought he could flaunt convention so completely, he might have eschewed the narrative entirely without significant damage to the power of his art.

Don't go thinking this is a fairly unique phenomenon either: other artists, even communities, have put narrative in the backseat while their encyclopedic dialectics working out the innards of a world that never was go for a drive. Orion's Arm, an online community dedicated to creating an SF universe with transhuman elements as plausibly as possible, is one example of a particularly long-lasting community of worldbuilders.

Even more popular universes are not immune to this sort of fiction. Star Wars features such books as The Illustrated Star Wars Universe and The Star Wars Essential Guide series. While these books use the material which fleshes out the traditional narrative expressions of their universes as a starting point, much of the information contained in these volumes is either assumed, deduced, induced, or entirely fabricated. Jumping onto this trend's bandwagon are books like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, by Newt Scamander (aka J.K. Rowling), and The Dune Encyclopedia, edited by Dr. Willis E. McNelly. It would seem that if a universe is inviting enough, there is a market made up of people who simply want to explore its niches and unmapped territories, to make it even more "real" in their minds by learning new details. After all, as any good lier knows, the least questioned stories are generally the ones with more consistent details. To achieve verisimilitude, a facsimile must be nuanced. The real world is complex, and so are the best of our fantasies.

I must confess I am not an unbiased witness - even as children my brother and I created our own fantastic universe, which you can view in this slideshow here (be sure to access the speaker's notes by opening it in a new window using the button on the lower left of the player and then clicking Actions. They provide much-needed explanations for the odd illustrations):

The point then, as it seems to be now, was to create a platform for an infinite variety of narratives to take off from in the mind. Thus in its way, the worldbuilding mode is more versatile and free than even the novel or the non-sandbox computer game. These media cannot rove over the countryside of a newly-imagined universe without considerable difficulty, because they are constrained by the rigid train-tracks of a narrative plot that must show only what is relevant to progressing the storyline if it is to maintain proper pacing and keep the reader's interest. Although many of us love the discursive examinations of esoterica found in books like Moby Dick, this sort of sidetracked writing style is often criticized. It appears ill-fit with the narrative it purports to uphold. It might often do better liberated from the shackles of its parasitic narrative structure.

In a round-about way of argumentation, I suppose I have been attempting to point out that this uniquely postmodern mode of fictive artistic expression deserves recognition as a subgenre within SF & Fantasy. Worldbuilding is a natural and valid mode in and of its own right, and offers opportunities to artists that no other present medium seems prepared to provide.