Concretizing Abstractions

As a rationalist I object to the belief that gut feelings are reliable tools for understanding the mechanics of the world. Human minds are prone to biases that steer them from the path of reason. Not only is this prone to happen, but it is nearly inevitable in any situation where the precision of physics or probability theory is reduced to vague intuitions.

As none of us are walking, talking quantum computers, we spend a good deal of our time using our mysterious inner sense to guide us through life. We needn’t apply this auto-pilot consciousness to our important decisions, however. We can make our philosophy honest by articulating our mysterious intuitions into precise, non-mysterious sentences.

We must remember the lesson of AI: We don’t truly understand anything unless we can program it into a computer. A full understanding of what something is requires the ability to produce an algorithm for it. Arguments are just like computer programs. Either the steps lead clearly from one simple step to the next, or they are ineffective. Those arguments that are cloaked in the mysteriousness of complex emotions are likely lacking in detail.

This is where rationalist thinking comes into tension with artistic thinking. Most supporters of high art revel in the experiential wonders of consciousness, in the subtlety and intricacy of the interplay of emotions that great art stirs inside of us, in the complexity and majesty of the universe with its currents and counter-currents of contradicting, corresponding, and non-corresponding flows and forces dancing around us, splashing violently against the rocky shores of human experience. Art to them is adventure for the spirit, wild and terrifying and wonderful.

“How stultifying it would be to reduce these wonders into cold, rigid, mathematical terms! How counter-productive, how silly, how limiting it would be to take the life out of life and replace it with a mechanical account of experience!”

It is easy to sympathize with these claims. Art is wonderful and it would be a shame to lose that, if that’s what rationalism entails. But just as reading film criticism, film history, and learning filmmaking techniques does not lessen but actually strengthens one’s appreciation of cinema, so does the collapsing of the epistemic distance between conscious experience and physical reality. Knowledge does not reduce our experience to anything. It enhances our appreciation by giving us a more thorough understanding of the underlying mechanics that create those great effects in the brain.

At any rate, my readers will find me decidedly incapable of translating the totality of experience into math – although I would if I could! But one thing we can do is transition away from the glorification of our vague intuitions by trying to articulate our feelings. In concretizing our experiential abstractions, we increase the correspondence between our internal map and the external territory. Reducing the fuzzy blur of emotions to meaningful statements of the world tidies our minds, allowing us to think more clearly and economically.

Collapsing the wave function of the meanings of feelings is a hobby of mine. The other day I realized that there are two plain, ordinary people I know that give me the same impression. I find both of them funny for reasons I wasn’t articulate. So I took out a piece of paper and a pen and tried to articulate this impression, pretending I was introducing this character in a short story.

I came up with:

“X had a one-note bumbling good-naturedness and utter inability to understand irrational and sudden episodes of strong emotions in others, not for any cold, analytical penchant of his own, but out of a general clumsiness in the social skills department. Some called it innocence but X didn’t feel any more moral than the next guy. Well-meaning and mature, he had the style of a sucker. He is one of millions. One wonders if he’ll ever make it.”

Notice that this passage itself has its share of mysteriousness. One could just as easily convert the impressions the passage conjures up into a new passage, a meta-commentary that tries to concretize the blurriness of the newly evoked feelings.

Something like: 

“Playful and long-winded, the passage reduces the sprawling dynamism of X’s character into a compact essence. It begins with an elegant voice, looking backward from a disembodied, farseeing, future viewpoint, one that promptly switches to a present-tense viewpoint with limited knowledge.”

One might then try to perform a meta-meta commentary and collapse the epistemic distance in this follow-up passage. But even if one did, that would just lead to a meta-meta-meta commentary and so on. There is an infinite regress lest we become omniscient about the totality of experience and learn to communicate it in some universal language.

By this point some readers might think that what I’m proposing seems to be something that every artist already does. Well, the game is up – that’s exactly what it is! Artists collapse epistemic distances all the time, especially writers. They show us the world in a particular way, emphasizing some of its qualities and de-emphasizing others. All artworks are metaphors in this regard.

Just as artworks concretize abstractions, they also abstract aspects of the world that another model has a concrete explanation of. This is part of making sense of the world. The critic, like the artist he criticizes, is also faced with the challenge of lifting the fog of intuition by articulating gut feelings in words.

These efforts expose our biases and simplify the presentation of our ideas to others. You don’t have to be an artist for this to be helpful. Everybody wins.