Muses

I write a lot in my day-to-day routine, but do so mostly in languages understood by computers. I enjoy writing in natural language because it forces me to organize my scattered thoughts into a somewhat coherent argument. I don't know how many times I have sat down to write something, thinking my argument was pretty solid, only to realize that a fifth-grader could poke holes in my reasoning. Nothing against fifth-graders; the truth is that we really know very little, and what we think we know isn't usually well thought out. The goal of this page is to present what I believe in as clear a fashion as is possible. If you agree, fine. If you do not, even better.

First, let me clarify exactly what I mean by "romantic". Or, perhaps, it is easier to explain what I don't mean when using the word. By romance, I am not referring to the feelings one might have for his or her love interest. Disney-style romance is a sham, as are all of its derivatives. The romanticism I am referring to is generally recognized as beginning in the 18th century as a response to the growing popularity of reason as a tool for understanding the world. Newton and Liebniz synthesized the calculus in the 17th century, and in doing so helped usher in a novel way of thinking about the world. In this new, enlightened era, fact was no longer dictated by historical figures or imparted from on high. Instead, fact-hood was decided within a framework of observation and reason. Feelings, emotions, passions – these things did not disappear, but they did begin to lose power as determiners of Truth. Romanticism was, in part, a response to this movement. It emphasized the importance of man's emotive reaction to the world around him. Thus, in its purest form, romance is the condition induced by a sublime experience, a boundless experience, beyond the reach of reason.

I experience the sublime in my close relationships, with my family and the few friends to whom I would entrust everything and, in return, request nothing. At the same time, I do not know why it should be so. No reason-based explanation satisfies. This is, of course, the nature of the sublime. To evade all attempts at formal specification. To exist in that foggy region just beyond the reach of our intellect. To make its presence felt while admitting no direct contact. We make a mistake when we try to reason about our closest relationships. Doing so achieves nothing but frustration. As R.W. Emerson so eloquently points out:

"Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine – a possession for all time. ... I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity."

The sublime lies beyond rationality, and access to it is strangely limited. However, when I look at paintings such as these, or images such as this or this, I am convinced that I share the same respect for nature that inspired Mr. Friedrich. I cannot pinpoint this reverence, cannot tell you what it is or from what it derives, but it is there all the same. Like my relationships, such scenes admit no rational process. That is what makes them beautiful. Again with the Emerson:

"The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough."

The following question looms largest in my mind: "Why do romantic feelings, the product of sublime experience, exist in the first place?" Surely, these feelings serve no external purpose. The same people and mountain ranges would continue to exist regardless of our reaction to them. I believe these feelings are the necessary byproduct of our intelligence. The mind has but one duty: to organize the information it receives. Normally, it does a tremendous job of this. Most of us have struck a balance with our environment. But the balance is not perfect; it sways to and fro with the uniqueness of each experience. Details are missed and information is incorrectly conceptualized. Emotions spring from these imperfections, and through the most profound confusion the sublime is experienced. I, for one, enjoy it.

Having been a graduate student for some time now, I have come to the realization that novel insights are rare. Should I find myself to be in seeming possession of such a thing, Google readily points me to many others who have had the same, if not a better, idea themselves. And so it went with the topic of this muse, which has been festering in my head for a very long time. Perhaps even more awe-inspiring than Donald Knuth's vita or the 812-pipe organ residing in his home, is this simple assertion residing on his web page:

"I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime."

Alas, novelty is once again pried from my grasp; however, not surprisingly, it did not reside in Knuth's hands either. He offers this quote, attributed to Umberto Eco:

"I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages."

I will not attempt to pinpoint the origin of the sentiment expressed above; rather, I will submit my own perspective, updated to reflect a new online environment, but hardly original, to be sure.

What I find most interesting about Knuth's transformation is its location in time: the dawn of mainstream internet usage. It is not as though Knuth decided to dump email after a drawn out, losing battle with spam. Indeed, spam-as-irrelevant-email would not be officially recognized for another 8 years or so. At the time of Knuth's epiphany, the founders of YouTube were, on average, 12 years old. The founder of Facebook was 6. The internet had hardly put on its distraction training wheels when Knuth abandoned email. What, then, was the source of his disillusion? I can only speculate, but speculate I will, and thusly: Knuth is dedicated to his work in a way that requires uninterrupted focus, which was threatened by email and its pleas for immediate attention. I suspect Knuth was simply tired of the begging.

Now, fast-forward 19 years, and throw out everything that says the world wide web is a distributed presentation of static content; for it is, quite undeniably, the opposite. Content is now generated collaboratively by millions of people and made available to the world within seconds. On the surface, this environment appears to have little in common with the one Knuth rejected in 1990; however, the two share at least one key property: a plea for immediate attention. This plea has been amplified and precisely targeted in the past 19 years, but its M.O. has not changed.

As an undergraduate, I took a psychology course in classical behaviorism. To my dismay, the instructor roundly dismissed all cognitive processes as irrelevant to an understanding of human learning; however, my dismay notwithstanding, I did enjoy the class. We conducted a quarter-long experiment in which we trained rats to push levers for food using a variable ratio reward (VRR) schedule. In such a setup, the learner is rewarded after a random number of responses, but the average reward per response is fixed at the beginning of the experiment. Thus, our rat knew (pardon my cognitivism) that its food would appear if it continued to press the lever long enough. This reward mechanism is widely recognized as one of the most effective methods of maintaining a learned behavior, and it is strikingly similar to the reward system employed by many of today's most popular internet content providers.

MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, IM, and countless other services promise some sort of "reward" to users that continue to sign in and click around long enough. Of course, the reward varies from user to user, but with millions of diverse contributors, every demographic is sure to find something of interest, something that compels its members to continue the search for rewarding content. Moreover, these sites have become increasingly integrated with each other and, crucially, with our email inboxes, which bear a striking (virtual) resemblance to the boxes we trained rats in. There is even a small button for users to push. And the reward? More often than not there is no reward, but that is what makes the schedule variable. That is what makes it effective. For evidence of this, one need only observe the uproar caused by downed BlackBerry message networks, a catastrophe covered on prime time NPR. Make no mistake about it, users do not appreciate being separated from their lever-and-reward technologies.

Presumably, many would argue that there is no problem with the services mentioned above. After all, they are an entertaining, effective diversion — that much is beyond dispute. I would, however, challenge anyone who believes that, on the whole, such services are actually benefiting society. Sure, many of them bring in vast sums of money, and corporations often leverage them in an effort to do the same. But what about losses in end-user productivity both at work and at home? What about the intellectual retardation brought on by utterly vapid content? Regrettably, I have squandered countless hours watching pointless videos, viewing profiles and photo streams of people whom I barely know, mindlessly clicking over...and over...and over, pursuing rewards I cannot define and could not care less for. In moments of clarity, I have deleted my Facebook profile, removed IM clients, and blocked text messaging. I have banned myself from the most problematic sites and limited my usage of others. However, despite my efforts, past compulsions continue to manifest themselves in subtle ways. My prognosis would seem poor considering the extent to which my work depends on things like email, but I will continue to battle, striving for the enlightenment Knuth discovered. Feel free to join me...that is, if you can extricate yourself from the inanity.

I recently finished reading Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, which I took up immediately after reading Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, for which the former is a prequel. Both books have received copious (deserved) accolades that I don't need to repeat; instead, I would like to explore a property of novels in general, and Deepness and Fire in particular, that I have come to enjoy a great deal: the "unfinished ending". Judging from the lengths of Deepness and Fire (774 pages and 613 pages, respectively), one might suppose that Vinge takes pleasure in exhausting every possible plot line in the production of his books. One would, however, be wrong to do this. Vinge's worlds are so expansive, so intricate, and yet so cohesive that he could easily have rattled off another three or four hundred pages in each book without losing my attention; indeed, these additional pages would be necessary to "properly" tie up plot lines, which, as it stands, are left dangling before the reader's face. Here are some examples of what I am referring to:

• (from Deepness) Sherkaner's and Victoria's unresolved fates.
• (from Fire) Ravna's becoming stranded on an alien world, an apparently permanent condition given the expanded size of the slowness.
• (from Fire) The implied (and undiscussed) death of billions (trillions?) of people as a result of the expanded slowness.

Possible explanations for these endings might include Vinge simply running out of time, or running out of creative juice, or securing a good place for a sequel (which he is apparently writing in the case of Fire); however, I like to believe that Vinge, given all the time and energy in the world, would have chosen the same endings. Indeed, I greatly prefer them over neat-and-tidy endings à la Dan Brown, who can never seem to resist the urge to spell out each and every implicit plot detail. I am left with a much deeper appreciation of the story and characters as a result of the jagged and somewhat depressing endings put forward by Vinge. Such endings speak to a slightly darker side of human experience, one that is riddled with unknowns. The combination of the unknown with a glimmer of hope is what allows the reader to perceive something all too human in Vinge's work, despite the fact that many of the primary characters are fundamentally alien.

Neal Stephenson is an author who has received a significant amount of negative (and positive) review due to his closings. I have not read a substantial portion of his work (Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, and King of the Vagabonds being those I have read), but I did especially like the ending of Vegabonds, the last sentence of which bears repeating: "Jack heard the splash just as he was sitting down on the shit-stained bench where he would row until he died." Jack being the protagonist (and regardless of what the splash was or how Jack came to be a galley slave), I can understand why some readers might be uncomfortable with the ending; however, and this I claim cautiously, such readers are too accustomed to endings in which at least some of the characters live happily ever after. For some, like Jack, there is no "after". For others, like Sherkaner, Victoria, and Ravna, there might be, but we currently have no way of knowing. I very nearly hope Vinge doesn't publish a sequel to Fire, in which case I'll happily continue pondering the outcome. Of course, he probably will, and of course I will order it immediately.

During the summer of 2009, I spent a few months doing research at the Institute for Creative Technologies in southern California. The Institute straddles the border between the yacht-riddled marina district and the suburbs of Los Angeles. Like any heavily populated area, the streets surrounding the Institute are home to a fair number of people. Barely a day went by that I did not cross paths with the homeless on my bike or on foot. The phenomenon of homelessness itself was not anything new or unexpected; however, I was struck by the regularity with which it was presented against a backdrop of extravagance.

One particular morning stands out in this regard. As I was nearing the Institute, I came up behind a homeless woman walking in the same direction. Ragged hair fell from under an old baseball cap, her gaze focused on the ground at her feet instead of the path in front of her. She went along with a strange little shuffle — strange, at least, until one noticed the far-too-small slippers she was wearing. Her left slipper was missing the back half of its sole, and the concrete had worn a large hole in the heel of the exposed sock. The shuffle clearly resulted from an effort to keep the slippers on and the exposed heel off the ground. As I passed on the left, her grimacing face looked up for an instant before shifting down again. I turned left down a street and glanced back to see the woman shuffling through the crosswalk. Continuing on, I found the sidewalk blocked by an ostensibly luxurious yacht in tow behind an equally expensive truck pulling into a gas station. What a profound contrast: on one hand, an individual without the means to purchase shoes. On the other hand, an individual whose only immediate problem was the impossibility of fitting their gargantuan yacht into the fueling stall.

It seems to me that such extreme disparities of condition only arise within populations of the human species. To be sure, non-human species occasionally suffer: they are killed by predators and starved by natural ecological changes; however, the scale, duration, and intensity of this suffering pales in comparison to that which is experienced by humans, and I would like to suggest that this difference is the necessary byproduct of intelligence, diminished in lower organisms and fantastically developed in and utilized by the human species. The engineer's intelligence creates yachts and shiny trucks. The financially savvy man's intelligence creates the means to acquire such things. The intelligence of the destitute allows them to survive in places and situations that are wholly unwelcoming and often quite dangerous. Each of these is a testament to the power of human intelligence.

Our intelligence is a formidable force, but it is not alone. There is another powerful force at work in nature, and that is natural law itself. Natural law is not difficult to observe. It reveals itself quite readily in places that have not been corrupted by human intelligence. Take a walk in the woods or mountains and make note of the sparsity and simplicity of your surroundings. Natural law does not prefer this state on a whim or by random chance; rather, it does so by necessity, because to do otherwise would be to destroy the delicate balance that lies at the heart of any ecosystem. Of course, a perfect balance is never achieved. The actual state is one of constant fluctuation, and the violence of these fluctuations is proportional to the extent to which an ecosystem's members have thwarted natural law. In the woods and mountains, these fluctuations are often imperceptible. We experience peace in such places because the occupants thereof live in accordance with natural law.

Humans, on the other hand, could not care less for natural law. In fact, we take great pride in our ability to eschew it. For example, any developed city is utterly incapable of supporting itself internally. Food is scarce, so we centralize production within the most fertile regions and transport goods over vast distances. Water is scarce, so we divert it from natural waterways, destroying them and their occupants in the process. Ground space is limited, so we engineer multi-story buildings. Travel must be quick, so we lay asphalt and concrete over every square foot of grass, field, and forest that can be found. Our intelligence provides a solution to each problem that arises, building on previous solutions whenever possible and inventing new solutions if needed. In the end, an area of land naturally capable of supporting a few hundred individuals becomes home to tens of thousands — perhaps millions — of individuals, all of whom are dependent on complex support systems that require constant monitoring and maintenance.

Despite our best efforts, however, natural law is occasionally reasserted. The examples here are equally numerous: rolling blackouts across national power grids, disastrous droughts, mass starvation, economic collapse. In each case, our imperfect intelligence confronts the fundamental, unyielding laws of nature. When the former wins, we call it progress and press on. When the latter wins, we call it disaster — but we do not stop there. We reengineer. We rebuild. Twice as big, twice as strong, twice as complex. Should we be so surprised when the next disaster is correspondingly twice as fatal, twice as widespread? I do not believe so. Sadly, I also do not believe that we will ever reverse this process. It is human nature, and it will continue until, one day, we swing out a bit too far into the extreme, and, reaping the violence of natural law reasserted, lose much or all of what we hold to be important.

I leave you with a quote: