Writing and philosophy

 I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos of Alan Moore, who’s probably best known for his graphic novels, Watchmen and V for Vendetta, both of which were turned into movies. He also wrote a Batman graphic novel, The Killing Joke, which was turned into an R rated animated movie (due to Batman having sex with Batgirl) with Mark Hamill voicing the Joker. I’m unsure if it has any fidelity to Moore’s work, which was critically acclaimed, whereas the movie received mixed reviews. I haven’t read the graphic novel, so I can’t comment.
 
On the other hand, I read Watchmen and saw the movie, which I reviewed on this blog, and thought they were both very good. I also saw V for Vendetta, starring Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving, without having read Moore’s original. Moore also wrote a novel, Jerusalem, which I haven’t read, but is referenced frequently by Robin Ince in a video I cite below.
 
All that aside, it’s hard to know where to start with Alan Moore’s philosophy on writing, but the 8 Alan Moore quotes video is as good a place as any if you want a quick overview. For a more elaborate dialogue, there is a 3-way interview, obviously done over a video link, between Moore and Brian Catling, hosted by Robin Ince, with the online YouTube channel, How to Academy. They start off talking about imagination, but get into philosophy when all 3 of them start questioning what reality is, or if there is an objective reality at all.
 
My views on this are well known, and it’s a side-issue in the context of writing or creating imaginary worlds. Nevertheless, had I been party to the discussion, I would have simply mentioned Kant, and how he distinguishes between the ‘thing-in-itself’ and our perception of it. Implicit in that concept is the belief that there is an independent reality to our internal model of it, which is mostly created by a visual representation, but other senses, like hearing, touch and smell, also play a role. This is actually important when one gets into a discussion on fiction, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I just wish to make the point that we know there is an external objective reality because it can kill you. Note that a dream can’t kill you, which is a fundamental distinction between reality and a dreamscape. I make this point because I think a story, which takes place in your imagination, is like a dreamscape; so that difference carries over into fiction.
 
And on the subject of life-and-death, Moore references something he’d read on how evolution selects for ‘survivability’ not ‘truth’, though he couldn’t remember the source or the authors. However, I can, because I wrote about that too. He’s obviously referring to the joint paper written by Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash called Objects of Consciousness (Frontiers of Psychology, 2014). This depends on what one means by ‘truth’. If you’re talking about mathematical truths then yes, it has little to do with survivability (our modern-day dependence on technical infrastructure notwithstanding). On the other hand, if you’re talking about the accuracy of the internal model in your mind matching the objective reality external to your body, then your survivability is very much dependent on it.
 
Speaking of mathematics, Ince mentions Bertrand Russell giving up on mathematics and embracing philosophy because he failed to find a foundation that ensured its truth (my wording interpretating his interpretation). Basically, that’s correct, but it was Godel who put the spanner in the works with his famous Incompleteness Theorem, which effectively tells us that there will always exist mathematical truths that can’t be proven true. In other words, he concretely demonstrated (proved, in fact) that there is a distinction between truth and proof in mathematics. Proofs rely on axioms and all axioms have limitations in what they can prove, so you need to keep finding new axioms, and this infers that mathematics is a neverending endeavour. So it’s not the end of mathematics as we know it, but the exact opposite.
 
All of this has nothing to do with writing per se, but since they raised these issues, I felt compelled to deal with them.
 
At the core of this part of their discussion, is the unstated tenet that fiction and non-fiction are distinct, even if the boundary sometimes becomes blurred. A lot of fiction, if not all, contains factual elements. I like to cite Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels containing details like the gun Bond used (a Walther PPK) and the Bentley he drove, which had an Amherst Villiers supercharger. Bizarrely, I remember these trivial facts from a teenage obsession with all things Bond.
 
And this allows me to segue into something that Moore says towards the end of this 3-way discussion, when he talks specifically about fantasy. He says it needs to be rooted in some form of reality (my words), otherwise the reader won’t be able to imagine it at all. I’ve made this point myself, and give the example of my own novel, Elvene, which contains numerous fantasy elements, including both creatures that don’t exist on our world and technology that’s yet to be invented, if ever.
 
I’ve written about imagination before, because I argue it’s essential to free will, which is not limited to humans, though others may disagree. Imagination is a form of time travel, into the past, but more significantly, into the future. Episodic memories and imagination use the same part of the brain (so we are told); but only humans seem to have the facility to time travel into realms that don’t exist anywhere else other than the imagination. And this is why storytelling is a uniquely human activity.
 
I mentioned earlier how we create an internal world that’s effectively a simulation of the external world we interact with. In fact, my entire philosophy is rooted in the idea that we each of us have an internal and external world, which is how I can separate religion from science, because one is completely internal and the other is an epistemology of the physical universe from the cosmic scale to the infinitesimal. Mathematics is a medium that bridges them, and contributes to the Kantian notion that our perception may never completely match the objective reality. Mathematics provides models that increase our understanding while never quite completing it. Godel’s incompleteness theorem (referenced earlier) effectively limits physics as well. Totally off-topic, but philosophically important.
 
Its relevance to storytelling is that it’s a visual medium even when there are no visuals presented, which is why I contend that if we didn’t dream, stories wouldn’t work. In response to a question, Moore pointed out that, because he worked on graphic novels, he had to think about the story visually. I’ve made the point before that the best thing I ever did for my own writing was to take some screenwriting courses, because one is forced to think visually and imagine the story being projected onto a screen. In a screenplay, you can only write down what is seen and heard. In other words, you can’t write what a character is thinking. On the other hand, you can write an entire novel from inside a character’s head, and usually more than one. But if you tell a story from a character’s POV (point-of-view) you axiomatically feel what they’re feeling and see what they’re witnessing. This is the whole secret to novel-writing. It’s intrinsically visual, because we automatically create images even if the writer doesn’t provide them. So my method is to provide cues, knowing that the reader will fill in the blanks. No one specifically mentions this in the video, so it’s my contribution.
 
Something else that Moore, Catling and Ince discuss is how writing something down effectively changes the way they think. This is something I can identify with, both in fiction and non-fiction, but fiction specifically. It’s hard to explain this if you haven’t experienced it, but they spend a lot of time on it, so it’s obviously significant to them. In fiction, there needs to be a spontaneity – I’ve often compared it to playing jazz, even though I’m not a musician. So most of the time, you don’t know what you’re going to write until it appears on the screen or on paper, depending which medium you’re using. Moore says it’s like it’s in your hands instead of your head, which is certainly not true. But the act of writing, as opposed to speaking, is a different process, at least for Moore, and also for me.
 
I remember many years ago (decades) when I told someone (a dentist, actually) that I was writing a book. He said he assumed that novelists must dictate it, because he couldn’t imagine someone writing down thousands upon thousands of words. At the time, I thought his suggestion just as weird as he thought mine to be. I suspect some writers do. Philip Adams (Australian broadcaster and columnist) once confessed that he dictated everything he wrote. In my professional life, I have written reports for lawyers in contractual disputes, both in Australia and the US, for which I’ve received the odd kudos. In one instance, someone I was working with was using a cassette-like dictaphone and insisted I do the same, believing it would save time. So I did, in spite of my better judgement, and it was just terrible. Based on that one example, you’d be forgiven for thinking that I had no talent or expertise in that role. Of course, I re-wrote the whole thing, and was never asked to do it again.
 
I originally became interested in Moore’s YouTube videos because he talked about how writing affects you as a person and can also affect the world. I think to be a good writer of fiction you need to know yourself very well, and I suspect that is what he meant without actually saying it. The paradox with this is that you are always creating characters who are not you. I’ve said many times that the best fiction you write is where you’re completely detached – in a Zen state – sometimes called ‘flow’. Virtuoso musicians and top sportspersons will often make the same admission.
 
I believe having an existential philosophical approach to life is an important aspect to my writing, because it requires an authenticity that’s hard to explain. To be true to your characters you need to leave yourself out of it. Virtually all writers, including Moore, talk about treating their characters like real people, and you need to extend that to your villains if you want them to be realistic and believable, not stereotypes. Moore talks about giving multiple dimensions to his characters, which I won’t go into. Not because I don’t agree, but because I don’t over-analyse it. Characters just come to me and reveal themselves as the story unfolds; the same as they do for the reader.
 
What I’ve learned from writing fiction (which I’d self-describe as sci-fi/fantasy) – as opposed to what I didn’t know – is that, at the end of the day (or story), it’s all about relationships. Not just intimate relationships, but relationships between family members, between colleagues, between protagonists and AI, and between protagonists and antagonists. This is the fundamental grist for all stories.
 
Philosophy is arguably more closely related to writing than any other artform: there is a crossover and interdependency; because fiction deals with issues relevant to living and being.

Time again

 This is a topic I’ve written about before, many times, but I’m returning to it on this occasion because of a video I watched by Curt Jaimungal, whom I can recommend. He’s smart and interviews people who are even smarter, and he has a particular penchant for interviewing people with unorthodox ideas, but with the knowledge to support them. He also has the good sense to let them do nearly all of the talking. He rarely interjects and when he does, it’s pertinent and tends to not interrupt the flow. I’ve sometimes been annoyed by interviewers cutting someone off when they were about to say something that I was interested in hearing. I could never accuse Curt of that.
 
In this case he’s interviewing Avshalom Elitzur, whom I’ve also referenced before. He’s a bit of an iconoclast – my favourite type of person, even if I disagree with them. If I’m to be fair, I’d have to include Donald Hoffman in that category, though I’ve been a harsh critic in the past. Having said that, I’ve noticed that Donald has changed his approach over the 8 or so years I’ve been following him. As I’ve said before, it’s important to follow the people you disagree with as well as those you agree with, especially when they have knowledge or expertise that you don’t.
 
Elitzur discusses three or more topics, all related to Einstein’s theories of relativity, but mostly the special theory. He starts off by calling out (my phrase) what he considers a fundamental problem that most physicists, if not all (his phraseology) ignore, which is that time is fundamentally different to space, because time changes in a way that space does not. What’s more we all experience this, with or without a scientific theory to explain it. He gives the example of how another country (say, Japan) still exists even though you don’t experience it (assuming you’re not Japanese). If you are in Japan, make it Australia. On the other hand, another time does not exist in the same way (be it past or present), yet many physicists talk about it as if it does. I discussed this in some depth, when I tackled Sabine Hoffenfelder’s book, Existential Physics; A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.
 
Elitzur raises this at both the start and towards the end of the video, because he thinks it’s distorting how physicists perceive the world. Specifically, Einstein’s block-universe, where all directions in time exist simultaneously in the same way that all directions in space exist all at once. He mentions that Penrose challenges this and so did Paul Davies once, but not now. In fact, I challenge Davies’ position in another post I wrote after reading his book, The Demon in the Machine. Elitzur makes the point that challenging this is considered naïve but he also makes another point much more dramatically. He says that for Einstein, the ‘future cut’ in time is ‘already there’ (10.50) and consequently said, ‘…has the same degree of reality as the present cut and the past cut. Are you okay with that?’ His exact words.
 
He recounts the famous letter that Einstein wrote to the family of a good friend who had just passed away, and only 4 weeks before Einstein himself passed away (I didn’t know that before Elitzur told me), from which we have this much quoted extract: ‘The past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Davies also used this quote in his abovementioned book.
 
I’m going to talk about last what Elitzur talked about early, if not quite first, which is the famous pole-in-the-barn thought experiment. Elitzur gives a good explanation, if you haven’t come across it before, but I’ll try because I think it’s key to understanding the inherent paradox of special relativity, and also providing an explanation that reconciles with our perception of reality.
 
It's to do with Lorenz-contraction, which is that, for an observer, an object travelling transversely to their field of vision (say horizontally) shortens in the direction of travel. This is one of those Alice and Bob paradoxes, not unlike the twin paradox. Let us assume that Alice is in a space ship who goes through a tunnel with doors at both ends, so that her ship fits snugly inside with no bits hanging out (like when both are stationary). And Bob operates the doors, so that they open when Alice arrives, close when she is inside and open to allow her to leave. From Bob’s perspective, Alice’s spaceship is shorter than the tunnel, so she fits inside, no problem. Also, and this is the key point (highlighted by Elitzur): according to Bob, both doors open and close together – there is no lag.
 
The paradox is resolved by relativity theory (and the associated mathematics), because, from Alice’s perspective, the doors don’t open together but sequentially. The first door opens and then closes after she’s passed through it, and the second door opens slightly later and remains open slightly longer so that the first door closes behind her before she leaves the tunnel. In other words, both doors are closed while she’s in the tunnel, but in such a way that they’re not closed at the same time, therefore her spaceship doesn’t hit either of them. This is a direct consequence of simultaneity being different for Alice. If you find that difficult to follow, watch the video
 
I have my own unorthodox way of resolving this, because, contrary to what everyone says, I think there is a preferred frame of reference, which is provided by ‘absolute spacetime’. You can even calculate the Earth’s velocity relative to the overall spacetime of the entire universe by measuring the Doppler shift of the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation). This is not contentious – Penrose and Davies both give good accounts of this. It’s also related to what Tim Maudlin called, the most important experiment in physics, which is Newton spinning a bucket of water and observing the concave surface of the water due to the centrifugal force, and then asking: what is it spinning in reference to? Answer: the entire universe.
 
You might notice that when someone describes or explains the famous twin paradox, they only ever talk about the time difference – they rarely, if ever, talk about the space contraction. Personally, I don’t think space contracts in reality, but time duration does. If you take an extreme example, you could hypothetically travel across the entire galaxy in your lifetime, which means, from your perspective, the distance travelled would be whole orders of magnitude shorter. This can be resolved if it’s the ruler measuring the distance that changes and not the distance. In this case, the clock acts as a ruler. Kip Thorne has commented on this without drawing any conclusions.
 
This same logic could be applied to the spaceship and the tunnel. For Alice, it appears shorter, but she’s the one ‘measuring’ it. If one extends this logic, then I would argue that there is a ‘true simultaneity’, experienced by Bob in this case, because he is in the same frame of reference as the tunnel and the doors. I need to point out that, as far as I know, no one else agrees with me, including Elitzur. However, it’s consistent with my thought experiment about traversing the galaxy: time contracts but space doesn't.
 
I’ve raised this before, but I believe that there is an independent reality to all observers, and this is consistent with Kant’s famous dictum that there is a ‘thing-in-itself’ that we may never perceive. In other words, relativity can only tell us about what we observe, which leaves open the possibility that there is a reality that one observer has a better perception of than another. It’s possible that while ‘time passed’ is observer-dependent, space is not, but only the observer’s perception of it.
 
This is also consistent with Elitzur’s overall thesis and core argument that space and time are different. It’s also consistent with the idea that there is a frame of reference for the entire universe, which I argue is what general relativity (GR) gives us. And in fact, we observe that local frames of reference can actually travel faster than light, which is why the observable universe has a horizon: there are parts of the Universe receding from us faster than light.
 
There is another aspect of this that Elitzur doesn’t bring up, and that is that there is an edge in time for the Universe, but no boundary in space. I find it curious that, if physicists bring this up at all, they tend to gloss over it and not provide a satisfactory resolution. You see, it conflicts with the idea, inherent in the block-universe model, that there is no ‘now’.
 
Curt introduces ‘now’ towards the end of the video, but only in reference to the ‘flow’ of time that we all experience. Again, I’m a heretic in that I believe there is a universal now for the entire universe.
 
And while I don’t think it explains entanglement and non-locality in QM, it’s consistent with it. Entanglement works across space and time independently of relativistic causality, without breaking the relativistic rule that you can’t send information faster than light.
 
As it happens, there is another video by Curt with Tim Maudlin, an American philosopher of science, whom Curt introduces as ‘bringing some sober reality to this realm of quantum confusion and mysticism.’ In particular, Maudlin gives an excellent exposition of Bell’s famous theorem, and debunks the claim that it questions whether there is ‘reality’. In other words, it’s often formulated as: you can accept non-locality or you can accept reality, but you can’t have both. Just to clarify, ‘locality’ means local phenomena that obey SR (special relativity) as I’ve discussed above.
 
Maudlin argues quite cogently that you only need 2 assumptions for Bell’s theorem to make sense and neither of them break reality. The main assumption is that there is ‘statistical independence’, which he explains by giving examples of medical controlled experiments (for example, to test if tobacco causes lung cancer). It just means that random really does mean random, which gives true independence.
 
The only other assumption is that we can have non-locality, which means you can have a connection or relationship between events that is not dependent on special relativity. Numerous experiments have proven this true.
 
Maudlin challenges Sabine’s contention that Bell’s Theorem can only be explained by ‘superdeterminism’, which is another name for Einstein’s block-universe, which started this whole discussion. Sabine is so convinced by superdeterminism, she has argued that one day everyone will agree with her. This of course has implications for free will and is central to Elitzur’s argument that the future does not exist in the same way as the present or even the past, which is fixed. And that’s his point. Sabine’s and most physicist’s view on all this is that what we experience must be an illusion: there is no now, no flow of time, and no free will.

Addendum 1: I came across another video by Curt with Jacob Barandes, that came out after I posted this. Jacob is a Harvard scientist, who has done a series of videos with Curt. It's relevance to this topic is that he talks about space-time in GR and how, unlike Newtonian physics, and even SR, you can't tell which direction time and space have. And this axiomatically creates problems when you try to quantumise it (to coin a term). I think the superposition of a gravitational field creates its own problems (not discussed). He then goes on to conjecture that there should be an intermediate step in trying to derive a quantum field theory of gravity, and that is to do probabilities on gravity. He acknowledges this is a highly speculative idea.

He then goes on to talk about 'expectation values', which is the standard way physicists have tried to model QFT (quantum field theory) on to spacetime, and is called 'semi-classical gravity'. Viktor T Toth (on Quora) says about this: …it is hideously inelegant, essentially an ad-hoc averaging of the equation that is really, really ugly and is not derived from any basic principle that we know. Nevertheless, Toth argues that it 'works'. Barandes goes further and says it's based on a fallacy (watch the video if you want an elaboration). To quote Toth again: We can do quantum field theory just fine on the curved spacetime background of general relativity. What we have so far been unable to do in a convincing manner is turn gravity itself into a quantum field theory.

I tend to agree with Freeman Dyson, who contends that they are not compatible in theory or in nature. In other words, he argues that quantum gravity is a chimera. Dyson also argues that QM can't describe past events; so, if that's true, quantum gravity is attempting to describe spacetime in its future. Arguably, this is what happens the other side of the event horizon of a black hole, where space itself only exists in one's future, which leads to the singularity. 

Addendum 2: Since posting this I've watched a lot of other videos, many of them by Curt, which may become the subject of a future post. But I just wanted to reference this one with Emily Adlam, who has a view completely opposite to the one expressed in my post above. She's developed what she calls the 'Sudoku universe', or the 'all at once' universe. The analogy with Sudoku is that the outcome is already 'known' and you can start anywhere at all - there is no progression from a fixed starting point to a fixed end point. This video is 1hr 19m, and I need to point out that she knows a lot more about this subject than I do, and so does Curt. Curt had obviously read all her papers relevant to this and knew exactly what to ask her. I know that if I was to go one-on-one with her, I could never argue at her level. I intend, at some point, to write another post where I discuss points-of-view of various physicists that are all driven more by philosophy than science.