The problem with physics

 This title could be easily misconstrued, as it gives the impression that there is only one problem in physics and if we could solve that, everything would be resolved and there would be nothing left to understand or explain. Anyone familiar with this blog will know that I don’t believe that at all, so I need to unpack this before I even start.
 
And you might well ask: if I know there are a number of problems in physics, why didn’t I make that clear in the title? You see, I’ve embedded a question in the title that I want you to ask.
 
I’ve been watching a number of videos over a period of time, many of them on Curt Jaimungal’s channel, Theories of Everything, where he talks to a lot of people, much cleverer than me, some of whom have the wildest theories in science, and physics in particular. If one takes John Wheeler’s metaphor of an island of knowledge in an infinite sea of ignorance, they are all building theories on the shoreline of that island. I like to point out (as a personal ego-boost) that I came up with that metaphor before I knew Wheeler had beaten me to it.
 
To give just one example that seems totally ‘out there’, Emily Adlam proposes her ‘Sudoku universe’ where everything exists at once. She’s not alone, because it’s not dissimilar to Sabine Hossenfelder’s position, though she uses different arguments. Of course, both her and Sabine are far more knowledgeable on these topics than me, so while I disagree, I acknowledge I don’t have the chops to take them on in a proper debate. Another example is Claudia de Rahm, whom I’ve referenced before, who thinks that gravitons may have mass, which would seem to contradict the widely held belief that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light. She has discussions with Curt, that once again, are well above my level of knowledge on this topic. 

Another person he interviews is Avshalom Elitzur, who even makes statements I actually agree with. In this video, he argues that space-time is created when the wave function collapses. It’s a very unorthodox view but it’s consistent with mine and Freeman Dyson’s belief that QM (therefore the wave function) can only describe the future. However, he also has a radical idea that the ‘creation’ of space may be related to the creation of charge, because if the space is created between the particles, they repel, and if it’s created outside, they attract. I admit I have problems with this, even though it took Curt to clarify it. Richard Muller (whose book, NOW, I’ve read) also argues that space may be created along with time. Both of these ideas are consistent with the notion that the Big Bang is still in progress – both time and space are being created as the Universe expands.
 
So there are lots of problems, and the cleverest people on the planet, including many I haven’t mentioned like Roger Penrose and Sean Carroll, all have their own pet theories, all on the shoreline of Wheeler’s metaphorical island.
 
But the island metaphor provides a clue to why the problem exists, and that is that they are all just as philosophical as they are scientific. Sabine attempted to address this in 2 books she wrote: Lost in Math and Existential Physics; both of which I’ve read. But there are 2 levels to this problem when it comes to physics, which are effectively alluded to in the titles of her books. In other words, one level is philosophical and the next level is mathematical.
 
All of the people I mentioned above, along with others I haven’t mentioned, start with a philosophical position, even if they don’t use that term. And all physics theories are dependent on a mathematical model. There is also arguably a third level, which is experimental physics, and that inexorably determines whether the model, and hence the theory, is accurate.
 
But there is a catch: sometimes the experimental physics has proven the ‘theory’ correct, yet the philosophical implications are still open to debate. This is the case with quantum mechanics (QM), and has been for over a century. As Sabine pointed out in a paper she wrote, our dilemmas with QM haven’t really changed since Bohr’s and Einstein’s famous arguments over the Copenhagen interpretation, which are now almost a century old.
 
Some would argue that the most pertinent outstanding ‘problem’ in physics is the irreconcilability of gravity, or Einstein’s general theory of relativity (GR), and QM. Given the problems we have with dark matter and dark energy, which are unknown yet make up 95% of the Universe, I think we are ripe for another Kuhnian revolution in physics. And if that’s true, then we have no idea what it is.

The role of the arts. Why did it evolve? Will AI kill it?

 As I mentioned in an earlier post this month, I’m currently reading Brian Greene’s book, Until the End of Time; Mind, Matter; and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, which covers just about everything from cosmology to evolution to consciousness, free will, mythology, religion and creativity. He spends a considerable amount of time on storytelling, compared to other art forms, partly because it allows an easy segue from language to mythology to religion.
 
One of his points of extended discussion was in trying to answer the question: why did our propensity for the arts evolve, when it has no obvious survival value? He cites people like Steven Pinker, Brian Boyd (whom I discuss at length in another post) and even Darwin, among others. I won’t elaborate on these, partly due to space, and partly because I want to put forward my own perspective, as someone who actually indulges in an artistic activity, and who could see clearly how I inherited artistic genes from one side of my family (my mother’s side). No one showed the slightest inclination towards artistic endeavour on my father’s side (including my sister). But they all excelled in sport (including my sister), and I was rubbish at sport. One can see how sporting prowess could be a side-benefit to physical survival skills like hunting, but also achieving success in combat, which humans have a propensity for, going back to antiquity.
 
Yet our artistic skills are evident going back at least 30-40,000 years, in the form of cave-art, and one can imagine that other art forms like music and storytelling have been active for a similar period. My own view is that it’s sexual selection, which Greene discusses at length, citing Darwin among others, as well as detractors, like Pinker. The thing is that other species also show sexual selection, especially among birds, which I’ve discussed before a couple of times. The best known example is the peacock’s tail, but I suspect that birdsong also plays a role, not to mention the bower bird and the lyre bird. The lyre bird is an interesting one, because they too have an extravagant tail (I’m talking about the male of the species) which surely would be a hindrance to survival, and they perform a dance and are extraordinary mimics. And the only reason one can think that this might have evolutionary value at all is because the sole purpose of those specific attributes is to attract a mate.
 
And one can see how this is analogous to behaviour in humans, where it is the male who tends to attract females with their talents in music, in particular. As Greene points out, along with others, artistic attributes are a by-product of our formidable brains, but I think these talents would be useless if we hadn’t evolved in unison a particular liking for the product of these endeavours (also discussed by Greene), which we see even in the modern world. I’m talking about the fact that music and stories both seem to be essential sources of entertainment, evident in the success of streaming services, not to mention a rich history in literature, theatre, ballet and more recently, cinema.
 
I’ve written before that there are 2 distinct forms of cognitive ability: creative and analytical; and there is neurological evidence to support this. The point is that having an analytical brain is just as important as having a creative one, otherwise scientific theories and engineering feats, for which humans seem uniquely equipped to provide, would never have happened, even going back to ancient artefacts like Stonehenge and both the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids. Note that these all happened on different continents.
 
But there are times when the analytical and creative seem to have a synergistic effect, and this is particularly evident when it comes to scientific breakthroughs – a point, unsurprisingly, not lost on Greene, who cites Einstein’s groundbreaking discoveries in relativity theory as a case-in-point.
 
One point that Greene doesn’t make is that there has been a cultural evolution that has effectively overtaken biological evolution in humans, and only in humans I would suggest. And this has been a direct consequence of our formidable brains and everything that goes along with that, but especially language.
 
I’ve made the point before that our special skill – our superpower, if you will – is the ability to nest concepts within concepts, which we do with everything, not just language, but it would have started with language, one would think. And this is significant because we all think in a language, including the ability to manipulate abstract concepts in our minds that don’t even exist in the real world. And no where is this more apparent than in the art of storytelling, where we create worlds that only exist in the imagination of someone’s mind.
 
But this cultural evolution has created civilisations and all that they entail, and survival of the fittest has nothing to do with eking out an existence in some hostile wilderness environment. These days, virtually everyone who is reading this has no idea where their food comes from. However, success is measured by different parameters than the ability to produce food, even though food production is essential. These days success is measured by one’s ability to earn money and activities that require brain-power have a higher status and higher reward than so-called low-skilled jobs. In fact, in Australia, there is a shortage of trades because, for the last 2 generations at least, the emphasis, vocationally, has been in getting kids into university courses, when it’s not necessarily the best fit for the child. This is why the professional class (including myself) are often called ‘elitist’ in the culture wars and being a tradie is sometimes seen as a stigma, even though our society is just as dependent on them as they are on professionals. I know, because I’ve spent a working lifetime in a specific environment where you need both: engineering/construction.
 
Like all my posts, I’ve gone off-track but it’s all relevant. Like Greene, I can’t be sure how or why evolution in humans was propelled, if not hi-jacked, by art, but art in all its forms is part of the human condition. A life without music, stories and visual art – often in combination – is unimaginable.
 
And this brings me to the last question in my heading. It so happens that while I was reading about this in Greene’s thought-provoking book, I was also listening to a programme on ABC Classic (an Australian radio station) called Legends, which is weekly and where the presenter, Mairi Nicolson, talks about a legend in the classical music world for an hour, providing details about their life as well as broadcasting examples of their work. In this case, she had the legend in the studio (a rare occurrence), who was Anna Goldsworthy. To quote from Wikipedia: Anna Louise Goldsworthy is an Australian classical pianist, writer, academic, playwright, and librettist, known for her 2009 memoir Piano Lessons.

But the reason I bring this up is because Anna mentioned that she attended a panel discussion on the role of AI in the arts. Anna’s own position is that she sees a role for AI, but in doing the things that humans find boring, which is what we are already seeing in manufacturing. In fact, I’ve witnessed this first-hand. Someone on the panel made the point that AI would effectively democratise art (my term, based on what I gleaned from Anna’s recall) in the sense that anyone would be able to produce a work of art and it would cease to be seen as elitist as it is now. He obviously saw this as a good thing, but I suspect many in the audience, including Anna, would have been somewhat unimpressed if not alarmed. Apparently, someone on the panel challenged that perspective but Anna seemed to think the discussion had somehow veered into a particularly dissonant aberration of the culture wars.
 
I’m one of those who would be alarmed by such a development, because it’s the ultimate portrayal of art as a consumer product, similar to the way we now perceive food. And like food, it would mean that its consumption would be completely disconnected from its production.
 
What worries me is that the person on the panel making this announcement (remember, I’m reporting this second-hand) apparently had no appreciation of the creative process and its importance in a functioning human society going back tens of thousands of years.
 
I like to quote from one of the world’s most successful and best known artists, Paul McCartney, in a talk he gave to schoolchildren (don’t know where):
 
“I don't know how to do this. You would think I do, but it's not one of these things you ever know how to do.” (my emphasis)
 
And that’s the thing: creative people can’t explain the creative process to people who have never experienced it. It feels like we have made contact with some ethereal realm. On another post, I cite Douglas Hofstadter (from his famous Pulitzer-prize winning tome, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) quoting Escher:
 
"While drawing I sometimes feel as if I were a spiritualist medium, controlled by the creatures I am conjuring up."
 
Many people writing a story can identify with this, including myself. But one suspects that this also happens to people exploring the abstract world of mathematics. Humans have developed a sense that there is more to the world than what we see and feel and touch, which we attempt to reveal in all art forms, and this, in turn, has led to religion. Of course, Greene spends another entire chapter on that subject, and he also recognises the connection between mind, art and the seeking of meaning beyond a mortal existence.

Insights into writing fiction

 This is a series of posts I published on Quora recently, virtually in one day, in response to specific questions, so I thought it worth posting them here.
 
 
What made you start writing science fiction?
 
I was late coming to science fiction as a reader, partly because I studied science and the suspension of disbelief was more difficult as a result. In my teens I read James Bond and Carter Brown novels that my father had, plus superhero comics, which I’d been addicted to from a young age. I think all of these influenced my later writing. Mind you, I liked innovative TV shows like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. The British TV show, The Avengers with Emma Peel and Steed was a favourite, which had sci-fi elements. So the seeds were there.
 
I came to sci-fi novels via fantasy, where the suspension of disbelief was mandatory. I remember 2 books which had a profound effect on me: The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien and Dune by Frank Herbert; and I read them in that order. I then started to read Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and Le Guin. What I liked about sci-fi was the alternative worlds and societies more than the space-travel and gizmos.
 
The first sci-fi I wrote was a screenplay for a teenage audience, called Kidnapped in Time, and it was liberating. I immediately realised that this was my genre. I combined a real-world scenario, based (very loosely*) on my own childhood with a complete fantasy world set in the future and on another planet, which included alien creatures. To be honest, I’ve never looked back.
 
Elvene was even more liberating, partly because I used a female protagonist. Not sure why that worked, but women love it, so I must have done something right. Since then, all my stories feature female protagonists, as well as males. Villains can be male or female or even robots.
 
Science fiction is essentially what-ifs. What if we genetically engineered humans? What if we had humanoid robots? What if we found life on another world? What if we colonised other worlds? What if we could travel intergalactic distances?
 
 
What unconventional writing techniques have you found most effective in crafting compelling characters?
 
How do you differentiate ‘unconventional’ from ‘conventional’? I don’t know if my techniques are one or the other. Characters come to me, similarly, I imagine, to the way melodies and tunes come to composers and songwriters. That wasn’t always the case. When I started out all the characters were different versions of me and not very believable.
 
It’s like acting, and so, in the beginning, I was a poor actor. Don’t ask me how I changed that, because I don’t know – just practice, I guess. To extend the analogy with composing, I compare writing dialogue to playing jazz, because they both require extemporisation. I don’t overthink it, to be honest. I somehow inhabit the character and they come alive. I imagine it’s the same as acting. I say, ‘imagine’, because I can’t act to save my life – I know, I’ve tried.
 
 
How do you balance originality and familiarity when creating characters and plots in your stories?
 
All fiction is a blend of fantasy and reality, and that blend is dependent on the genre and the author’s own proclivities. I like to cite the example of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, where the reality was the locations, but also details like what type of gun Bond used (Walther PPK) and the type of cigarettes he smoked (Turkish blend). The fantasy was in the plots, the larger-than-life villains and the femme-fatales with outlandish names.
 
My fiction is sci-fi, so the worlds and plots are total fantasy and the reality is all in the characters and the relationships they form.
 
 
*When I say ‘loosely’, the time and milieu is pretty much the same, but whereas the protagonist had a happy home life, despite having no memory of his mother (he lived with his father and older brother), I had a mother, a father and an older sister, but my home life was anything but happy. I make it a rule not to base characters on anyone I know.

Is Morality Objective or Subjective?

 This was a Question of the Month, answers to which appeared in the latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 167, April/May 2025). I didn’t submit an answer because I’d written a response to virtually the same question roughly 10 years ago, which was subsequently published. However, reading the answers made me want to write one of my own, effectively in response to those already written and published, without referencing anything specific.
 
At a very pragmatic level, morality is a direct consequence of communal living. Without rules, living harmoniously would be impossible, and that’s how morals become social norms, which for the most part, we don’t question. This means that morality, in practice, is subjective. In fact, in my previous response, I said that subjective morality and objective morality could be described as morality in practice and morality in theory respectively, where I argued morality in theory is about universal human rights, probably best exemplified by the golden rule: assume everyone has the same rights as you.  A number of philosophers have attempted to render a meta-morality or a set of universal rules and generally failed.
 
But there is another way of looking at this, which are the qualities we admire in others. And those qualities are selflessness, generosity, courage and honesty. Integrity is often a word used to describe someone we trust and admire. By the way, courage in this context, is not necessarily physical courage, but what’s known as moral courage: taking a stand on a principle even if it costs us something. I often cite Aristotle’s essay on friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics, where he distinguishes between utilitarian friendship and genuine friendship, and how it’s effectively the basis for living a moral life.
 
In our work, and even our friendships occasionally, we can find ourselves being compromised. Politicians find this almost daily when they have to toe the party line. Politicians in retirement are refreshingly honest and forthright in a way they could never be when in office, and this includes leaders of parties.
 
I’ve argued elsewhere that trust is the cornerstone to all relationships, whether professional or social. In fact, I like to think it’s my currency in my everyday life. Without trust, societies would function very badly and our interactions would be constantly guarded, which is the case in some parts of the world.
 
So an objective morality is dependent on how we live – our honesty to ourselves and others; our ability to forgive; to let go of grievances; and to live a good life in an Aristotlean sense. I’ve long contended that the measure of my life won’t be based on my achievements and failures, but my interactions with others, and whether they were beneficial or destructive (usually mutual).
 
I think our great failing as a communal species, is our ability to create ingroups and outgroups, which arguably is the cause of all our conflicts and the source of most evil: our demonisation of the other, which can lead even highly intelligent people to behave irrationally; no one is immune, from what I’ve witnessed. A person who can bridge division is arguably the best leader you will find, though you might not think that when you look around the world.

Noam Chomsky on free will

 Whatever you might think about Noam Chomsky’s political views, I’ve always found his philosophical views worth listening to, whether I agree with him or not. In the opening of this video - actually an interview by someone (name not given) on a YouTube channel titled, Mind-Body Solution – he presents a dichotomy that he thinks is obvious, but, as he points out, is generally not acknowledged.
 
Basically, he says that everyone, including anyone who presents an argument (on any topic), behaves as if they believe in free will, even if they claim they don’t. He reiterates this a number of times throughout the video. On the other hand, science cannot tell us anything about free will and many scientists therefore claim it must be an illusion. The contradiction is obvious. He’s not telling me anything I didn’t already know, but by stating it bluntly up-front, he makes you confront it, where more often than not, people simply ignore it.
 
My views on this are well known to anyone who regularly reads this blog, and I’ve challenged smarter minds than mine (not in person), like Sabine Hossenfelder, who claims that ‘free will needs to go in the rubbish bin’, as if it’s an idea that’s past its use-by-date. She claims:
 
...how ever you want to define the word [free will], we still cannot select among several possible different futures. This idea makes absolutely no sense if you know anything about physics.
 
I’ve addressed this elsewhere, so I won’t repeat myself. Chomsky makes the point that, while science acknowledges causal-determinism and randomness, neither of these rule out free will categorically. Chomsky makes it clear that he’s a ‘materialist’, though he discusses Descartes’ perspective in some depth. In my post where I critique Sabine, I conclude that ‘it [free will] defies a scientific explanation’, and I provide testimony from Gill Hicks following a dramatic near-death experience to make my point.
 
Where I most strongly agree with Chomsky is that we are not automatons, though I acknowledge that other members of the animal kingdom, like ants and bees, may be. This doesn’t mean that I think insects and arachnids don’t have consciousness, but I think a lot of their behaviours are effectively ‘programmed’ into their neural structures. It’s been demonstrated by experiments that bees must have an internal map of their local environment, otherwise the ‘dance’ they do to communicate locations to other bees in their colony would make no sense. Also, I think these creatures have feelings, like fear, attraction and hostility. Both of these aspects of their mental worlds distinguish them from AI, in my view, though others might disagree. I think these particular features of animal behaviour, even in these so-called ‘primitive’ creatures, provide the possibility of free will, if free will is the ability to act on the environment in a way that’s not determined solely by reflex actions.
 
Some might argue that acting on a ‘feeling’ is a ‘reflex action’, whereas I’m saying it’s a catalyst to act in a way that might be predictable but not predetermined. I think the ability to ‘feel’ is the evolutionary driver for consciousness. Surely, we could all be automatons without the requirement to be consciously aware. I’ve cited before, incidents where people have behaved like they are conscious, in situations of self-defence, but have no memory of it, because they were ‘knocked out’. It happened to my father in a boxing ring, and I know of other accounts, including a female security guard, who shot her assailant after he knocked her out. If one can defend oneself without being conscious of it, then why has evolution given us consciousness?
 
My contention is that consciousness and free will can’t be separated: it simply makes no sense to me to have the former without the latter. And I think it’s worth comparing this to AI, which might eventually develop to the point where it appears to have consciousness and therefore free will. I’ve made the argument before that there is a subtle difference between agency and free will, because AI certainly has agency. So, what’s the difference? The difference is what someone (Grant Bartley) called ‘conscious causality’ – the ability to turn a thought into an action. This is something we all experience all the time, and is arguably the core precept to Chomsky’s argument that we all believe in free will, because we all act on it.
 
Free will deniers (if I can coin that term) like Sabine Hossenfelder, argue that this is the key to the illusion we all suffer. To quote her again:
 
Your brain is running a calculation, and while it is going on you do not know the outcome of that calculation. So the impression of free will comes from our ‘awareness’ that we think about what we do, along with our inability to predict the result of what we are thinking.
 
In the same video (from which this quote is extracted) she uses the term ‘software’ in describing the activity of one’s brain’s processes, and in combination with the word, ‘calculation’, she clearly sees the brain as a wetware computer. So, while Chomsky argues that we all ‘believe’ in free will because we act like we do, Sabine argues that we act like we do, because the brain is ‘calculating’ the outcome without our cognisance. In effect, she argues that once it becomes conscious, the brain has made the ‘decision’ for you, but gives you the delusion that you have. Curiously, Chomsky uses the word, ‘delusion’, to describe the belief that you don’t have free will.
 
If Sabine is correct and your brain has already made the ‘decision’, then I go back to my previous argument concerning unconscious self-defence. If our ‘awareness’ is an unnecessary by-product of the brain’s activity (because any decision is independent of it), then why did we evolve to have it?
 
Chomsky raises a point I’ve discussed before, which is that, in the same way there are things we can comprehend that no other creature can, there is the possibility that there are things in the Universe that we can’t comprehend either. And I have specifically referenced consciousness as potentially one of those things. And this takes us back to the dichotomy that started the entire discussion – we experience free will, yet it’s thus far scientifically inexplicable. This leads to another dichotomy – it’s an illusion or it’s beyond human comprehension. There is a non-stated belief among many in the scientific community that eventually all unsolved problems in the Universe will eventually be solved by science – one only has to look at the historical record.
 
But I’m one of those who thinks the ‘hard problem’ (coined by David Chalmers) of consciousness may never be solved. Basically, the hard problem is that the experience of consciousness may remain forever a mystery. My argument, partly taken from Raymond Tallis, is that it won’t fall to science because it can’t be measured. We can only measure neuron-activity correlates, which some argue already resolves the problem. Actually, I don’t think it does, and again I turn to AI. If that’s correct, then measuring analogous electrical activity by an AI would also supposedly measure consciousness. At this stage in AI development, I don’t think anyone believes that, though some people believe that measures of global connectivity or similar parameters in an AI neural network may prove otherwise.
 
Basically, I don’t think AI will ever have an inner world like we do – going back to the bees I cited – and if it does, we wouldn’t know. I don’t know what inner world you have, but I would infer you have one from your behaviour (assuming we met). On the other hand, I don’t know that anyone would infer that an AI would have one. I’ve made the comparison before of an AI-operated, autonomous drone navigating by GPS co-ordinates, which requires self-referencing algorithms. Notice that we don’t navigate that way, unless we use a computer interface (like your smart phone). AI can simulate what we do: like write sentences, play chess, drive cars; but doing them in a completely different fashion.
 
In response to a question from his interlocutor, Chomsky argues that our concept of justice is dependent on a belief in free will, even if it’s unstated. It’s hard to imagine anyone disagreeing, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to hold anyone accountable for their actions.

As I’ve argued previously, it’s our ability to mental time-travel that underpins free will, because, without an imagined future, there is no future to actualise, which is the whole point of having free will. And I would extend this to other creatures, who may be trying to catch food or escape being eaten – either way, they imagine a future they want to actualise.

 

Addendum: I’m currently reading Brian Greene’s Until The End Of Time (2020), who devoted an entire chapter to consciousness and, not surprisingly, has something to say about free will. He’s a materialist, and he says in his intro to the topic:
 
This question has inspired more pages in the philosophical literature than just about any other conundrum.  

Basically, he argues, like Sabine Hossenfelder, that it’s in conflict with the laws of physics, but given he’s writing in a book, and not presenting a time-limited YouTube video (though he does those too), he goes into more detail.
 
To sum up: We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles.
 
He then provides numerous everyday examples that we can all identify with.
 
And since all observations, experiments, and valid theories confirm that particle motion is fully controlled by mathematical rules, we can no more intercede in this lawful progresson of particles than we can change the value of pi.
 
Interesting analogy, because I agree that even God can’t change the value of pi, but that’s another argument. And I’m not convinced that consciousness can be modelled mathematically, which, if true, undermines his entire argument regarding mathematical rules.
 
My immediate internal response to his entire thesis was that he’s writing a book, yet effectively arguing that he has no control over it. However, as if he anticipated this response, he addresses that very point at the end of the next section, titled Rocks, Humans and Freedom.

What matters to me is… my collection of particles is enabled to execute an enormously diverse set of behaviours. Indeed, my particles just composed this very sentence and I’m glad they did… I am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organisation has emancipated my behavioural responses.
 
In other words, the particles in his body and his brain, in particular, (unlike the particles in inert objects, like rocks, tables, chairs etc) possess degrees of freedom that others don’t. But here’s the thing: I and others, including you, read these words and form our own ideas and responses, which we intellectualise and even emote about. In fact, we all form an opinion that either agrees or disagrees with his point. But whether there are diverse possibilities, he’s effectively saying that we are all complex automatons, which means there is no necessity for us to be consciously aware of what we are doing. And I argue that this is what separates us from AI.
 
Just be aware that Albert Einstein would have agreed with him.

 

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.