The point of a simulation is not to quantify human behavior and complex systems. It is to set in motion a narrative from which people can take ideas and experiences.

Goals, Games, and Stories

Writing a blog post on Microsoft Word makes me feel like I’m writing a paper of some sort, so all of this formal language keeps coming into my head. Even writing this sentence in MSWord is a bit weird, but if I don’t remind myself that this is for the blog, I’ll continue to write as if I had some thesis to prove (laugh track.)

But anyway, I was going to talk about The Sims. I was having a conversation with a friend the other day and I think that he hit the nail on the head when he complained that it was Taylorist. I’m not the expert on Taylorism, but it’s generally a philosophy that dominated workplaces a few decades ago by emphasizing repeated motions and compartmentalized processes that maximize efficiency at a given task. Think McDonalds—its “killer feature” being that it made food much more efficiently by using an assembly-line process in which every person does a single task. Yum!

Now, in particular, it went across that same line of reasoning a lot of us may have about the game—we obsess over making our characters eat breakfast and go to work, forgetting that we’re asking them to do the most mundane things that we’re generally avoiding by playing video games. Of course the catch is that we generally don’t operate the same way in real life—eating breakfast, going to work and engaging in seemingly rote self-improvement are generally situated in something other than a single-minded numbers game. I admit, however, I’ve fallen into that trap, and I think many others have; where the idea of self-improvement escapes any sort of idea of life and mindfulness and we suddenly hope to sit down for a few hours and mindlessly repeat some rote task while increasing some theoretical gauge or meter. And, yes, it’s a horrible way to think about life.

And this is where I think The Sims truly fell short of being a great game despite its being one of the most popular of all time. By the way, I’m only talking about the first one, I haven’t played the sequels. But I digress; a truly great game constantly demands that we make decisions of strategic depth—this means that the challenges are always somewhat novel and that there are few (if any) stretches of performing the same task repeatedly. Nor is it even that such repetition makes a game potentially boring, but rather the horrible serotonin trap that can come out of it. There are those times where I can keep getting a little kick of happiness from repeating some action and getting some minimal amount of feedback. When I give one of my Sims a promotion at work or an extra skill-point, there is a slight jolt of satisfaction that reinforces the sense of reward that will come when I pass the next tiny milestone.

What’s important to me about this dichotomy between the rote and the novel isn’t so much what it says for creating a game with great gameplay, but what it means for creating a game that offers a true narrative experience. As I’ve said before (though maybe not on this particular blog), what separates games from other mass media (if you consider games a mass medium—hard to say when such a popular thing is only taken seriously by a narrow demographic) is that it doesn’t offer any sort of real storytelling. Yes, there are backstories, cutscenes, characters, allusions and motifs within games, but most of these things are cosmetic and not at the core of the experience; even the occasional deeper theme that pervades gameplay only scratches the surface of what a real story will deeply penetrate.

As I write this I am in the passenger seat of a car, riding down a stretch of highway connecting Boston to New York, anticipating the sights of big buildings upon my eventual entry into the FDR drive. I’m listening to “Kids” by Kelli Ali—a song with lyrics that semantically mean little more than noise to my rational mind—but the ambience and percussion behind the vocalist’s low and breath-like voice brings about a feeling of mystery. It is the opposite of what Taylorism, rationalism, utilitarianism, classical economics, score cards and every other measurement that’s been mistaken for reality stands for. The soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist—but one that I wouldn’t want to exist anyway; a movie that maybe one day I can borrow a few scenes from but leave the rest in the unprocessed ether of the unstructured and the uninterpreted.

This is, of course, the instinct that art and storytelling invoke in us. Nobody gives a shit how many midichlorians Luke Skywalker gains between A New Hope and Return of the Jedi and when I watch Mad Men, I’m hardly thinking about Peggy Olsen’s iron march of progress (though it goes without saying that I’m rooting for her—she’s one of the only decent people at the agency.) But they do have something in common with even the most stereotypical video games, they have goals; that is, goals of a certain nature. We see change over time, infer motives in characters and follow a journey. It’s just that this journey is of an entirely different nature than that which is stamped, filed, indexed, briefed, de-briefed and numbered; it’s one in which the path matters more than the destination—what more mathematical types would call “path dependent.” At its core, it refuses to acknowledge gain without loss, pleasure without pain, joy without melancholy—a far cry from the one-track “pursuit of happiness” (as defined by what the game tells you it is) that The Sims beckons us to.

This isn’t to say that games never offer anything similar to this experience. We can satisfy the simple desire to see interesting things happen by turning up the difficulty a notch higher than we usually would, modifying the game, or (a la The Sims) treating the game like a dollhouse in which we create dramas. A medium is a means of transportation: sound through air, a signal through a telephone wire, meaning through language, a story through a novel, a vision through a painting; so at its core, this “dollhouse” idea is how the process of storytelling operates on some very deep and fundamental level—the reflection of our mind, our environment and our shared cultural discourse off a medium.

But the tools for this kind of exploration are currently insufficient for an experience that even comes close to what I can experience by turning on a movie, opening a book or listening to a song. I want to imagine a game in which people can experience this exploratory mode of play with the full spectrum of behaviors, desires, motives, personalities, webs of causality, empathy, mystery and dramatic weight that we see in stories. Perhaps game isn’t the right word—“game” in the more academic sense of the word meaning known probabilities and mathematically defined sets of outcomes. Whatever I may want to call them, it’s time to embrace the notion of goals, motives and desires that can be understood but not classified—they need to be open-ended; a catalyst rather than some suffocating essence that defines the experience. Motives are as fundamental to both stories and games as symbols are to both narratives and maps; a narrative being an open-ended set of ideas and symbols rather than a strictly delimited abstraction.

Parts of this post, such as those bits about exploration vs. destination, felt so obvious and banal, but that isn’t what’s most important to take away. What’s important is to make this distinction in a way that doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Goals, motives and desires are at the core of both the most rote gameplay and the most beautiful poetic landscapes—but in making a new kind of “game”, we must embrace it in a different way while still preserving the core ideas behind gameplay. There really is an area between story and game.

The Entropy of Morality

I've had plenty of thoughts about "moral relativism", mostly that it's pseudo-intellectual garbage. I haven't bothered post exactly why I think that, but suffice it to say that it talks about everything as if its reducible to first order logic. If we can't (I mean literally can't) fully formalize math, then why the bloody hell would we expect to be able to do it with ETHICS?

But I thought of another reason why I believe morality exists. Because true morality is hard. I'm not talking about sparing someone's feelings when they ask you if they've gained weight or refraining from committing a crime. These are the easy things; social and legal forces are very overreaching and keep us in line. No, I'm talking about the hard choices. Putting yourself in physical danger because it's the right thing to do, living ascetically to escape the corruption of material wealth, quitting your job because of an ethical situation that you have little part in (like say... selling advertisements for cigarettes or dangerous pharmaceuticals that you yourself would never use.) Acts of serious courage and sacrifice are things you don't see every day; I myself confess that I've never made any risk or sacrifice great enough to stop questioning my own virtue.

What does this have to do with anything? Isn't that arbitrary? Well, no. Saying that something is hard is a way of saying that it means something. Cowardice is a dime a dozen. If I make a choice between an act of courage and an act of cowardice, it's not like both are decisions with equal weight. One is easy and common, the other rare and difficult; so it must mean more—just like it's more meaningful for me to write these words on paper than to just punch random unintelligible keys; or to solve a difficult math problem instead of make an unsubstantiated conjecture about something based on nothing.

In other words, truly moral actions will have greater information content. They prove something, even if that something may be "arbitrary", just like math; a subject in which we still value proofs (for good reason.) Just as a game means nothing if there are no rules (with the exception of Calvinball), an action means nothing without difficulty. Cowardice, greed and hatred, on the other hand, never prove anything. There's no test, no rules and no meaning.

Paradigms vs. Narratives

I think I have a simple definition of a narrative:

A paradigm is a sign system that is closed.

A narrative is a sign system that is open.

This also easily explains the difference between game design and interactive storytelling (to an extent; you can think of it as a spectrum, chess is on the "game" extreme whereas something like SimCity or Final Fantasy is a lot closer to the middle. Nothing yet on the "interactive storytelling" extreme.)

I'll elaborate more on this soon and also talk about how this is shaping my work.

For that matter I decided I'm going to also be a lot more open about my work. Scrooges go nowhere.

Command and Control

Why do we overeat and refuse to burn it off? Why do we procrastinate; or even burn out despite our passion for a subject? What about the state of the world? Why are politicians so disappointing; what should we trust in when we vote for them—rigid rationalism, protocol; or the feeling deep within our gut? What about the problems that we just think are never going to end—is it willpower, self-experimentation or something else?

I've benefited a lot in recent months by letting go of reliance on two sides of the same coin—declarative knowledge and conscious "willpower." Both are important and play a role in many things, but they are the exception rather than the rule. The way I came to this was through, yes, some changes to how I ate and exercised. I've never had a weight problem, but I have some other reasons, such as asthma, to look after what goes in my body.

Upon investigating these ideas, I saw that there was a general flaw in the arguments about obesity. Moralizing self-help gurus have convinced us everyday laymen have taken the truism that people gain weight because they "consume more energy than they expend" and somehow used some discursive sleight of hand to translate this to the idea that obese people are being weak-willed by overeating and not exercising. To quote one great thinker: what horseshit!

Have we learned nothing from the mistakes of Descartes or the piles of research on the body's effect on the brain? I could even wager that thousands of years of wisdom would back this; but I really don't know and could be wrong about that. We are deeply connected to our bodies; they are the source of emotions, which are by extension the source of our decision making. Don't believe me? How about the fact that even with tons of analytic knowledge ("facts"), severing the connection between our brains and our bodily dispositions disables our ability to effectively make decisions. But I digress.

The reason why this "calories-in/calories-out" argument doesn't work is that our behavior is affected by all the biochemical reactions that are going on in our metabolism. When we eat too much junk food too regularly, our metabolism breaks down and our ability to efficiently process nutrients falls apart; insulin surges through the body at unhealthy rates, we store perfectly good nutrients as body fat and our brain does not get the glucose it needs to stop yelling "I'm hungry!" The result is that we find ourselves crashing and needing more food. So perhaps we just need to burn it off? Unlikely; where would you get all the energy needed if you can't even feel satiated?

Of course, all this could be wrong too; remember that bit about syllogistic knowledge. But I am convinced that these systems work something like this—the world is just too connected and nonlinear. And for this reason I've started to wonder, in light of just how embodied our decisions are; whether we need a whole new way of thinking about how to do things. When we procrastinate, it's likely that our mind is telling us that it doesn't approve of the plan. But couldn't that be irrational? Well, yes; we're not always cut out for the modern world that we've set up for ourselves—but the wisdom of emotions seems to be seriously underestimated. Our emotions really may be what's right when we're procrastinating; an unrealistic plan really can slow us down after all.

And how surprising is this when you look at something bigger like the markets? Sometimes we like to give credit to politicans for saving or ruining the economy; but how much say do they really have? What effect does the average tax policy or stimulus plan have? I'd argue that sometimes they work; sometimes they provide a big enough jolt to shift things into another equilibrium—but that's a big maybe; the fact is, we can't even seem to predict where the markets go.

What does that tell us? That yes, there are things we can do. We have some conscious control over our choices and we certainly have times where we just need to stop making excuses and apply elbow grease. But the parallels become even more striking when we hear about the limits to our willpower; how they can be increased through certain behaviors and states of health—but those behaviors and states must be brought about in some way to begin with. We have a very fragile modicum of control over a system that is highly belligerent and, on top of that (though somewhat related), quite random. We need to understand and appreciate these systems for what they are; not only economics and nutrition, but also our habits, the social interactions of people; and of course the very stochasticity of life.

To do that, we must let go of the command and control model but not think that this is some key to "hijacking" our behavior. We talk about tricks to fool ourselves, but it's hard to believe that we can really just "trick" ourselves into doing everything. Nothing is going gently nudge me to do 8 hours of nonstop work (if only...) No, not a chance. There's something more than that. We need to look at the equilibria of our life; on the harm of deterministic thinking and the benefits of random events; on the anti-fragility behind growth and discovery.

It's hard to say for sure what it all means, but a lot of things have helped me towards this path. Eating and exercising more stochastically, cutting out certain food groups but not worrying if I cheat once in a while; not pushing the serotonin buttons of e-mail and Facebook first thing in the morning (getting bad at that), finding peace and discovery in fiction, walking, meditation and unscheduled activities; not adhering to rules too tightly.

But I'd hardly say that I read fiction for "knowledge" or take walks for "exercise"—more accurately I exercise to learn and read for the sake of my body. Exercise has a specific scent of discovery to it, it resides at the core of so many things in our hunter-gatherer past; reading makes me feel more whole, my body relaxes into a new state—just as well that I run anaerobically and weight-lift aerobically.

Maybe you agree, maybe you disagree. If you agree, how have you applied this to your life? If you disagree, you can have a say too ;)

Truth

Truth (capital "T" intended) exists.

But there are no such things as platonic forms. Only forms that we imagine.

We create forms and change them when we find that they cannot adequately describe the essence that we're attempting to capture.

It's in that moment of change, that flux between isomorphisms, that we see Truth. It's an aether that can only be seen via flux.

And that may be all that reality is; flux.

Consciousness (In 3.5 Steps)

I spent way too much of 2010 pondering about metaphysics, so I gave it a break until recently when I cracked open Godel/Escher/Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and read the first chapter. That was enough to fill in the blanks to a fragmented theory of existence that I had been churning around for most of 2010. Here are the basics; I will elaborate further if anyone is interested:


1) Existence and Consciousness are inseparable

From an epistemological standpoint, I don't see any way these can be safely separated. Therefore, I'm assuming that they can't. There are other reasons, which are still a mess in my head, but I am more or less working from what I consider the indisputable truth of subjective experience.

2) Experience is the friction of incomplete information

Why do we never seem to remember locking our door? Why do we remember surprises more than routine things? Because we failed to predict, thus signifying new information. In information theory, it's called information content and is measured by how many bits it takes to store; if a probability distribution has a single outcome that is 100% likely to occur, that probability distribution has no information content.

Another way of thinking about this is that information content is also called entropy*, which in physics is the irreversible disorder that arises from motion, which is very related to that other phenomenon we call friction.

Wolfgang Iser brilliantly applies this theory to the experience we have when reading books and just about everything else in life seems to follow. When are video games boring? When there's no challenge left. When do movies suck? When they're way too predictable. But thankfully, things are always at least a little bit different than we anticipated them.

3) You need identifiers to signify difference but you need difference to distinguish the identifiers from one another; this paradox creates a regress loop.

To put that in English, let's consider the colors of objects. If everything were the color red, we'd have no such thing as color. We notice things because there are differences. This ties back in to what I said about information content in the previous post; if there's a 100% probability of one particular outcome, then there is no information.

So if we want difference, we need some trait in which these things are different. But where does this trait come from? It would need to be distinguished from something else. Therefore, we're faced yet again with the same problem ad infinitum.

One last thing is needed then, to close this odd regress loop. Once we've done that, we essentially have a system in which we can continue to seek information in a cycle of anticipation and surprise but never reach the end:



While writing this, I realized that I was missing the answer to this part. I will try a basic sketch of this:

-There is some kind of self-reference that closes the loop of this problem with infinite levels of "difference"

-The result manifests itself as a paradox (or many of them--perhaps they all mean the same thing) such as Godel's Incompleteness Theorem or the Time Dilation paradox.

-This creates a dog-chasing-its-tail effects in which a recursive pattern creates a fractal of uncountable codes--the friction of these being what we know to be reality.

But feel free to take a stab at the last part and let me know what you think...



I should note that by the time I finish Godel/Escher/Bach, it may be the case that Hofstadter beat me to the punch; in fact, he says that his thesis is that Meaningless Symbols Acquire Meaning Through Self-Reference, but so far it has proven to simply be the connective link that I have been missing between the three steps that I outlined above; I just hadn't put them together the right way, but they were all there a year ago.


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*Forgive me if I've abused the poor term; I'm not a physicist.

A definition of narrative?

So many things I wanted to post about, so many work related distractions and so many excuses. Here's one for brevity.

My structural definition of a narrative:

A collection of events* that makes sense of itself without the use of axioms.


*Was hesitant about using the term "event", but I think that it's more precise than saying "signs"--there's a self similarity here I think; the idea of an event is itself inscribed in narrative.


Thoughts?

That Old Humanities Argument

We've all been asked this question before: why study the humanities? Why teach literary criticism? What is the point of learning about things that never happened and inapplicable interpretations? Math and science have certainly been hyped up in the past few years by the presidential administration with the looming economic fears of being uncompetitive in the face of rising powers and the political activism of people who want to see our money spent better.

As an English major in college, I had to struggle with this question myself; I was asked by other people and even had to deal with the prompt in a literary theory class (which I utterly failed at doing.) It is worth noting that a lot of my work in literary theory has been applicable to what I'm engineering now, but that's besides the point to me because I know that it wasn't all that this was about. I certainly see literature as an important metaphysical experiment for philosophers, but I don't know how I feel about philosophers either.

But around a year ago I had read about Stanley Fish's book Save the World On Your Own Time, which apparently* argued that trying to find some political or economic justification for the humanities denigrates it by denying the idea that it may just be good in of itself (does everything really come down to money and survival?)

While I was taking a break today that line of thinking crossed over with all the time that I've spent thinking about Edmund Burke and Nassim Taleb and it dawned on me that I had been missing the obvious for years; that perhaps the importance of literary criticism is in the fact that despite having no explicit justification for it, we still continue to read, teach, analyze and deconstruct stories; value a supposedly "arbitrary" literary canon, ask questions about things that never happened and give interpretations in the absence of right or wrong answers.

To me, asking why we value literature, spend so much time teaching it to students and even have tenured academics who spend their whole life studying it is like asking why we have religion or inauguration ceremonies or act hold doors open for other people. At this point, it's tradition and part of a deeper logic that we can't ever presume to understand--a point made tirelessly by Edmund Burke in the wake of a disastrous French revolution based on simple top-down models. Simply put, I don't think that the world would be better off if we stopped holding doors for other people and I don't think that we'd be better off not studying literature.

On a more concrete note, I think it is possible to glean the value of literary criticism and it is related to the importance of things beyond economic concerns. We live in a world richly populated by cultural phenomena. Being part of that world means understanding our cultural heritage and our shared idea of what it is to be human (cliche, I know, but isn't it true?) Would you refrain from teaching your kid table manners or how to talk to elders?

Whether it's through high school English, Hebrew School or wrestling in the grass with your classmates, we all have and all need rites of passage. Part of the humanities is spiritual training, the rest is something else.

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*No, I haven't read it, just making that clear. A second-hand summary did in fact raise some interesting points for me.

The Confirmation Bias

Everyone knows what the confirmation bias is. Here's an especially good article on it:

The Reason We Reason -- Jonah Lehrer

He goes on to say many things that are well known; that we look for corroborating evidence, that we're not good at hearing or processing facts that are against what we think. He cites a scientist, however, that takes this a step further and puts the whole thing together; that we don't reason in order to objectively understand the world but in order to persuade others.

Now, I'd say that it's also to persuade ourselves, but I'll get back to that in a moment. What struck me is that knowledge is mostly ornamental; our abstract reasoning is subservient to our social reasoning. As Lehrer puts it so masterfully:

"Instead, the function of reasoning is rooted in communication, in the act of trying to persuade other people that what we believe is true. We are social animals all the way down."

This seems to me to be very deeply connected with the notion of cognitive dissonance and identity. For those who haven't read my previous posts, I was suggesting that we rationalize what we do and look for evidence in order to do so because it's what regulates our identity; that acting in a totally "rational" would bring about symptoms resembling schizophrenia* Think about a computer generated actor that always makes the "optimal" choice; it would confuse the hell out of us as it would change behaviors without any warning or visible precedent. The body must fight off what is foreign and so must the mind.

This is why I say that we also look for corroborating evidence to persuade ourselves. Really, though, I didn't just bring this up to one-up Mr. Lehrer; I wanted to say that persuading others and persuading ourselves are one in the same. If we find corroborating evidence in order to construct a story for others and do the same for ourselves, then it seems fair to say that narratives are the primary way in which we perceive the world. Our instinct, when we debate with others, is to try to tell a great story; no different than when we seduce or entertain and also no different than when we make sense of our own situation by constructing an identity.

The story we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others are two sides of the same coin.

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*If anyone reading this deals with people who have serious problems such as Schizophrenia, I apologize in advance for anything presumptuous I may be saying. This blog is a loose network of working hypotheses, many of which will turn out to be extremely silly.

The Triad

1) When I was in high school I was already thinking about semiotics, albeit without any knowledge of that word. One day in high school, my biology class took a trip to this art activity held by a resident artist who had us all draw "three things that we were made of." A lot of people drew funny and goofy things, I think I took it too seriously. My three things were zeroes, ones and eyes. Zeroes and ones because those are the only two ingredients you need to create information. Why eyes? What is information without something to observe it?

This is still a haunting question in semantic and semiotic theory. That said, two might be the number of symbols (difference), but three is the number of signs. Another reason that I think three is the key number is because signs are not about one-to-one relationships between terms (that's a symbol!) Signs are about multiplicity and ambiguity; a sign has connotations and ambiguities, it can be used not only to name but to give hints and even lies. You need at least three nodes in a graph (in layman's terms, network) to create something more than a simple one-to-one mapping.

2) Speaking of signs and triads, here's a quote that I found from The Name of the Rose that seems to implicitly talk about the triad of signifying/inferring/lying that I talked about earlier:

"It is of use to me as Venantius's prints in the snow were of use after he was dragged to the pigs' tub. The unicorn of the books is like a print. If the print exists, there must have existed something whose print it is. ...The idea is sign of things and the image is sign of the idea, sign of a sign. But from the image I reconstruct, if not hte body, the idea that others had of it." -William of Baskerville

The Garden of Platonic Forms

More on this later perhaps; time permitting, but I may have stumbled upon the fundamental essence of post-structuralism:

Literature has no platonic forms, invalidating the underlying assumption since Aristotle that literature is a way to bring us closer to Platonic forms (Plato believed that poetry and drama was "thrice removed from nature", meaning that it was an imitation of an imitation; but Aristotle believed in the power of poetry/drama to bypass the limitations of Earthly manifestations.)

Structuralism was the most rigorous* way of doing this, but eventually saw its own limits; thus becoming a study of this very cycle of interpreting and then finding new meaning by figuring out how the interpretation contradicted itself or simply didn't apply. Perhaps that's why I have as hard a time as the French understanding any real difference between structuralism and post-structuralism.

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*Please take "rigorous with a grain of salt.

Two Social Psychology Observations

Cognitive Dissonance: A long time I wrote that I thought that cognitive dissonance was an evolutionary adaptation that made people in groups more predctable and trustworthy and ultimately facilitated the use of narrative as a social heuristic. I still think this is true, but I also think its function is important on an individual level; in order to explain, I'll point out an observation by the computer scientist and cultural theorist Phoebe Sengers:

In listening to Julie, it was often as though one were doing group psychotherapy with the one patient. Thus I was confronted with a babble or jumble of quite disparate attitudes, feelings, expressions of impulse. The patient's intonations, gestures, mannerisms, changed their character from moment to moment. ...It seemed therefore that one was in the presence of various fragments, or incomplete elements of different 'personalities' in operation at the one time. Her 'word-salad' seemed to be the result of a number of quasi-autonomous partial systems striving to give expression to themselves.

out of the same mouth at the same time.

(Laing 1960, 195-196; quoted in Phoebe Sengers' "Schizophrenia and Narrative")

Sengers uses this example to make a point about how current methods in artificial intelligence (AI) operate: an optimal behavior is selected on the basis of some utility metric without any regard for what was done in the past. This disregard for consistency is optimal for any agent within a game-theoretic model (classical economics, chess, etc.), but if a person were to operate this way, their identity would be completely inconsistent, every action acting completely out of context with any other one. In more simple terms, acting in this manner requires completely throwing out one's identity.

To a theoretical economist, this might be great news; after all, it was once said that consistency is the hobgoblin of all minds; but we shouldn't dismiss the importance of a consistent identity so fast. Reading through Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind, I took note of his explanation of consciousness (synonymous with subjectivity, and in this blogger's humble opinion, narrative) as a more evolutionarily advanced mechanism for self-regulation, the process by which all life forms, from prokaryotes to mammals, fight off external chaos and maintain internal order. Self-regulation is the essence of all life, and consciousness is the most advanced tool for doing so by allowing us to make complex plans and coordinate seamlessly with large groups; but more than that, consciousness regulates itself in the same manner that life-forms do—it is a consistent narrative that maintains itself and in doing so endows us with identity. Without a cohesive narrative, we cannot have a subjective identity; and without a subjective identity, our consciousness, that most crucial of means of human survival, quickly disintegrates. If you don't believe me, read the passage above one more time.

Cognitive dissonance is a way for us to fight external entropy, no different than the regulation of our body temperatures or our immune system's constant attack on what's foreign to the body.

2) Protagonists: On a much shorter note, it occurred to me that the presence of protagonists in stories is possibly a symptom-of/appeal-to our own universally shared narcissism.

The Poverty of Online Information

This is a post I wrote for another website, Good to Know, Inc., but I wanted to share it on this blog in its unedited form (since they're likely to make edits to my writing.) Here it is:

Also, I have no idea why the font is being so screwy.

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There are three concepts that, when one looks closely enough, can be seen as a single indivisible triad: narratives, context and memory. They all fundamentally deal with an associative way of thinking and they are noticeably robust: one doesn’t easily forget things (my cousin and I still occasionally debate who was at fault in a scuffle we had when I was seven) and we seem to understand things best when they’re told as a story. They also have another trait in common: they are often lacking if not non-existent when I try to find information from the internet.

Take Wikipedia as an example. It certainly has a wealth of raw information; just about anything one can think of seems to have an article, whether your interest is in hermetian matrices, hardcore bands, Lacanian psychoanalysis or Pokemon trading cards. Even so, I never feel the same sense of fulfillment reading material on Wikipedia that I get from reading a book; I often find myself struggling to walk away with something to hold on to after browsing through this seemingly infinite pool of collective knowledge.

Maybe I’m just of a dying breed of people who hold on to physical books, but more universal reasons seem to be at play. Our brains work in an associative manner; rather than record our memories in a serialized manner like a video camera or a computer’s hard drive, we create memories by connecting various objects, sensations, thoughts, images, sounds and other past experiences. Conversely, we recall memories from the past by seeing, hearing, feeling or thinking something that we’ve associated with it; anyone remember the scene that everybody talks about from Swann’s Way where the narrator takes a bite of a Madeline cookie and his entire past rushes back at him?

A single sensation or reference brings back a rapid cascade of memories and this same phenomenon underlies what might be our memory’s inherent preference for books: we associate its content with the distinct look and feel of the book’s cover, pages, printing, wear and tear. Simply put, you can remember something much better when you attach it to a physical object of some kind.[1] But just as the physical context of knowledge may matter more than we think, so too might the relevance of that knowledge to some larger narrative. The journalist Malcolm Gladwell might oftentimes be criticized for the lack of empirical rigor behind his theses, but I prefer any one of his books to a series of entries on Wikipedia because I believe him to be a masterful storyteller able to weave a larger number of data, anecdotes and ideas into a single story that makes sense of them. Knowledge is much more easily remembered when there is a narrative that brings it all together.

One way of thinking about this is that a narrative introduces redundancy to knowledge. It’s much easier to remember an idea when it’s linked to a number of other ideas as part of a larger theory. If you learn something in a vacuum, there will be nothing to give you any clues to it should you forget it; but by relating it to something else, we have something to remind us of the original idea.

But is it really the case that there are no narratives on Wikipedia? If I look up David Bowie, I’ll find a summary of his life and career and with it there will be hyperlinks to more detailed summaries of particular works or to biographies of his contemporaries; there’s definitely a narrative. Even so, there’s something about Wikipedia that is too summarized and distilled to be the kind of story that sticks well after I’ve finished reading an article. It offers not so much a story as a summary in which details are relegated to the various articles that it links to.

But these links on Wikipedia are inadequate to finish telling the story. They are details that are told in a complete vacuum, unaware of the fact that I came from a page talking about one thing and not another. In Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, the defeat of the United States Navy 7^th Fleet at the hands of Paul Van Riper’s meager force in the 2002 Millennium Challenge War Games is talked about in the context of how human intuition can be more powerful than the world’s greatest computers, but a Wikipedia article summarizing the thesis of Blink could only tell it in sufficient detail by providing a link to an unrelated page summarizing the incident; one that would fail to have the interpretive richness of Malcolm Gladwell’s own retelling.

A story, as opposed to a simple summary or functional narrative, speaks to us about what is not obvious. Whereas summaries compress, stories interpret by bringing together a wealth of information and constructing a unique idea. Furthermore, through this same process of bricolage, a story is filled with a rich variety of prose and impedimenta that allow us to create a rich network of associations and have an experience that is eminently memorable. A summary, as a simple compression of one or more stories, simply doesn’t have the same informational richness as those stories and as such cannot create the strong mnemonic associations that stories do.

At the end of the day, storytelling is something that is hardwired into us. We comprehend and remember things as stories, not data, and the tradition of storytelling has been a universal ritual as far back as recorded history takes us. This natural affinity of ours towards telling stories can teach us a lot about how we learn and should be taken into consideration as we expand our educational tools into the domains of the internet and cloud computing. The ability to express ideas as dynamic and interactive programs as opposed to static texts and the interconnection of vast amounts of user-created data will doubtless allow us to inform and educate in novel ways; but these innovations must cultivate the human faculty for storytelling if they are to be truly effective as pedagogical tools. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected and hyper-abundant in information, context has become the essence of knowledge; and one cannot understand context without understanding stories.

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[1] For further reading on this idea, see Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notebook, Opacity (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.html)

Narratives are for Socialists!

I've been linking together ideas of social interactions and narratives a lot in some of my posts. For a while, I've been continuing to develop a theory that narratives are a kind of epistemology that is rooted in social interactions. Here's an evolutionary take on the idea:

Human cognition arose from having to infer increasingly complicated patterns (for those who might get the wrong idea, this is not a logical kind of inference—it's pattern recognition in the brain.) Originally, pattern recognition was developed in order to provoke the kind of response along the lines of "Holy shit, a rattlesnake!".

As primates evolved, they became more sophisticated organisms that also worked in groups. These groups involved social relationships far more complex than schools of fish or flocks of birds (which are quite nicely simulated by programs such as Boids). In order to facilitate these social interactions, members of the group needed to traverse these in an effective way, thus the individual organisms needed to become more intelligent with regards to social interactions.

Now, this kind of intelligence had much different demands than those of basic sequential reasoning, which was first the basis for being able to competently hunt down an animal and eventually for the kind of sequential logic that gave rise to civilization. If you now turn your attention to stories, it's pretty notable that the vast majority of stories are re-tellings (fictional or otherwise) of social interactions; more so when I think about the fact that the only narratives devoid of social interactions (that I can think of) are from modern times.

If this is true, then it's safe to say that stories were originally about people. Stories also have their own internal logic and form that is very different than the kind of modularized rationalist thinking that we usually associate with knowledge. My take on this is that this unique logic was crafted over time in the human mind in accordance with the nuances of social interactions. Rather than try to learn about social interactions through empiricism, which would get your slow-thinking ass killed in the jungle, the human mind developed a vast and messy network of heuristics for comprehending social interactions—in simple terms, we developed an intuition for how people work and were able to express it to one another by means of storytelling.

But why telling stories? Why not just understand social interactions in some way on our own? Two reasons. First, there's an obvious advantage to being able to communicate this knowledge to the rest of the group—to tell one's kids why they shouldn't lie to other people or why they should stay away from the other tribe. Second, being able to transmit and modify this knowledge presents another huge advantage: just as biological evolution embraces random change as a means of creative destruction, having the capacity for storytelling allowed for traditions and arguments between people that allowed stories to change in unexpected ways. Those that were keepers stuck around and those that didn't have much value could be weeded out in time.

Since then, we've been given a large and intractable network of storytelling traditions, genres, themes, allusions and so on; all of which is worth studying, by the way. At some point, I might post about how narrative evolves, since narratives are built on other narratives through two concepts talked about by Jerome Bruner known as canonicity and breach. But I'll leave that for another time.

Why Intent "Matters" (or: why Beyonce is a bad liar)

First, a disclaimer: if anybody ever tells you that an interpretation of a work is invalid because "that's not what the author intended," throw them off an overpass; they're better off coming back as a lobster.

Second, the opposite view is equally dogmatic and flawed. This is the harder point to make and I'll start by extolling some of the virtues of this view before kicking it down a notch.. A peer of mine once brilliantly said about analyzing Lolita "If we were to bring Nabokov back from the dead to ask him what he intended, he'd probably just pop out of his grave and start lying." This is quite true on many levels; on a quite literal level, there's no way you can guarantee an honest statement of intent; just because an author is saying it as opposed to writing it or phrasing it in a direct manner rather than an indirect manner (i.e. telling a story, what a concept!) that doesn't make it any more of a foundation since it isn't verifiable.

I can take this further by saying that intent simply isn't verifiable. It has no objective existence; you can tell your best friend what your intent about writing a story is and then lie to everybody else, but what you said to your best friend doesn't have any objectively verifiable basis; it only exists in your head! This seems somewhat banal, but it's a less metaphyiscal way of stating the fact that subjective ideas can only be mapped, they cannot be verified.* So it would seem that talking about intent is silly; it doesn't objectively "exist", it's something we can only infer in some unquantifiable way by privileging someone's "direct" statements or by looking at the biography of an author and using our idea of what their life was like to suggest how some events may have informed their work.

But this argument seems a bit weak. Is anything in literary interpretation ever objectively verifiable? Answering "yes" to that question seems absurd (if you think otherwise, feel free to speak up; I'm just saying that right now I really don't see any good argument.) So what are we doing then in analyzing literature? We're making sense of its impact and its relationship to the world by constructing a narrative of our own. While others may have strongly disagreed with me on the following point, I'll still make it: narratives are fundamentally about people and primarily reflect our existence as social creatures. When we read a novel or watch a TV show, we socially construct characters from the words on the page or the actors on the screen despite what's most likely a complete poverty of information; we may not know the entirety of their (imaginary) life experience, but just like a famous author, we construct a narrative from a limited biography (and body of canonical works; After the Quake isn't representative of Haruki Murakami, I swear!) and create a being with a life of its own.

One of the most important factors in our social construction of human beings is the idea of intentionality. We infer intentions when it comes to everything people do; perhaps as a way of masking all of the noisy details and deviations of a person's behavior or maybe because we really can learn who to trust and who not to.** Without ascribing intentions, we can't construct a picture of a person or empathize with someone; thus the reason why a heroic or tragic story on the news will captivate us but a statistic can only glance off the (somewhat) rational surface of our minds. The same goes for literature; not just in constructing characters but also in how we construct the story as a whole. There is always a narrative voice telling the story, however passive or indirect; and just as we listen closely to a personal story told to a trusted friend, we "listen" to a piece of literature in order to figure out what to make of the story it contains.

To put it another way, every story always has a storyteller; implicit or otherwise. Our idea of the storyteller is informed and constrained by many things; social norms, the conventions of genre, the idea that they're trying to entertain us (think about the last mystery/thriller you saw; you have a pretty good idea of why the most obvious suspect wasn't the traitor/murderer/villain,) and so forth. A former professor of mine rightfully responded to this point by bringing up the point that many of these ideas are different than a mere statement of intent because we can create a more objectively verifiable case about things like social customs and generic conventions. I agree with them insofar that making blanket statements about what someone intended isn't a good way to make an argument; our idea of someone's intention is as subjective as the author's own intent and an argument requires definite common ground. I still find it necessary, however, to acknowledge that we ultimately create an interpretation of the story that is itself a narrative and in order to do that we create an intent behind the storytelling. But I digress.

All storytellers are actually implicit; even if we know the author or are listening to an orator right in front of us, we don't know every last detail of that person's life, we've constructed a simplified version in order to relate them to the story that they're telling. The point is that this implicit storyteller informs our own effort to make sense of the story and in order to let such a storyteller inform us about the story we endow them with intentionality.*** Storytelling is fundamentally a social enterprise; it depicts complex social relationships (to the point that we can hate Nina Meyers for killing Teri Bauer) with very little information and it makes an impression on us by allowing us to read into how the story is told. From an evolutionary (and completely hypothetical) perspective, stories began as a means of communication about complex social relationships and so we're always scrutinizing the storyteller who must have borne witness to the events and who must have some motive behind telling us the story. But I (once again) digress.

We can't read a story without inferring something about the storyteller's intent and we can't have any understanding of a story without imagining a common ground between ourselves and the author. This is why Beyonce's songs will never do it for me. She talks about guys leaving her in so many of her songs (Single Ladies, Why Don't You Love Me, Say My Name...) but she's been dating Jay-Z for practically all of her adult life and is now married to him. I can't see veyr much authenticity in what she's saying. Jay-Z never left her and she started dating him when she was 21, so it seems unlikely that she has much to be going off of.

People have asked me why I continue to enjoy Lady Gaga despite the seeming artificiality of her songs about partying and seduction (she was a workaholic in school and is more of one now.) That's a good question. I suppose that most of Lady Gaga's songs in The Fame seemed somewhat reflexive and ironic to me. I know that's not a very sophisticated critique, but the difference is that Beyonce, for all of her singing and dancing talent and her picture perfect looks, just comes off to me as too damned earnest for her to have any implicit commentary in her lyrics. Of course, this is just the Beyonce that I've imagined for myself; the truth is that I don't know the first thing about her, and neither does anybody else outside of her personal life.


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*My amateur knowledge of phenomenology and semiotics causes me to think that this statement suggests the respective roles of both schools. Semiotics is the study of mappings whereas phenomenology is the study of where mappings come from.

**To be fair, narratives were much more reliable back in the Pleistocene when the world wasn't so damned interconnected. I take no credit for this idea; see The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.

***A stronger argument that I'm tempted to make is that this idea of the implicit storyteller is necessary to create any sort of narrative context; generic conventions, social customs and even the specific language/dialect that we're reading in is some subjective phenomena independent of the physical text (how could it be a physical property of the text?) that we see as an act of communication between teller and listener. To put this in a more familiar perspective, Peirce concluded that all signs require three elements: a signifier, a singified and an interpretant. Without a social construction that binds the storyteller (imagined or not) and the listener, there's no code with which to link sign and signified.

Data vs. Narrative

This is an odd topic for a post, since I don't think many people think about data and narrative as particularly contrasting with each other, but I think there are important differences and similarities that should be addressed. A narrative as we know is a story, something that's told to us to make a point, to amuse us or to help us make sense of something in general. Data is a collection of raw numbers or labels that links two or more things together; the amount of young adults that have jobs, the amount of reported car accidents in America in a given year, etc.

So, let's first take care of why I'm bringing up this question in the first place. What's the point of comparing and contrasting data and narratives? Well, a narrative is, generally speaking, a way of making sense of some series of events. It illustrates causality (note to literary theorists: please bear with my questionable simplification; part of the use of this is understanding narratives better, this is just a good starting point.) If narratives explain why something happened, then they may be able to tell us something about what's going to happen next. By this definition, it's really no different than a scientific hypothesis (literary theorists: just keep running with it). More simply, we can think of this as being given a bunch of data points and connecting them with a mathematical function of some kind; i.e. fitting them to a curve:


Some data...



And a narrative to explain it!

I should make a note that it's perfectly acceptable that these narratives could be wrong. A new data point could be shown that doesn't fit with the curve that I drew, thus forcing me to draw a new curve. In fact, there are an endless number of curves I could draw to fit those points; some of which may look exactly the same close up but wildly different when you zoom out. As an interesting side-note, this illustrates pretty well what Wolfgang Iser calls the inexhaustibility of the text. What I mean by this is that when reading a book, one creates a "world" inside their head that matches what they've read; but there are an infinite number of "worlds" that could match this, with any number of (currently) unnecessary ideas unconsidered. As the reader continues, they find new statements in the book that have to be accounted for either by changing previous assumptions or by adding new details to the "world" that they've created in their head.*

So why is a narrative not just a scientific hypothesis or some formula that matches a bunch of data points? The answer can be found in part of my digression; that as we read a text, we have to consider new details in evaluating what's going on and why. A more mathematical analogy is that we have to consider more semantic dimensions; we might read a book that takes place in a Castle, and at first we only have to know the general outline of a castle, but then when the book describes how it made the characters feel alone and vulnerable, we then have to think about ways in which that castle may look or be built that would invoke that kind of a feeling. This all might be very abstract, mind you, but it still works that way on a fundamental level. Also; and this is important, the details that we come up with in the future are going to depend on the details that we've imagined now; so the set of details to be considered are not just latently laid out in the text in some finite way, the details we consider are actually going to derive from each other. So the semantic dimensions (or types of detail, for the less pretentious) are not in any way pre-determined and there could be a potentially infinite amount of them.

Data, like the sample points I showed in my illustration, is different. There are exactly two dimensions to be considered when fitting a line to these points. We already know the entirety of the semantics. Data is entirely delimited; we don't consider things outside of the traits that are enumerated, and there are values specified for each of these traits on every point. Lines drawn to fit the data are ultimately built to fit a static sign system that never changes (I hoped not to have to use the word "sign system", but I don't know how else to explain that.) But once again, there's a catch that might pull data and narrative back together, which I believe to have unknowingly been the source of conflict in a debate I had on this subject with a good friend:

Even if the points exist in a single, unchanging sign system (unlike narratives, in which the sign system changes in unpredictable ways), there's still the question of the scientific hypothesis or the line that fits the curve. Scientific data and points on a chart may both be delimited, but the hypothesis or the function isn't really. Oftentimes, a scientific discovery is made by thinking outside of the conventional data analyzed and therefore the sign system of why the data points are generated in a certain way changes. Similarly, with a mathematical function, the way in which the data points are arranged may require you to add increasing amounts of complexity to the functions; you may add another degree to the polynomial or add a trigonometric function, or something else entirely. So the actual hypothesis/function actually does have a surprising amount in common with narratives in that there is a potentially infinite amount of semantics that can be added.

The difference is that whereas a text is unexhaustible, there isn't the case with a set of data; the hypothesis that's suggested doesn't change the attributes of the data that have to be accounted for. There is an argument from literary theorists, however, that essentially says that as you find these new hypotheses, you create a new paradigm in which the attributes of the data are better changed to fit it and that therefore you have the same intractability as solving a narrative. As tempting as it seems to accept this counter-argument, it still seems to be the case that while new paradigms might introduce new ways of formatting the data, scientific hypotheses still account for the old delimitations; or else it's just solving a straw-man for all intents and purposes. Personally, this argument doesn't interest me, so let's move on to something more important:

The question on my mind from the beginning of this has been one about hypotheses and it'll take a moment to explain. New hypotheses are constantly created from new observations that may have nothing in common with the data. For example, a theory in microeconomics may spring from something in psychology that is not in the paradigm of economics; so it wouldn't show in the data, but it may be the only thing that explains the economic data. Now, let's think about how we perceive the world. When we look at the world, everything is data; our senses send discrete electric imuplses to our brains that quantify our experience as data; the semantics of our sensory experiences are finite, so how do we experience narratives, how can things be inexhaustible?

The answer lies in our neurology. The many inputs and outputs of our brains are interconnected through webs or neurons; these connections being associations between observations. These create clusters of connected neurons we know as ideas. These new ideas which are formed from connections between observations (and also from other ideas) create new conceptions of meaning that we couldn't even hypothesize about before, therefore offering us a process akin to the text in which we can create a virtually unlimited number of narratives starting with the finite amount of data that we initially perceive; in other terms, we can now draw hypotheses from outside of our our original paradigm of experience. Add to this that changes in this web of neurons essentially changes the inputs and outputs into our system (we may still have the same sensory receptors, but they get processed differently as they go further through our cortex) and we've created the reading process in which we connect data with meaning and then re-define data according to that meaning, therefore creating new semantics from semantics that we ourselves had previously created; our experience becomes inexhaustible.

I wasn't sure if I'd get to the end of this one, *phew.* It got a bit obscure near the end (my ability to write clearly is waning with my focus), so if anyone wants me to clear anything up feel free.
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*For those interested in this concept, I talk more about it in my earlier entry about the movie Inception. You can also read Iser's original theory in his essay The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.

My Interpretation of Inception

I saw Inception a few days ago, and from my collective experience with my other friends who've seen it, it's the kind of movie that you have a strong opinion about; you either love it or you hate it and there's always a reason or five.

I personally loved the movie, I thought that in spite of its flaws that the plot was extremely complex, well-informed and theoretically adventuresome. I saw it as a metaphysical thought experiment that follows in the footsteps of Christopher Nolan's last non-Batman movie, The Prestige. My fascination with the movie came from my seeing the movie as an extremely ambitious thought experiment on narrative, epistemology, language and consciousness; which in itself is funny because it made me realize what a structuralist I've become. I used to always get annoyed when I talked to diehard Freudians because they kept bringing up the same interpretive framework for everything, but it's hit me that whenever I watch a movie or look at a piece of art, I end up seeing it as addressing some question or another about narratives and signs that only a structuralist would really care about.

I'm going to write my interpretation in the form of small vignettes since I don't feel that I could give a single elegant interpretive framework. It's also hit me that I've always worked very hard at linearizing my non-linear way of thinking and that it might be okay for me once in a while to present things in a more free-form fashion that doesn't take up so much energy.

Also, if you don't like things that are "pretentious", then you may not want to read this entry; it attempts to connect a lot of very strange concepts. You've been warned.

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1) Mal (Marion Cotillard) is quite clearly insane. There is no two ways about it; she's mad. That seems like a rather banal observation, but it is tempting at first to empathize with her after seeing so many layers of dreaming throughout the movie and actually believe that she has a valid reason to be skeptical. But when it comes down to it, Mal has no basis for believing that she's in a dream when she kills herself. She can say "Well, dreams seem real, so there's no way I can prove that this isn't a dream", but she would have to ask that on ANY level of consciousness; in other words, if she was right that she was in a dream, then she would still have to ask the same question when she woke up in the next level up.

2) So there's an epistemological question that goes on with these dreams. You can't know whether you're in a dream if there's no reference to the waking world. This is equivalent to Bertrand Russel's problem of meta-languages. You cannot verify the statement "this statement is true" on its own merits. There needs to be some metalanguage that can say whether that statement is true or false and that can directly compare two statements. If anyone's ever told you that you're comparing apples and oranges, it means that you're dealing with two or more objects that do not have a shared system of comparison, i.e. a metalanguage. Of course, if we constantly concerned ourselves with trying to find a transcendent metalanguage (or for all of you postmodernists out there, a transcendent signified), we'd never get anywhere. Narratives in general, especially religious narratives, help us deal with this kind of problem; from the common ground of shared narratives, we reach some sort of understanding of the world through dialogue.

Madness is epistemic nihilism, a belief that nothing is sacred (which may yet explain people's reactions to my sense of humor). In my last entry, I pondered about how cognitive dissonance allows us to participate in a collective narrative. In Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV, the main character, a disgruntled and possibly schizophrenic impersonator of the German monarch Henry IV raves about the freedom he's gained from dropping the mask and living in a state of constant flux without worrying about contradicting any narrative he or others may have made about himself. He's become quite literally anti-social, a sociopath. On an interesting digression, he is faced with the choice, after murdering his ex-wife's fiancee, whether to keep his mask as Henry IV and trap himself in the narrative of madness, or face the consequences of his crime the minute he stops acting like the supposed lunatic who murdered him; a Madman suddenly forced to sanely masquerade as a madman.

Mal is an epistemic nihilist, and she faces the worst possible consequence for it.

3) The way in which dreams operate is based on a phenomenological theory of storytelling in which the reader's consciousness fills in the semantic gaps left by the text. If I say "He walked down the street" you have to come up with your own idea of what that person looks like, what kind of street they walk down and perhaps how they might be walking. In fact, maybe you don't even think about some of those things until I point them out, or until I give a second phrase that reads "and people laughed at the way he walked." Of course, now that I told you that he was laughed at, you accommodate this whole sentence by giving him a funny way of walking.

In Inception, the shared dream is populated with an arbitrary landscape, perhaps a city, a tundra or a hotel. There are people walking around and perhaps even some familiar locations, but for the most part, these are all arbitrary landmarks. The dreamer populates the dream using his subconscious, filling in for what's left blank with their own personal thoughts. The initial setup of objects demands that the dreamer forms some causality between initial objects in the dream and, as a result, the dreamer creates a narrative out of the objects that reveals information about themselves. This is how the process of extraction works.

4) The process of extraction mirrors how we use language and narratives. Words on their own are arbitrary, meaningless symbols; mere parts of a (very very messy) syntax. By drawing connections between the words that somebody says, that person can communicate with us by allowing us to draw connections between the words and extracting information from the context that emerges when multiple words or sentences are arranged in a particular way.

Narratives work in the same fashion. The "dream defenses" in inception are a perfect example. I personally thought that the dreams having some literal military looked silly, as many people may have. Despite the fact that we know that it wouldn't really look like that in real life, we understood what the military men signified by seeing them try to kill any and all intruders. Every metaphor requires at least two juxtaposed symbols; they are an invariant representation of a pattern. By juxtaposing two or more symbols, you can imply some sort of causality or context that mirrors something that people understand and therefore turn meaningless symbols (such as say... a bunch of talking farm animals) into something that helps us understand the world (such as, just for the sake of argument... Animal Farm.)

5) Extraction works by framing a person's consciousness with arbitrary symbols and then causing them to involuntarily fill in the blanks with parts of their personal life. We're simply hard-wired to look for patterns and try to make predictions by accounting for the unseen. The dreamer reveals their secrets by allowing the intruders to see how they connect the dots and account for what isn't present in the dream.

In other words, it is the context of what somebody is saying that reveals the truth. Otherwise, the person could be lying or telling the truth or just saying nonsense; but if we compare it to what they've said before and under what circumstances, then we can assign some sort of information content to the words. The logical conclusion of this is that the truth about a person comes from what isn't present in what they say, that it's always looking between the juxtaposition of somebody's words, sentences or actions. This is why our English teachers always tell us to "read between the lines."

6) As an extension of (3), art and religion make for very good learning tools because they utilize our brain's incredible talent for storing patterns as invariant representations. Stories represent a wealth of highly abstracted shared wisdom accumulated over the course of civilization; all in a convenient narrative form. But I digress.

7) The dreamscapes created by Ellen Paige use logical paradoxes in order to "close the loop" of the dream. Most notable was the infinite stairs reminiscent of M.C. Escher. I don't fully know what to make of it, but such paradoxes seem to tie in well with Bertrand Russel's metalanguage problem. The dreams have within them some sort of "incompleteness" in that the dream simply cannot account for all possible questions the dreamer might ask. By making the dream physically loop on itself in a seamless fashion, Ellen Paige can make sure that the dreamer will simply not be able to answer certain questions such as "does this dream end or is it infinite?"

In real life, we're faced with a similar phenomenon. Many logical paradoxes exist within our world, one of which has shown that some true statements in mathematics simply cannot be proven. This is called Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. In this sense, the dream is arguably just as real as "real life" because it has a set of symbols upon which we are able to endow a narrative and has logical paradoxes which shroud certain epistemic questions about reality.

8) And logical paradoxes might just be the most essential thing to the fabric of reality. If we had "total knowledge" by which all things were proven with a consistent set of axioms, then we would no longer have any sort of experience because there would be nothing left to learn. All experience is caused by the activity of the brain making sense of its inputs and all narrative is us drawing causal links out of an infinite amount of possibilities to account for some series of events (or more accurately, some set of symbols.) The existence of epistemic limits means that we continue in the activity of learning and creating narratives.

In my opinion, narratives are the essence of experience because they're about imagining what isn't there; we live ineffably. Things continue to be ineffable in the absence of irrefutable proof. But perhaps it's also because reality works just like the dreams featured in Inception; that the universe just doesn't have enough material to answer all of our questions and so reality closes itself under a logical paradox that leaves us to continually guess with narratives. The universe is hardly the static, sound and complete ontological entity that the Enlightenment envisioned, it's a constantly fluctuating narrative where ideas like "true" and "false" are far less understandable than we think.

And I think that's why Christopher Nolan made the last scene such a cliffhanger. To be honest, I actually hated that scene, I think it was an extremely un-subtle way to address a question that the movie already implied and I believe that by putting it in the forefront, it made people take the problem so literally without wondering whether it even mattered whether Leonardo DiCaprio was still dreaming.