Savanna Poets

Speaking of Hamlet on the savannah:

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/home/idris/Essays/Shakes_in_Bush.htm

I wonder if certain cognitive biases aren't essential to storytelling. You could almost define "story" in terms of the absence of probability - while 'overcoming bias' is to a large extent a matter of forcing oneself to think in probabilistic terms.

(I don't include poetry in this)

"The Great Stories are not timeless, because the human species is not timeless."

Storytelling itself only goes back a few hundred thousand years, but many of the concepts in our stories (murder, lust, betrayal, adultery, etc.) have identifiable homologues in animals. Several appear to go all the way back to the dawn of the complex nervous system.

Prof. Hanson says (or at least he used to say)economics tells us "stories without fools." Economics has the stories about mostly rational actors. But that seems to be why so many people aren't interested in economics, people love those fools. The fools are just so dang compelling and romantic.

Lucretius' On the Nature of Things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Nature_of_Things) is considered one of the most beautiful epic poem ever written and the subject can be summed up as the rejection of religion in favor of the physical sciences. Written before Christianity even existed, Lucretius describes atoms, the movement of mass, the infinite nature of the universe, and the materialistic nature of the soul. Beautiful indeed.

Reading Lucretius made me realize how long the science vs religion debate has been going on. I was introduced to Lucretius through reading George Santayana, the American Philosopher of aesthetics in particular of literature and poetry. I discovered Santayana at about the same time I discovered E.T. Jaynes which is an weird coincidence since they both seem to base their doctrine on untangling the confusion of the mind projection fallacy. They both argue at length that humans attribute too much of what goes in their head to the real world. Santayana used it to argue that religion is poetry and it is an error to believe it speaks of the real universe when it is only meant to metaphorically and poetically represent our internal thoughts about the world.

I find that even if Santayana was no mathematician, his ideas fit very well with Bayesianity. Here are some select quotes from The Life of Reason:

"Science and common sense are themselves in their way poets of no mean order, since they take the material of experience and make out of it a clear, symmetrical, and beautiful world; the very propriety of this art, however, has made it common. Its figures have become mere rhetoric and its metaphors prose. Yet, even as it is, a scientific and mathematical vision has a higher beauty than the irrational poetry of sensation and impulse, which merely tickles the brain, like liquor, and plays upon our random, imaginative lusts. The imagination of a great poet, on the contrary, is as orderly as that of an astronomer, and as large; he has the naturalist's patience, the naturalist's love of detail and eye trained to see fine gradations and essential lines; he knows no hurry; he has no pose, no sense of originality; he finds his effects in his subject, and his subject in his inevitable world."

"Thought, we are told rightly enough, cannot be accounted for by enumerating its conditions. A number of detached sensations, being each its own little word, cannot add themselves together nor conjoin themselves in the void. Again, experiences having an alleged common cause would not have, merely for that reason, a common object. Nor would a series of successive perceptions, no matter how quick, logically involve a sense of time nor a notion of succession. Yet, in point of fact, when such a succession occurs and a living brain is there to acquire some structural modification by virtue of its own passing states, a memory of that succession and its terms may often supervene. It is quite true also that the simultaneous presence or association of images belonging to different senses does not carry with it by intrinsic necessity any fusion of such images nor any notion of an object having them for its qualities. Yet, in point of fact, such a group of sensations does often merge into a complex image; instead of the elements originally perceptible in isolation, there arises a familiar term, a sort of personal presence."

"When this diversity between the truest theory and the simplest fact, between potential generalities and actual particulars, has been thoroughly appreciated, it becomes clear that much of what is valued in science and religion is not lodged in the miscellany underlying these creations of reason, but is lodged rather in the rational activity itself, and in the intrinsic beauty of all symbols bred in a genial mind. Of course, if these symbols had no real point of reference, if they were symbols of nothing, they could have no great claim to consideration and no rational character; at most they would be agreeable sensations. They are, however, at their best good symbols for a diffused order and a tendency in events; they render that reality with a difference, reducing it to a formula or a myth, in which its tortuous length and trivial detail can be surveyed to advantage without undue waste or fatigue. Symbols may thus become eloquent, vivid, important, being endowed with both poetic grandeur and practical truth."

"Science, which thinks to make belief in miracles impossible, is itself belief in miracles–in the miracles best authenticated by history and by daily life"

Now here's something to sink the teeth into - a sort of challenge - can we do better?

I guess my reaction to this post is a sort of microcosm of my reaction to most of the content of this blog - I think that our biases are -necessary-, in fact, I think they are the way that we think. They are easily exposed and routed out in our interactions with very basic things, but can you tell me how to get rid of my biases in thinking about Category Theory? How do I get rid of my biases when reading the works of Foucault?

Our biases are a consequence of our computational contexts. We cannot get outside of our computational contexts.

Thus, I am beginning to think that the "right work" of the intellectual is to -expose- and -inspire- rather than to -criticize- and -condemn-.

This post speaks to that. We cannot get out of our computational contexts, but let's evolve them together so that we have the foundation required to inspire, yo! Thanks for this post - it's certainly inspired a lot of thought in me.

I think this post covers a lot of "overcoming bias" in total. To pick on thought completions:

But the Great Stories in their current forms have already been told, over and over. I do not think it ill if some of them should change their forms, or diversify their endings.

Paraphrased completed thought: "I can, and I should, change, because I should, and I can."

"And they lived happily ever after" seems worth trying at least once.

Paraphrased completed thought: "An enumeration of possibilities completes me."

With more than six billion of us at the last count, does Jupiter really need to be on the list of potential protagonists?

Paraphrased completed thought: "A metaphorical approximation is beneath me."

So, let's see.

You wanna play "God"?

Fine. Good luck.

We're less different from the people who lived 10,000 years ago than we like to think. Great Stories are great because of what they tell us about being human. When they cease to apply, will we have to come up with a new term to replace 'human'? What will that term be, and what will that change signify?

Presumably the advantage of making Jupiter into a person rather than a ball of gas is not simply that we get an extra person to think about, but that it also allows us to explain various natural phenomena in a peculiarly satisfying way - as the traces of intelligible actions. Not that these explanations would have much to recommend them if you seriously wanted to understand the pheonomena. But literary writers are not, for the most part, in that business; "poetic truth" is an alienans predication, like "Tennessee whiskey".

"Savannah poets" is a superb coinage, btw. Is it yours?

"What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" Why pick methane and ammonia of all things? Combined, those make up less than 0.4% (original source page) of the planet by volume. Either by volume or by mass, Jupiter mostly consists of molecular hydrogen.

Jupiter's not just Ammonia and Methane. Hydrogen, mostly

• Ben Jones, 2008

The assertion that you can't write poetry about planets is nonsense, anyway. I personally know of hundreds of limericks referencing Uranus.

Great Stories are great because of what they tell us about being human.

People often say things like that, and it's quite silly. We don't learn things from those stories. Learning is quite unlike the response the stories generate, and if learning were what attracted us to them, they wouldn't have that universal appeal. What they generate is recognition. The "Great Stories" are collections of social interaction elements, patterns that natural selection has optimized us to detect in observations and recountings of events.

They're also incredibly boring to anyone willing to wrench their powers of analysis away from the thrall of their social-operations modules and look at them directly.

@ Caledonian: eh? But why would the ability to suspend one's social-operations module at will make it boring to look at stories while using that module? And in what sense is one seeing them "directly" when one stops treating them as simulated social interactions?

Perhaps "learning" is the wrong word. But "recognition" seems too restrictive to capture everything that makes a good story good. There's also surprise - when an author uses the reader's capacity for recognition against them. Surely you admit that this is pretty much the life-blood of storytelling. And, for that matter, it strikes me that it probably can teach you something - about your own inferential dispositions, if nothing else.

Lake, as far as I know, "savanna poets" is my coinage. (Savannah is a city.)

Sebastian, I was just quoting Feynman, I didn't think to look up the composition of Jupiter directly. I'd call it 'ironic', but it wouldn't really be any less ironic if I'd believed Wikipedia instead of Feynman.

Tom McCabe, complex nervous systems haven't been around forever either. Ben Jones, 10,000 years is not really a very long amount of time.

Caledonian, if human stories bore you, what interests you?

Not to mention a bitchin' soap opera.

I'd call it 'ironic', but it wouldn't really be any less ironic if I'd believed Wikipedia instead of Feynman. What about believing the NASA page used as a source for the WP article instead of Feynman?

Caledonian, if human stories bore you, what interests you?

Reality?

Humans aren't real?

Fictional humans are real?

Wait, what were we talking about? What do we need to taboo?

Human stories aren't.

Since I've committed to this thread, I might raise another (tangential?) issue. Are you (Elezier) entirely certain of your understanding of evolutionary biology? I'm by no means an expert, but look at what you wrote here: "Anger exists in Homo sapiens because angry ancestors had more kids. There's no other way it could have gotten there."

The first sentence is true only in the most trivial sense. Noam Chomsky explained this well: "While it is true in a very vague sense (it's correct to say that systems we now have developed through evolution, through natural selection), it's important to recognize how little we're saying when we say that. For example, it is certainly not necessarily the case that every particular trait that we have is the result of specific selection, that is, that we were selected for having that trait."

Thus, taken together, your second statement strongly implies two things

1. That anger was selected because it had a direct effect on differential fitness and
2. that no other hypothesis could account for this development.

As Chomsky points out, implication #2 is simply untenable and untrue. Implication #1 is an empirical matter that must be proved, if, indeed, it even can be proved.

There's another statement of yours that I recently read which strikes me as patently, fundamentally wrong: "But if faith is a true religious adaptation, I don't see why it's even puzzling what the selection pressure could have been.

Heretics were routinely burned alive just a few centuries ago. Or stoned to death, or executed by whatever method local fashion demands. Questioning the local gods is the notional crime for which Socrates was made to drink hemlock."

Setting aside the flawed assumptions of your argument (namely, that religion is a human universal), here you seem to disregard the crucial warning issued by G.C. William against misuse of the concept of "adaptation" (even as you rightly call attention to his criticisms of "group selection"): "Evolutionary adaptation is a special and onerous concept that should not be used unnecessarily, and an effect should not be called a function unless it is clearly produced by design and not by chance. When recognized, adaptation should be attributed to no higher a level of organization than is demanded by the evidence." (Williams 1966)

It is simply wrong to base an argument of human function on evidence for which natural selection cannot act. First, even strong selective pressure acting over mere centuries is generally not sufficient to produce adaptation (natural selection can act fast, but not that fast). This is especially true when that selective pressure arises in an environmental context fundamentally altered from the ancestral environment.

Second, arguments about human adaptations must always be couched in terms of the ancestral environment in which the ancestral traits were "groomed". Our ability to prove an instance of adaptation is directly proportional to our ability to prove certain aspects about the ancestral environment and our ability to prove certain aspects about the ancestral genome. The recent goings on during the Middle Ages have had no statistically significant effect that one may characterize as 'an adaptation'.

In my view, it is far more likely that religion and faith are maladaptive or nonadaptive evolutionary artifacts correlated (genetically or environmentally) to certain other adaptive emotional organs and that the peculiar stimuli of our modern environment elicits these religious emotions quite incidentally, quite accidentally. This is my own intuitive speculation, though. In theory, these matters can be settled empirically, depending upon our capacity to illuminate the vagaries of the ancestral environment.

Let me end with a quote from Donald Symons "The Evolution of Human Sexuality", which has inspired my thinking on these matters and to which I point at as an example of excellent literature:

"The complexity of human interaction and the subtleties of judgment and calculation required to achieve reproductive success in any given society may be sufficient to account for the evolution of learning potentials that make possible--as an incidental effect--human social variability.

I believe that this possibility should receive serious consideration especially since it is in many ways uncongenial. It is uncongenial, for example, because we value creativity and do not value Machiavellian intrigue, and to propose that intrigue is a function of the human brain and creativity is an incidental effect may seem to elevate and justify the former and to denigrate and trivialize the latter; but this is true only to the extent that natural is equated with good. This point of view is also uncongenial because it implies that a great deal of human variability observed today probably is not explicable by any general scheme but is largely a product of historical circumstances. If this is true, it seriously compromises the possibility of finding general explanations for human behavior. But however uncongenial this may be to our satisfaction in intellectual generalization, it may be true nonetheless." (Symons 1979)

I suggest you follow the same advice you offered to (amateur and ancient) philosophers: do not be too eager to offer a generalized answer to all questions of human function. It is possible that some knowledge is simply beyond our scope of knowing. We should therefore confront and internalize the limitations knowledge capacity, so that we might better formulate questions that lie within reachable bounds.

Um, I just wrote a rather lengthy reply here and it was somehow flagged by a bot as being spam. That's extremely disheartening, as I suspect that by the time it gets reviewed by a human and posted, no one will be around to see it. What kind of bot mistakes such an unmistakably authentic post for spam, for Chrissake?

if human stories bore you, what interests you?

Systems that initially attract my attention, are sufficiently ordered so that I can form expectations about them, but sufficiently unpredictable such that my expectations are violated in comprehensible-yet-unexpected ways. If they don't appeal enough for me to generate expectations in the first place, there's no potential for interest. If they're so conventional and banal that the expectations I do generate are always met, there's no potential for interest either. If they're so random or nonsensical that I can't anticipate at all, there's no interest.

For general examples of such phenomena, I recommend studying why people found Joss Whedon's Firefly so exceptional. Pay particular attention to Wash playing with the dinosaurs, and Mal violating the warranty on the engine intake.

Prospero spread his arms in a conciliatory gesture. “An archetypal quest narrative must be kept simple. To burden it with technicalities — ” Sachio inclined his head briefly, fingertips to forehead, downloading information from the polis library. “Do you have any idea what archetypal narratives are?” “Messages from the gods, or from the depths of the soul; who can say? But they encode the most profound and mysterious — ” Sachio cut him off impatiently. “They're the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity's greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you've created is not only devoid of truth, it's devoid of aesthetic merit.”

The Planck Dive

The "human stories" are potato chips: fat, salt, and starch, devoid of real nutritional value in our modern society, but appealing to ancient instinctual drives that urge us to gorge ourselves on them.

Caledonian, this post also reminded me of that part of "The Planck Dive." But we should distinguish between the archetypal myths Sachio derides and human stories in general. I should think that Greg Egan's works still count as "human stories," even if they're not always about humans exactly. The characters are still lovable, comprehensible--I should say social. That there's physics doesn't eliminate the (trans)human element.

It seems to me that when Egan attempts to make his books more 'literary' by making concepts secondary to the 'human interest' elements of characterization and emotional struggle, his writing becomes stilted and awkward. When he lets characters and their personal perspectives be straw dogs that illustrate and instantiate transcendent concepts, the work is excellent and the story flows.

The best science fiction has always been so deeply concerned with ideas that they are treated as more vital than the story's human elements, and it has been criticized on those grounds as not being true literature. I say literature is a pointless appeal to hardwired primate thought patterns that are of little value or interest.

That's a pretty big claim. Do you never watch television? Listen to music? Talk to other primates? Or is it just all transcendentalism, all the time?

Also, what notion of value do you have in mind, if not something that pushes your primate buttons? And if you're so down on the pleasures of narrative, why read sci-fi at all? Why not just, you know, read sci?

Also, what notion of value do you have in mind, if not something that pushes your primate buttons?

People who don't read preceding posts make baby Jesus turn over in his grave.

"... if not something that presses your primate buttons."

Still waiting.

As if "transcendent concepts" isn't a primate button. Don't fool yourself into thinking that Science has some mind-independent value that "characterization and emotional struggle" lack.

@Caledonian You say you're not interested in human stories, but instead in:

"Systems that initially attract my attention, are sufficiently ordered so that I can form expectations about them, but sufficiently unpredictable such that my expectations are violated in comprehensible-yet-unexpected ways."

Don't humans meet these criteria?

Don't fool yourself into thinking that Science has some mind-independent value that "characterization and emotional struggle" lack.

Science is useful for predicting and manipulating the world. This is a value quite independent of any enjoyment we might derive from the contemplation of its concepts and findings.

Enjoyment for its own sake is a death spiral.

What, you mean you start finding it everywhere? If only.

The problem with talking about Jupiter being a ball of gas, is that it cannot feel, and emotion is the primary goal of poetry. You certainly can have stories that endure science, but putting a story on Jupiter is not changing the story much at all. One example that I personally enjoy is Star Trek. It dealt with issues in a different way, but they were still the same issues affecting current society. I fail to understand what you are asking future poets to do. Emotion is the same, the only thing poets can do is change the setting.

Doug_S.'s link is broken, so I'll stick my own in.

https://www.fairviewhs.org/system/files/10164/original/ib-shakespeare-in-the-bush-1.pdf?1349452587

This post is different. For it is poetic. And I liked to read it in a different way than I liked to read other posts. Thanks for putting simple words into a beautiful form, Eliezer.