(This is the second section of a long multi-part installment in the same series that began with "A Simulating Conversation". It will be easier to follow if you have read that. It will make no sense if you have not read Part I. It is not guaranteed to make sense in any event.)
*
Iachimo: Fine, I’ll wait until Yorick gets here.
Ursula: Sorry, Iachimo, it’s just that Juliet was saying some of this earlier, and we were in the middle of part of it – well, as you know from what you heard.
Adam: From the surveillance camera.
Juliet: Well, so Iachimo, here’s a question: how much energy, how many resources, are spent on surveillance?
Iachimo: You mean – in fact? I’ve no idea. In theory – less and less, as the technology becomes better and better and more and more efficient. Also it depends on what you are counting as surveillance.
Ursula: But not indefinitely more efficient, surely.
Orsino: That’s an interesting question – I’m surprised it never occurred to me before. A perfect surveillance state would have to completely duplicate itself. It would exhaust its own being just in recording – in “simulation.” No matter how efficient the technology became.
Ursula: Like the one-to-one-scale map in Borges, you’re saying.
Adam: Well, no. Because no power is interested in everything. It’s interested in very specific somethings. Crime. Insurgency. Sedition.
Ursula: Hmm. Yes. You might even say power is profoundly uninterested in everything.
Adam: Precisely the opposite of philosophy.
Ursula: On the other hand – as Trotsky said: You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.
Emilia: The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four is interested in everything.
Adam: What Trotsky is talking about isn’t interest. It’s more like – scrutiny, accounting.
Orsino: Why not both?
Emilia: No you’re right. I wouldn’t say the Party is “interested.” Just wanting to control. To reduce.
Iachimo: Which is one reason the novel is so absurd. This is what I was saying last week: the “totalitarianism” Orwell depicts would be fundamentally incredibly unstable.
Juliet: Maybe that was part of the point?
Iachimo: That’s what artists always say. “I meant to do that.”
Emilia: Hey.
Iachimo: All right, all right. Sorry.
Adam: Actually I believe you’re talking about philosophers. And no, Orwell’s point is not (I think) that the Party is unstable. Though Yorick was saying something like this actually.
Ursula: Well, when it comes to surveillance – and I mentioned this before – the Panopticon does not have to actually observe everything. It imposes the feeling of everything being observable.
Orsino: Can you just remind us what that means? I’m sure we went over it in your class, but that was five years ago, and as I mentioned, I don’t remember.
Juliet: I actually do know this from Ursula’s class. The Panopticon is a model prison. Circular, with a watchman in the middle. It was designed by Bentham – Jeremy Bentham, right? – to maximize the visibility of inmates, and to minimize their knowledge of whether they were actually being watched.
Ursula: In fact, it needn’t be a prison, as far as Bentham is concerned. It could be a hospital, a school, a public park –
Adam: Yes. Pan-Optic, “All-Seeing.” At the risk of a little etymology –
Orsino: Oh right – like the eye above the pyramid on the dollar!
Adam: You mean the Great Seal of the United States, I believe.
Ursula: And the interesting thing about Bentham’s design is that he did not think of himself as making a tool for tyranny at all. Bentham was a reformer.
Adam: He thought he was.
Juliet: Yeah well so did the white guys who designed the “Great Seal of the United States.” The ones who made the three-fifths compromise, for example.
Orsino: I am aware.
Emilia: What was he trying to do, then? Bentham.
Ursula: Well – to improvise on Foucault-avec-Lacan – Bentham fancied he was helping us internalize the gaze of the Other. The notion is: let us sense that we are all always potentially observed, exposed to the approval or disapproval of society at large –
Adam: It is not “society”, it is a certain sub-class of technocrats –
Ursula: I’m getting to that, my dear.
Emilia: Where is Yorick?
Orsino: We need him to facilitate this.
Juliet: I begin to see that.
Iachimo: Among other reasons.
Adam: Sorry, sorry! Do continue.
Ursula: You adopt the internal point of view of the other – well the “Big” Other, the imaginary “all-seeing eye” – yes that’s Pan-optika for those of you who like to lighten things up – and Bentham thought that this would occasion a general self-monitoring of the subject. This would mean – and this is why he was on the side of social reform – that one could more and more dispense with coercive punishment for transgression, and rely instead on the “discipline” internalized from one’s experience as a subject in the panopticon. You start out thinking that perhaps someone else can observe you; you go on observing yourself.
Orsino: Policing yourself.
Adam: But you don’t – pace Bentham or his postmodern heirs – actually lose the “transgressive” itch. That’s just thumos.
Emilia: Just what?
Adam: The Greeks had a word for the faculty of soul which motivated indignation, or fury, or self-assertion: thumos. And it isn’t something one can simply subtract or overcome. Or if you did, that wouldn’t be a good thing, it would be – something like the last men, in Nietzsche.
Ursula: No, this “transgressive itch” – I like how you put it – remains. Suppression is not elimination. And suppression has its limits in any case. Bentham is merely leveraging a mechanism internal to the psyche –
Adam: And which Plato describes in the myth of Gyges.
Iachimo: Somebody stop him. If I have to listen to The Lord of the Rings one more time –
Adam: Don’t panic, my precious; I will skip to the good parts – the pay-off today. When people self-censor for fear of social disapprobation, they are not thereby delivered from the temptations of crimethink. They merely store up a growing reservoir of ressentiment – a reservoir that sooner or later will burst.
Emilia: I’m not following, Adam.
Juliet: Whenever someone talks about “self-censorship,” my first thought is that at the back of their mind they mean they’re upset they can’t use the N-word.
Adam: Sometimes not just the back, either. But in this case at least, I am thinking of others, not myself. What I mean is simply that using shame as a mechanism of social control comes with a cost: the moment that control slips, everything held back by the shame comes to the fore again – with a vengeance, because shame demands retribution. A sense of “now it’s our turn.”
Ursula: One sees this, too, in millennialist sects. The end of the world, the suspension of the world order, the visiting of vengeance on one’s enemies – truly, if God exists, everything is permitted.
Iachimo: So look – speaking of the end of the world: Juliet’s question is actually interesting because –
Orsino: Which question? Sorry, there’s just a few different ones pending –
Juliet: The one about how much energy goes to surveillance.
Iachimo: Yes, that one. It’s interesting, because it’s actually possible to show that there could be – well, this is strictly theoretical, but it’s consistent with what we know – there could be an effectively indiscernible simulation – or, if you like, a complete “surveillance and recording” – at the end of time. So yes, if you wanted to salvage Orwellian coherence (though I don’t see why you should), you could say that the Party is imagining and trying to enact the end of the universe.
Ursula: Well, you are full of surprises tonight.
Adam: Of course the Party is imagining the end of the universe. That’s what immanentizing the eschaton is.
Juliet: Sorry?
Ursula: Adam is name-dropping again–
Adam: I mentioned no names!
Ursula: Precisely. You dropped it.
Emilia: Who’s the name this time, then?
Orsino: I know this one! “Immanentize the eschaton” is a way Eric Voegelin talked about Marxism – for instance – its desire to make the end of the world –
Adam: the Kingdom of God.
Orsino: – real within history.
Adam: Ah. Well, for a one-sentence account –
Orsino: I got it from reading up on the background to the Illuminatus trilogy. Robert Anton Wilson.
Iachimo: To drop a name.
Orsino: And Robert Shea, actually. He’s always neglected.
Ursula: Never let it be said that a work of fiction cannot get philosophical traction.
Adam: Why, who would ever say something like that?
Iachimo: Look, I just think that if you are going to argue, argue. If you want to tell a story, tell a story.
Orsino: Yorick’s read it. Illuminatus. We talked about it once, on that camping trip he and Iachimo and I went on.
Ursula: Ah yes, your famous outdoor expedition. From which the women were excluded.
Iachimo: It wasn’t much of an expedition. It was just car camping. Or I wouldn’t have gone.
Adam: Nor was it just the women who didn’t get to go. Anyway, you had gone to that Bed and Breakfast with him, on the island. Or was it a lunch?
Ursula: It was, in fact, a very nice writing retreat. We planned a paper, for which he tried to refuse any credit at all. I overruled him of course.
Orsino: I thought you couldn’t come camping because you were at an academic conference?
Ursula: It’s true. Up The Slippery Slope: Lowbrow to High Theory. As such things go it wasn’t bad. It’s where I presented the paper we planned.
Adam: Don’t remind me. I could have been discussing Heraclitus under the stars with Yorick –
Ursula: You would have spent it arguing with Iachimo about metalanguage.
Iachimo: Probably not, actually. Not out there.
Adam: Instead, there was that interminable panel on, what, sans serif fonts as castration –
Ursula: You turned pale at the suggestion of sleeping in a tent. I prevailed upon Adam to come to the conference – I knew the organizers and there was a last-minute opening – and he presented a perfectly well-received paper on Wittgenstein and Levinas. And Heraclitus, as I recall.
Adam: Yes. "Saying, Showing, and the Said: the way up and the way down." It wasn't a bad bit of work on-the-fly.
Ursula: On the fly indeed. If I’m not mistaken you wrote the whole thing on the plane. Between lift-off and landing. Thematically appropriate enough.
Adam: No one understood a word, so I had my revenge for the panel. They were polite, I admit.
Emilia: And what was the paper you wrote with Yorick, Ursula?
Ursula: It was on Sabina Spielrein and Lou Salome, on the death drive and Eros. I did most of the writing, but I credited Yorick – I told him I would, and I did – with the abstract and the outline. And indeed the germ of the idea. Of course no one at the conference had any idea who he was.
Iachimo: Not that I care, but what were you doing at a conference with a name like that? Neither of those papers sounds remotely lowbrow.
Adam: Oh I put in some throwaway nonsense about sleight-of-hand misdirection, red herrings and so on, in mystery writing and film. Unreliable narrators. Ursula just ignored the lowbrow entirely.
Ursula: I was well within the limits of the acknowledgedly accepted.
Juliet: But wait – why didn’t you go camping, Emilia? It wasn’t really that women were – ?
Adam: Of course not.
Juliet: Well it just sounded like neither Ursula nor Emilia – I’m just saying, sometimes unexamined practices wind up not prioritizing –
Emilia: I was doing scenery design for the production of Moor & Merchant.
Ursula: That’s right. The Shakespeare mash-up, the Venice plays. Why on earth – or not on earth, I suppose – did the director set it on Mars?
Emilia: It wasn’t Mars, it was a kind of Martian version of New York. Because Venice has canals.
Iachimo: But Mars doesn’t.
Adam: Nor does New York.
Orsino: I think that was to underline the Black / Jewish thing. Othello and Shylock.
Iachimo: Harlem and Brooklyn.
Orsino: Well, Crown Heights in particular.
Juliet: Crown Heights?
Orsino: There were huge race riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. 1991.
Juliet: Oh I’ve read about that, I think.
Orsino: Three days. Fires, looting, murder. Sparked by car accident when a Jewish driver lost control and hit and killed a black kid. It got kind of eclipsed because of the Los Angeles riots the next year. Rodney King.
Juliet: Yes, that name I know.
Ursula: Not just “a Jewish driver.” He was in a three-car entourage for Menachem Schneerson, the most important Orthodox Rabbi in New York. Some would have said, in America.
Orsino: The crowd of onlookers blamed the Jews. They effectively lynched a Jewish student a few streets away in retaliation. Smashed up and burned Jewish homes and businesses.
Juliet: How did they know they were Jewish? Just the neighborhood? –
Iachimo: The mezuzah. On the door post.
Orsino: I wasn’t sure about that play, I admit. I was afraid it was laying on the race angle pretty thick. But it was interesting. I’m glad I went.
Adam: I almost boycotted it. Sorry, Emilia – nothing to do with the sets! But I can’t approve of taking liberties with Shakespeare. Othello and The Merchant of Venice are both – to call them masterpieces is simply to belabor the obvious. Why toy with them like that?
Ursula: As Orsino notes, it is – in part – about racism and antisemitism. The fact that both of Shakespeare’s plays which most explicitly deal with such prejudice are set in Venice is surely interesting? And the production didn’t change a word of either play.
Adam: In the end that’s what persuaded me to watch it.
Emilia: And you liked it.
Adam: I confess. It struck me as – an interesting exercise. In reading both plays. I came around. Somewhat.
Orsino: That’s what Iachimo said about camping.
Iachimo: To be honest, yes. I mean, it wasn’t a strenuous back-country hike or anything, we just drove to the campground, and took some day walks. But I didn’t think I would like it – sort of like you, Adam; I think of tents and sleeping bags and go, No. But I did. Like it, I mean. Yorick knows a lot of astronomy, it turns out.
Orsino: And botany.
Emilia: I wish he’d get here.
Juliet: Can you say the bit about, what was it, making the end of the world come about? Marxism’s effort to realize the kingdom of God, what were you were calling it?
Orsino: Immanentizing the Eschaton.
Ursula: Now that rolls off the tongue.
Adam: Yes, well, Orsino’s summary was, I admit, more succinct than I would have been. Voegelin argues – persuasively, to my mind – that the project of re-making society along the lines of a given social schema is always a kind of second-hand theological project. There are those in the know, who see the capital-T Truth, who seek to impose their vision upon the whole of the social world, which since it inevitably does not match the vision, becomes the object of violence.
Ursula: I hope you are being “succinct” too.
Orsino: And the point is that it’s impossible, because the end of the world isn’t the sort of thing you can engineer.
Iachimo: OK, so this is actually interesting. I mean, as much as it pains me to agree with Adam, it’s possible that Voegelin is right about this – I mean that there’s simply not sufficient energy to accomplish the simulation except under these very specific conditions at the end of time – with the Big Crunch.
Adam: As I recall – just to play along for a moment – last time we had based some of our thinking on the notion that there are always limits on available energy for running such a simulation.
Orsino: Yes, either because of finite total energy available or constraints on how it can be harnessed.
Iachimo: – but as I was saying, I’ve since realized that there are cosmological models of the end of the universe – this is part of what I want to show Yorick – that plausibly show infinite energy – an actually infinite energy – available, at the moment of the Big Crunch. And in fact, given that when the universe collapses, everything will be destroyed, the only possible way to survive will be as a simulation. We could really be in a simulation, and in fact this simulation could really be “after” the end of the universe. Though really it would just be an endlessly-extended moment prior –
Adam: All right, my accommodation time just elapsed. There’s that word “really,” again. Well, the question of time, at least, will interest Yorick. But look – this “really” you mention. If we were in a simulation – really – then this “really” would not be simulated.
Juliet: Say again?
Ursula: He means that the one is ontic; the other, ontological.
Emilia: And what does that mean?
Ursula: It’s Heideggerese. “Ontic” refers to things that exist, how they are characterized. “Ontological” refers to existence itself – Being, per se.
Adam: C.S. Lewis remarks somewhere that everything is real – the question is, a real what? When Macbeth sees the dagger, it’s real all right – but is it a real dagger, or is it a real hallucination?
Juliet: Oh God. C.S. Lewis.
Ursula: You clearly object. I can imagine more than one reason – what’s yours?
Juliet: Too long to go into. Let’s just say I’m a recovering victim of Narnian propaganda.
Adam: So “real” is ontological – it has to do with Being. Whether the universe we see is a collection of atoms, or of bits, is ontic.
Orsino: OK – but then, if everything is real – if we can just stipulate that whatever X is, it’s real, and let it go – then what you’re calling “ontic” – “a real what” – seems to be the more important question.
Ursula: Notwithstanding Heidegger’s portentousness.
Iachimo: Also, there’s actually no reason to insist that bits and atoms are opposed.
Orsino: Right, and I was thinking of that – but first, Adam, even if we accept this opposition, your indifference to whether Iachimo is right seems strange. Fine, everything is real, the universe is real, a simulation is real. But then the question “is it real?” only has one answer: Yes. But is the universe a simulation? That’s an actual question.
Adam: “Actual,” meaning – ?
Emilia: I see what Orsino is saying. An “actual” question can have many possible answers –
Orsino: Right. An answer to it will increase the information we have.
Adam: And what are the stakes of the question?
Juliet: The stakes?
Iachimo: He means – I take it – how would you actually settle the issue? It’s a Popperian question. What counts as showing that it is true or false?
Ursula: Poor Sir Karl would be either amused, or appalled, to find Adam his ally.
Adam: Yes, well, imagine how I feel. In any case, I was actually asking about a different issue: what changes if the answer is Yes? Or No? What is the actual upshot? It’s not Popper; it’s William James.
Orsino: And is he amused, or appalled?
Adam: Oh some of each, I imagine. Of course I may be projecting. As Ursula might put it in therapy-speak.
Ursula: Again, I am a psychoanalyst. As for upshot: I said before and I say again, there cannot be any. Not as regards the “simulation question.”
Iachimo: But look: do you truly think it is an uninteresting question, what the nature of the physical universe is? I mean, there’s a binary here: Yes or No, do we live in a simulation? It cannot be both.
Adam: Why not? William James is both appalled and amused.
Orsino: Wait, can’t it? I mean, you were just saying that bits and atoms don’t have to be mutually exclusive. And there are undecidable propositions in mathematics –
Iachimo: Undecidable under certain axiom sets. That’s very different. And the question of whether they are decidable is not undecidable – or if it is, that’s a separate issue.
Emilia: Aren’t there also situations in the physical universe that can’t be decided? Like the two-slit experiment – from what I understand –
Iachimo: O Ye Gods, as Adam says.
Emilia: What? What?
Ursula: He’s objecting to playing fast-and-loose with science again. His two-slit experiment is very special to him.
Iachimo: It’s not mine, it’s 20th century physics’.
Adam: Iachimo, you are very fond of the latest technological light-show. It is indeed dazzling. But you are a scientific revolution too late. The double-slit experiment was performed by Thomas Young at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, and it was not meant to establish the weirdness of particle-wave duality. It was a confutation of Newton’s corpuscular theory of light.
Ursula: Are you sure that’s the same experiment?
Adam: It’s undecidable. Putnam and Putnam.
Iachimo: No, he’s right – aside from the Adam-brand snarkiness, and thinking he could surprise me. I was trying to keep things simple. The experiment he’s referring to is what got updated. In fact most of the time it was only a thought-experiment.
Juliet: Actually undecidables are one of the outcomes of the rhizome model we were talking about earlier. We don’t have to decide whether one identity or another is more basic than another, and we don’t have to decide if one community is always more marginalized than another either.
Iachimo: But – I mean, that’s a pretty loose way of talking about “undecidables” here. Under strict axiomatic conditions, certain results follow and others don’t. If we are talking about squishy anthropological or social systems, I am sure you can model those, but the fuzzy probabilities you get out of those kinds of models are not really the same thing as Godelian undecidability.
Ursula: Iachimo, the sciences have been furnishing metaphors for millennia –
Adam: Like the handmaidens they are.
Orsino: In any case, when Juliet was explaining it, I got the impression that there were at least some conclusions that are ruled out under the model she was describing.
Adam: In Diversity-Inclusion-Equity? Oh yes, there are indeed. There are strict axiomatic conditions.
Juliet: So speaking of explaining, can someone please describe this experiment for me, then?
Orsino: You start, Iachimo.
Iachimo: OK. Under protest. You’re shining light through a screen with two slits, at a further screen beyond. If you have just one slit open, photons –which are the smallest possible unit of light – register as if they are particles, and you get a little strip showing where the light hits. If you have two slits open, they register as if they are waves, and you get an interference pattern instead –not two strips of light, one for each slit, but bands of lighter and darker all across the screen. And this is hard to explain, because particles aren’t waves, and vice-versa.
Emilia: So maybe the photons interfere with each other somehow? Like, bouncing around to cause the interference patterns. They come through both slits, and some of them collide with each other because of their angle or something? When I do stencil work with spray paint, after all, there’s always a fuzzy edge if I move the stencil even a little –
Orsino: Good guess, but no. First, because unlike the stencil, the slits in the screen never move relative to the light source; but mostly because: aside from other disanalogies between paint and light, it turns out we can actually rule this out by firing one single photon at a time, so that there’s no possibility of mutual interaction.
Iachimo: Actually, they’ve mostly done this with electrons, and other particles. Photons present special problems. But the mathematics is all basically the same.
Juliet: What happens then, with letting one through at a time? I assume you get a tiny dot, from a single photon – or electron, or whatever.
Iachimo: One “dot” per particle, yes, but over time the wave-patterns still builds up, showing interference, one dot at a time, when – and only when – there are two slits open. It’s strange enough to suggest that the particle actually goes through both slits at once, if they are both available. So then, how about checking – set up a kind of detector, to see which slit any given photon passes through? But that’s the bizarre part: if – and only if – you try to do this, try to see which slit is used by any particular particle, the interference effect stops. Just vanishes. All of a sudden you get just a little strip of light again.The very fact of checking makes the photon look like a particle.
Adam: Perhaps you could say, it passes.
Ursula: Clever.
Iachimo: Too clever.
Adam: Like H2O and XYZ. Or Putnam and Putnam.
Iachimo: Aaaaand, not clever.
Adam: That’s what you think.
Orsino: It comes down to this: if you observe the photon at the slits, it’s a particle. If you observe it once it’s passed through, it’s a wave. So, no, it doesn’t “pass,” it’s as if the fact of checking itself fundamentally affects what gets checked.
Emilia: But how can it be that way? Does the measurement change it?
Iachimo: Like, mechanically? No.
Orsino: Richard Feynmann says it very clearly: no one understands how it can be this way. And also: You can derive all of quantum mechanics if you just think carefully about this one experiment.
Adam: That’s a tall claim.
Orsino: It’s not me; it’s Feynmann.
Adam: One way of discussing the two-slit experiment, and Schrodinger’s so-called cat, and all of those things, would be to say that these aren’t undecidable at all. Rather, they are descriptions of decision mechanisms or procedures.
Orsino: Right. The two-slit experiment doesn’t leave things undecided. In fact that’s the whole point, you might say: it decides.
Emilia: And it’s our interpretation of the results that is undecided?
Iachimo: Well, we can go with that for the moment –
Ursula: All right; but how would one “decide” the simulation argument? Which again, I insist is not possible. I’d almost say, not desirable.
Iachimo: We’ve already done a lot of work in that direction. Last week. The whole argument we put forward about probabilities, motives, energy, and so on, was meant – at least, I meant it – to give us reasons for deciding whether the universe is a simulation or not. This is, I thought, what Yorick was trying to do too. We stipulated that any simulation is in some sense a made thing –
Adam: Actually, Iachimo, you raise an interesting point when you mention the so-called Big Crunch – a vulgar term for discussing the end of the physical universe, but we can leave that be. What I want to know is – what reason would there be for believing that the universe in which this “simulation” runs would do anything like collapse, or for that matter that it had “begun” with a Bang – however Big? For if we are “in” a simulation – and what a lot of potency that tiny preposition has – then all our knowledge of the “physical universe” is actually knowledge of the simulation.
Emilia: Or not even that -- just part of the simulation.
Adam: I wouldn't go that far. Reason is reason, no matter the medium.
Orsino: Well as Iachimo was just saying, when we realized that the simulation is by definition an artefact of some kind, we found that we could speculate reasonably about the motives of the artificers, or at least the constraints –
Ursula: And I think Iachimo was just now saying that we had overstated the constraints – that there’s some circumstance when the constraints are lifted – am I getting this right, Iachimo?
Iachimo: Yes, at the very end of the contraction, the total energy goes too – well, in some models, it goes to infinity.
Adam: But wait – I don’t think it was quite that we were able to, what did you say Orsino, speculate about the artificers’ motives. Rather we extrapolated, I would say, from what I would call the grammar of the notion of artefact. And I was interested in this move of yours, Iachimo; I admit I did not foresee it but I thought there was something potentially powerful in it. We concluded that there was such a thing as time – though I am not sure we should say “thing” here – even “outside” the simulation. Even I found myself intrigued by this. It seemed to me that we discovered – or at least, we asserted – that if there is a simulation, there is time. But on reflection, I am not sure about calling this “time,”exactly. It seemed more precise to speak simply of the fact of constraint, of limits to the simulation: the fact of it being something and not everything, not everything-at-once; of differentiation per se.
Ursula: Yes. Why is there something, and not everything? We inverted the perennial question.
Juliet: Which question is that?
Emilia: I think it’s, Why is there something, and not nothing?
Ursula: But have we answered it?
Adam: The most interesting thing about the argument, to me, was that it seems to press the finitude I was mentioning beyond itself. I initially thought – and I still largely think – that Iachimo’s hypothesis rules out the possibility of understanding anything about the world itself. If all we know is the simulation – or if we are trapped in the Cave – then we cannot even imagine, let alone theorize about, the world outside. Science, which wants to ask not about how things are for us, but about how things are, full stop, would be impossible. I felt this was a kind of Heideggeriansim redux, because Heidegger (under the sign of human finitude), thinks that the issue of how things are in themselves is unaskable or even nonsensical – there is only how things are “for us,” because aside from us, there is no how-things-are.
Ursula: Are you willing to stand by that reading of Heidegger?
Adam: For the moment – I know very well specialists will object, but I’m trying to not talk over people’s heads here.
Orsino: His own included.
Adam: My own most of all. In any case, it’s not just Heidegger. Nearly every thinker of the last century has offered some version or another of this position – not always put so barefacedly: that it is hopelessly naive to ask about things in themselves.
Iachimo: You’re the one who was saying we should ask just “is it real” instead of “a real what?”
Adam: You mistake me. I’m a Platonist. The only questions – well, all right, the main questions – I am interested in are “what is it, really?” kinds of questions. As a matter of fact I take it for granted that we are “in the simulation” – I simply think that this fantasia extrapolating from the technology that happens to be current just now is unlikely to tell us what the simulation “really” is.
Ursula: So you are putting an anti-Kantian claim.
Adam: Hmm. Kantian and anti-Kantian –
Orsino: There's that “both,” again.
Iachimo: Just for the record – I actually have read Kant. And I do see why people say he’s doing something different.
Adam: Kant argues – and again, this is very much a summary of a summary – that all forms of metaphysics that try to disclose the thing-in-itself fail. We can only describe the shape of our understanding. We see appearances – that’s what the word phenomena means. What science does is describe the phenomena. What metaphysics can do is account for how there is phenomena. If you’ll pardon my grammar. I don’t think I’m wholly against Kant, as I too want to account for this. But I don’t want to restrict metaphysics so far.
Orsino: Scientists think of themselves as studying the universe, things in reality – not just phenomena.
Emilia: But then, what about the experiment you just described? Is light a wave or a particle – really? It sounds to me like you were saying that the answer really does depend on whether we are checking to see.
Iachimo: I was afraid of this. Look, quantum mechanics doesn’t mean that the world disappears when you don’t look at it.
Orsino: Which was Einstein's objection.
Iachimo: Just because we cannot use Newtonian mechanics to understand quantum results – which, I should emphasize, predict the outcomes of experiments to an astoundingly accurate degree – does not mean that the world is waiting for human beings to come along before it can even happen. The idea that quantum mechanics, or general relativity, or whatever, shows that consciousness somehow makes the world is one of the reasons why physicists think philosophy is at best a waste of time and at worst willfully misunderstands science.
Adam: Heidegger’s argument – and it is far from his alone – starts well before Einstein ever gets started. Not chronologically – I mean in terms of the structure of the argument. Heidegger claims to understand science better than it understands itself.
Ursula: Actually, science doesn’t understand itself qua science, according to Heidegger. It doesn’t think.
Iachimo: No, of course, only philosophy does that. Yawn.
Adam: Heidegger isn’t so sure about philosophy either. And in any case, he holds that this lack of thinking is science’s strength.
Iachimo: Faint praise much? As Ursula likes to ask.
Orsino: The problem is – this makes it hard to understand what we mean by science, or to understand scientific findings in scientific terms.
Ursula: Oh I think you could put it more strongly than that. The notion that we only ever see the world “as it is for us” eventually collapses into the notion that there is no sense in even asking about such a world – and this doesn’t just make it “hard to understand” science – it makes science as science understands itself nonsensical. This – as Adam knows – is Meillassoux’s critique.
Iachimo: Whose?
Adam: Quentin Meillassoux, a French philosopher who is writing today. Ursula is right, this is partly Meillassoux’s argument. Meillassoux thinks this sort of subjectivism is poisonous, but also very hard to argue against. His own counter-argument would be challenging to unpack. His conclusion, though, is essentially that science – and especially mathematics – really does discover what the world is like without us, and this “without us” is primordial and absolute. But our conversation last week, with Yorick guiding us, led me to concede that there might be a different way beyond the impasse. Although I still think that the simulation is a frivolous application of a parochial technological metaphor – astoundingly parochial for one put forward by people who think they have left anthropocentrism behind – our discussion of motive, energy, artefact, and time at least have persuaded me that there might be a way of pressing the argument beyond itself so that the notion of the for us might actually open up upon a new construal of objectivity that is not merely the universalization of our “access.”
Emilia: Look, when I paint a canvas or shape a pot – I’m putting pigments on cloth, or moving clay around. Last week we were saying about Zeus that his painting of grapes –
Ursula: You mean, Zeuxis.
Emilia: – Zeuxis, that his grapes were so realistic that birds pecked at them. But most of the time, for a bird looking through the window – or for my cat – the painting isn’t even a painting. I mean, it’s an object, something to move around if it’s in the middle of the room, but it’s not a picture of anything. I don’t think.
Juliet: Are you saying that if the representation isn’t seen as such, it doesn’t exist as such?
Emilia: I mean – I don’t know enough about animal perception and such, but my guess is, that Hathaway doesn’t see the canvas as a picture –
Juliet: Hathaway?
Orsino: Emilia’s cat. She’s in the bedroom, or she was a bit ago.
Iachimo: And since she doesn’t have language, she doesn’t think of the pottery as a “cup” either.
Emilia: I’m pretty sure she has some language. At least, she recognizes certain words –
Iachimo: As signals, of course. Pavlovian.
Emilia: Anyway, that’s more or less what I mean. She sees the cup as a thing, but it isn’t a “cup,” it’s not something to use. Even if she knows it’s worth checking to see if it might have cream inside it.
Orsino: And you’re saying that maybe some things in the world could be like that for us – or rather, not for us, if that makes sense – ?
Emilia: Yes. Just like the painting doesn’t exist as a painting for Hathaway, maybe there are things that don’t exist in a certain way “for us,” and even though they exist in other ways, we might be missing something huge about them, the way Hathaway might be missing the most important thing – for me – about the painting. So – I mean, I haven’t read Heidegger, but when Adam describes him as saying something like, apart from us, the world doesn’t exist because existing just is a thing that only makes sense when you are talking about human beings and what they experience, this actually makes a kind of sense.
Ursula: You can see the look on Iachimo’s face.
Iachimo: Look – it may be so – in a loose or analogical way – but “exist” is a bad word for what Heidegger means, then. Also, so what? So there are things that don’t exist for us. Fine. Then we can ignore them. And no cheating – no saying, well, but suppose they have effects – maybe a virus we don’t know about, maybe the volcano about to erupt, or the asteroid due to arrive in five years, or the inexorable effects of climate change or the creeping effects of capitalism. Because to have an effect on us is to exist for us. And the painting certainly has an effect on Hathaway – she can’t just walk through it after all.
Adam: Well, but Emilia is saying (I think) that the painting doesn’t exist as a painting for Hathaway. It hasn’t got that meaning for her, and that meaning is part of what it means for it to exist. So its mode of existence differs.
Iachimo: Ah. Its mode. Of course.
Ursula: Sarcasm does get one places, doesn’t it? It’s vastly underrated.
Juliet: You guys seem to be making up for whoever isn’t putting it to good use elsewhere.
Adam: Sarcasm is a special case of irony, albeit not the most interesting.
Orsino: And actually didn’t we even say last time that in a simulation there might be reasons for things not existing until we looked – like until we open the drawer, the drawer might not contain anything, to preserve memory storage space – ?
Iachimo: That’s a different issue.
Emilia: And there isn't even a drawer, anyway.
Orsino: No, look: The painting is one sort of thing, one sort of stimuli and set of meanings for Hathaway, because she’s a cat. So if she looks at the painting, the simulation renders it in one way – but if we look at it –
Iachimo: My God, this is muddled.
Adam: Look – we all know Yorick, except for Juliet, who hasn’t met him yet – did I understand correctly?
Juliet: I’ve just heard Emilia talk about him.
Adam: But Yorick is different for every one of us.
Ursula: And irony, as Adam is valiantly trying to keep from saying lest it send us on a long tangent –
Adam: But I love tangents. My philosophy is tangents! –
Orsino: – is “saying one thing and meaning another,” right?
Ursula: Well, that really is in a certain sense what any trope is. But irony in this sense is, as it were, the ne plus ultra of tropes – it’s saying something and meaning the opposite.
Juliet: But your friend Yorick isn’t the opposite of what he “is” to any of you –
Emilia: Where is Yorick, anyway? This is getting way too late.
Iachimo: Still at the library?
Orsino: I don’t think so. He seemed like he had already been there when I saw him.
Emilia: You say he was talking to the police?
Orsino: To one officer. They stopped as I came up – the policewoman looked at me with a kind of warning but I called out to Yorick, and when he waved me over it was OK. I just reminded him about tonight and then hurried on; I mean – I asked him if he wanted to come with me but he just said, “No, there’s something I must see to. We’ll speak this evening.” You know that sort of formal way he has?
Iachimo: Do I.
Adam: He’s walking, I’m sure. He’ll be here.
Ursula: I doubt he’s still at the library. Adam’s the one who lives in the library. And anyway it closed half an hour ago.
Juliet: Actually it closed early. The demonstration.
Adam: I don’t live there. Any more than Iachimo lives in his lab.
Iachimo: Not these days I don’t.
Ursula: Iachimo lives in the simulation. Even if none of the rest of us do.
Iachimo: Very funny. When Yorick comes I’ll have to go over everything I just said again.
Adam: Or render a decent simulation.
Emilia: I hope he shows. I want to show him a painting I’ve been doing.
Orsino: Show him? I thought you said –
Emilia: Well, at least tell him about it. A little. And I think you’ll like him, Juliet.
Juliet: Depends on how chummy he is with cops. But from what you say...
Ursula: Well, I really hoped to discuss this novel –
Adam: He’ll have read it.
Orsino: Didn’t he actually say he had read it? The Discovery of Morals, or something? Sounds like something he’d have written.
Emila: The Invention of Morel. Morel is a person, a character. I read it too – your recommendation, Ursula. I wanted something after the Orwell – and it’s brief. But beautiful – or, maybe “fascinating” is a better word; it’s very strange. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Every time Yorick talks about something it’s like the first time he’s thought about it.
Adam: Yes, and yet somehow also the nth. Odd, isn’t it? I wish I could get the trick.
Orsino: I think it’s not a trick.
Ursula: You’re reading it? How far did you –?
Emilia: I finished today – it’s not long, but you have to read it carefully.
Ursula: Thank goodness, otherwise we couldn’t discuss it at all. It’d spoil it – yes?
Iachimo: What does it mean, you’d “spoil it”? The story is the same.
Emilia: Not at all. It’s like the experiment. If you know you are tracking which hole the light passes through, you get one hole or the other. If you stop tracking, you get both. What you know in advance changes the outcome. Do you really not believe in spoiler warnings?
Iachimo: You just re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the nth time. Did you think Winston was going to escape finally?
Emilia: You can read a book for so many reasons. You read it to see “what happens.” You read it to understand something about the world depicted, the characters, how things unfold in the story – which in turn reflect something about you, your world, your life – even if so indirectly, or so, I don’t know, symbolically – but the point is, you can only do the find-out-what-happens part once, the first time. So yes, you need that experience, and if it isn’t protected for you, you don’t get it. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a thousand other things you can and do get out of re-reading.
Adam: There might be books that you can only take in when you re-read them – I would even say that just as there is an essential and fragile reading-for-the-first-time experience, so too there is one of – if this makes sense – re-reading certain books for the first time.
Iachimo: You mean, reading them the second time? Because that sounds a lot less pseudo-profound, and a lot more accurate.
Adam: Look – the first time you read Dante, you take in certain specific details. Paolo and Francesca in Hell – Dante faints with pity, and you as the reader feel this kind of tragic empathy. But when you re-read Dante, the whole Commedia, you see things differently – for the first time, you see a kind of vivid justice at work in the Inferno, and you see that in a certain sense Dante the poet means for Dante the pilgrim to be construed as somehow wrong, as mistaken, in his pity at that moment. The full measure of his art, the extraordinary beauty and the completeness of the design, only become clear once you are re-reading; and there is a shock in this, when you see for the first time that what you thought you had seen, you had not really seen.
Orsino: Again, spoilers! Some of us haven’t read Dante even once!
Juliet: I read parts of the Inferno – a survey class – but that’s it. But the truth is, I don’t see anything profound in Hell. Or beautiful. It’s a carceral fantasy. But I have read The Invention of Morel. I used to date an Argentinian –
Ursula: Interesting, so did I.
Juliet: – she loved Bioy Casares. I was trying to understand why.
Ursula: Hmm, not the same Argentinian, in any case.
Emilia: Did it help you understand?
Juliet: No.
Ursula: Still, how interesting – a motivated reading, if you see what I mean. That’ll be four of us, at least. Now that I think of it, Morel’s a little carceral too, yes? And yet – but we’ll let that wait. But you know, there are fantasies and fantasies. Emilia’s paintings; Iachimo’s simulation – or his flights of fancy about it –
Iachimo: If anyone here is not involved in “flights of fancy,” it’s me.
Adam: Hell may or may not be carceral; the more interesting question is, what do you think of Heaven?
Ursula: Careful….
Juliet: Flip-side of Hell. A projection. I mean, it gets people through, I guess. If you need that kind of thing. But it’s a distraction, and it justifies a lot of putting up with shit. You know: postponed happiness, and letting yourself be walked on because of some eventual reward, and on and on.
Adam: Ah. How disappointing.
Ursula: You weren’t seriously angling for a new convert?
Adam: One can hope, at least, for some good objections. You will have read – at least, you are aware of – Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian. There might in fact be good reasons not to be a Christian – there are certainly many I respect. Alas, Russell names none of them. And – well, no offense intended, but I must say the objections here raised to the notion of Heaven feel not unlike Russell’s to Christianity as a whole. It’s projection, it’s imaginary, it’s Pie In The Sky. These are old and boring.
Iachimo: And therefore false – ? Come on, Adam, we expect better than this from you.
Ursula: We might even think of an argument being old as an indirect bit of evidence for it’s being – well, not true, but worth considering.
Adam: Sorry, you’re right. Under other circumstances I might actually say that myself. I was just feeling disappointed.
Juliet: Well, sorry for letting you down.
Adam: Forgive me, I was being rude. Let me say, rather, that I’m not personally moved by any of these arguments. You’re not obliged, of course, to entertain me.
Iachimo: I’m sure Juliet is relieved.
Ursula: Furthermore, “not personally moved” may be fine as a confession, but it’s not like you to take refuge in subjectivism.
Adam: Don’t mind her, she’s like this all the time and we’re old friends.
Juliet: I gather. An ongoing dispute.
Adam: But she’s right – there’s at least a fine line between saying “I just can’t see the point here,” and saying “I’m going to ignore this.” So, we could look again.
Juliet: Look, I’d rather not talk about Heaven – now that’s a notion that’s old and boring. What’s interesting, what’s motivating, is the possibility of making the world we have better. For everybody. That’s why I was interested in this Voegelin person you were mentioning, and his talk about immanentizing the – what did you call it?
Orsino: The Eschaton. Means, basically, the end of history.
Adam: And just to be clear, Voegelin is opposed – this is part of his critique of Marx –
Juliet: In fact I would say that this inclusiveness, this making it better for everyone, is part of the thing that this vision of Heaven and Hell has always sabotaged. Because Heaven is the ultimate in-crowd, right, the ultimate privilege? And Hell is just the status of the subaltern, to the nth degree. What I want – what my politics is for – is a Heaven without Hell.
Adam: Ah! We agree after all!
Juliet: We don’t. Because what it means is: forget about the nth degree, forget about projecting it beyond the horizon. Let’s talk about what we can do now. Because the horizon is getting in the way. It’s the very thing that’s making this splitting-up of people possible.
Ursula: Hmm. Horizon as obstacle.
Adam: Are we thinking the same thing?
Orsino: I doubt it.
Ursula: Well, the horizon is after all not a barrier, but a function of our situatedness. And I was thinking of Parrhasius' curtain.
Adam: Well, that could pass for what I was thinking anyway. I was thinking of Archytas. Who argued that space must go on forever because, if you stood at the boundary and tried to, er, pass, either you could, or you would encounter a force holding you back, which must exist on the other side of the boundary.
Iachimo: Also, Adam, don’t you believe in Hell?
Adam: I believe that what I believe is a matter of complete indifference, if you see what I mean. But of course, I believe in Hell – it is one of the four last things. What I’m not sure I believe is that there’s anyone there. It’s quite likely the empty set.
Ursula: You’re a universalist?
Adam: I see I’ve surprised you.
Ursula: I notice you neither confirm nor deny.
Iachimo: That’s not surprising, anyway.
Emilia: Sorry – I’m not following. Are we saying somehow it’s surprising that Adam really believes in Heaven?
Juliet: Honestly I doubt anyone believes in it. What does it even mean, “believe” in life after death?
Emilia: Really? You don’t understand this?
Juliet: I don’t even see the point.
Adam: You’re right.
Orsino: Now I’m really confused.
Ursula: Adam’s going to put his back out being too clever one of these days. This might be it.
Juliet: Sorry, why do you say that? I thought –
Adam: Oh I believe in it, sure, if that’s the word you want to use. But again – what I believe is not the point. Look, I believe in the Good. If it is important that there be life after death, there will be.
Emilia: Important to who –?
Adam: Important qua importance. To the Universal Mind, the Active Intellect, if you want. To quote Avicenna.
Iachimo: Even for you, Adam, this is a new way of eating your cake and having it.
Ursula: Did you just use a trope?
Adam: A dead metaphor. But we know what it means, and so it lives.
Juliet: You used it yourself to me earlier. About rhizome theory.
Adam: Anyway don’t blame me. Yorick put it this way once when I was talking with him, and once he’d said it, it struck me as obvious.
Orsino: Yes, that’s what I thought about “each moment is seeing what happens.” I mean, I do see what you mean, Ursula, about it seeming, what, too “inspirational” or something. But there was something that felt totally pertinent about it when he said it.
Emilia: I was there, and what he said was, something like, “It’s never what you want. Even if it is.”
Orsino: Also, something like “It changes your wanting.”
Adam: I think it was, “It’s never just what you want.”
Ursula: I think it was, “Especially if it is.”
Adam: Which is by the way precisely how I feel about Heaven.
Iachimo: I just wish he’d get here.
Adam: Which is how Juliet feels about Heaven, apparently.
Juliet: I’ll settle for a little less Hell for most of us, actually. But that might require a few people giving up their little slice of pretend-heaven. Privilege.
Adam: Do you know, Iachimo, I too want to tell Yorick about something. And Emilia does, and Ursula does; and it occurs to me, that out of these different aspirations, a kind of negative portrait emerges: Yorick is the one Emilia wants to show her new picture to –
Emilia: Well Orsino is right, not show, not yet –
Adam: And Ursula wants to discuss Bioy Casares; and you want to walk him through some physical model of universal collapse –
Iachimo: It’s because the model has implications –
Adam: And I want to sketch some thoughts I have been having about the Aristotelian categories. Even Juliet is waiting, just to meet him. Orsino?
Orsino: Actually I just want to make sure he’s OK. He told me he’d be here. But there looked like there could be trouble, and the later it gets ….
Ursula: I think I see what you are suggesting, Adam; you’re improvising a picture of Yorick as a kind of all-things-to-all-people cipher?
Iachimo: Yorick the MacGuffin.
Emilia: But Yorick is the exact opposite of anything like that. He’s a person –
Juliet: We all are.
Adam: And that’s just it. We can build up a composite impression of Yorick from each of our expectations, our “projections” if you like – and we could do this about any of us – but Yorick himself escapes.
Iachimo: I’m not sure I see your point.
Emilia: Adam, are you saying it’s like the – the two-slit experiment? Like, an interference pattern builds up? Or –
Adam: No – though that is an interesting figure.
Iachimo: It is a painfully bad appropriation of science. Sorry, Emilia, it is.
Ursula: Everyone does seem to be in fine form this evening.
Orsino: It’s obvious we’re all a little preoccupied.
Emilia: We’re worried about Yorick.
Ursula: And that draft keeps chilling me. Though this warm elixir – no, just tea for me for the moment thank you – does help.
Adam: I haven’t noticed the draft since we started arguing. The warmth of thumos.
Iachimo: Well I said a little about what I want to go into. Why don’t you say your thing, Adam? Sketch it.
Adam: Ah – well –
Ursula: Oh go ahead. You do the docta, we’ll do the ignorantia. And yes, I suppose I'll take some of that Song of Sixpence.
Adam: The short version is… you’re all quite sure?
Orsino: Ursula, pass that hor-rye-zone?
Ursula: Fortify yourself for some deterritorialization.
Iachimo: Me too. OK, now yes go ahead.
*
(To be continued.)
