Protect Your Slack, Delay Moloch: Why You SHOULD Defend Yourself With Artificial Rents

Inspired by Behold the Pale Child at Secretorum: "the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards Bakkalon." (or Moloch. Moloch, at the bottom of the Darwinian/economic/political gravity well!)

The point of life is to be happy. How to go about this is mostly biologically determined. Yes, it's good to make others happy if you can, and to have making others happy make you happy as an incentive; for most of us, as social animals, this is also biologically determined. This position is that of a modern-day Epicurus, enhanced with and connected to facts about the natural world and our place in it. Not very controversial, you might think.

But I suspect that many people in the rationalist blogosphere will find it incredibly selfish to think first and foremost of oneself and ones own happiness, instead of the utilatarian (more specifically, Parfitian) long and wide view of everyone's happiness. (This more "selfish" position is not necessarily just individual hedonism, but rather would include having birthday parties for your kids instead of donating that money to dig a well in the developing world.[1]) In a curiously Calvinist-adjacent take, the implied position of the EA world (and tech capitalists telling young people their identify comes from working unhealthy hours and sacrificing the rest of their lives) is that you should de-emphasize your own happiness here and now since it's such a small drop in the ocean of possible conscious experience throughout time.

And yet if people are biologically limited by the link between their happiness and the amount of work they can do - and the kind they can do - and for whom they do it - and they are - what you're asking is many people to sacrifice their own happiness for an uncertain outcome, for an uncertain philosophical position.

The position of working 110% all-out all the time is not just something from the world of Effective Altruism (EA), etc. In a recent post on the Slatestarcodex (SSC) subreddit, in a discussion about the Musk-like approach to constantly fastforwarding everything and having work be eternal crunchtime - a commenter stated that once in a great while, such a push was okay, but it's not sustainable. I would go one step further: I want to enjoy my life, working hard diminishes that, focusing on any one thing to the exclusion of most others diminishes that, and you should avoid crunchtime and working hard wherever possible. (That is, I value slack - see Church of the Subgenius - and I will defend it if necessary, if only surreptitiously.) Wanting to enjoy your life, and do more things you directly enjoy more often, and fewer instrumental things, is not something to be ashamed of. That's why I'm posting it online and telling you it's good to feel the same way.[2]

It's true that if everyone thought this way, then life-saving and -improving technologies would progress much more slowly. But herein I'm taking the (apparently very hard to grasp position) that I neither want to work that hard, nor do I want to get in the way of people who do want to work hard. I say in all seriousness: good for them, I'm glad we have people built this way![3] But don't feel bad if you're not one of them, and you're almost certainly not. I'm definitely not, and I feel great about it! I've even turned down promotions for this reason. Again, not controversial, I wouldn't think. But it feels very much like an emperor's new clothes position to take.

The opposite of slack is hypercompetition, which I don't have to further describe to anyone living in the developed world in the 21st century, and I would argue a big part of Moloch is hypercompetitiveness (Moloch in the sense of Scott Alexander's synechdoche for a self-perpetuating system with serious and unintentional consequences that benefit nobody.) There is only so much work you can do; you need some slack, and though our modern Molochian culture has trained us to hide our slack-seeking from ourselves, we do it, or we burn out. And part of the outrage at people finding ways to guard slack is a result of hiding our desire for slack from ourselves (read: reaction formation and the predictable reaction to seeing others fulfill their fantasy) when a source of slack protection is noticed. (See: "tears of rent-seekers" regarding taxis, academia, government, or any other area where people have goodness forbid given themselves some extra slack to help them enjoy their lives.

Other strategies: shrouding - which normally means companies trying to avoid competing on price by making their pricing opaque, but works in the labor market too when workers cooperate to obscure measurement of output - outlawing payment for piece work was a major victory. Another: avoidance of direct market exposure, or any situation where your livelihood rests on your having to react in real time to developments - usually the more layers within an organization away from a customer interaction surface or competition with other organizations, the quieter your life is. (Must be balanced against the risk of paroxysmal collapses; the cycle-time of this class of org is relevant to your choices here (nations = centuries, companies = years or decades if already long-established.)

Some concrete examples are in order, of how you can and should protect slack and benefit your life by erecting artificial rent structures.


SITUATION 1 You're the leader of Organization A. You believe in what the organization is doing, genuinely care about the people there and want them to have good lives, and as a result you "leave some money on the table" by not expecting them to work that hard or otherwise sacrifice their well-being to the organization, as long as they keep the wheels turning.

Then Organization X comes along (for the Parfit-style calculators out there, let's say it has the same number of people), which does NOT care about its people this way, and they are constantly sacrificing themselves, or at least on a sort of psychological Malthusian frontier (of stress rather than starvation.) This might well be an Elon Musk company. Organization X eats Organization A's lunch, and Organization A is destroyed or absorbed, along with the lifestyle of the people in it.


SITUATION 2 Same as above, but you're the leader of Organization B. You know it is likely that if you do NOT drive your people to self-sacrifice, then a Muskite will drive theirs in such a way, and then they'll come for you. So for your organization to continue existing, you have to work them to the point of self-sacrifice. You do this, and keep existing, but the people who work at your organization are now miserable.


SITUATION 3 You're the leader of Organization A, same as Situation 1. Except you have a plan. You want your employees to have a good life but you know that the Muskite misery engines out there like Organization X will come get you. So you make a couple calls to a governor or legislator, take them golfing and make some arrangements, etc. Organization X now finds you have an administrative or legal moat - an artificial rent protector - for example, to do what your org does they have to be in a certain consotrium and no one will let the Muskite org join, or Organization X can't operate in a certain business in a certain territory, unless the workers within Org X get lots of protections. You know this can't work forever, but it will work for a while, and benefit the people you care most about.) Organization X loses its advantage in being willing to essentially trade personal slack for victory. People on SSC read about this, and cry their eyes out talking about Rents, and how you're immoral for depriving the rest of the world of the fruits of your labors (invisible tragedies, etc.)


I used to join in with the "ha ha, rentiers dying, suck it taxi drivers" until I realized that within a few years, AI will be able to do all of our jobs, and the value of labor will race to zero. Of the strategies I've mentioned, only legal artificial rent structures have any chance of lasting for any length of time. So I'm unashamed to admit I would rather work for Organization A in Situation 3, and unless you're the 1% of the 1% in productivity, you would too. (I suspect young people who don't agree with this are resisting the realization that they're not a "10x" 1% of the 1%.) Of course, sometimes the rents come "honestly" from an innovation - but then again, even patent protection is an artifical rent, since it's not just the innovation itself. Mostly rents come "artificially" from barriers like the ones I've described. Taxi medallions, medical licenses, etc. although in most cases there's usually at least some non-bullshit reason for the certification, or guild membership, whatever it is (.e.g. it's a quality signal)

Note that I've written these thought experiments with you in the position of the leader. But you're almost certainly not. If, in a true Rawlsian approach - if you fell out of the sky at random into these thought experiments - you'd probably be a rank-and-file employee. In that spirit:


SITUATION 4 You're an employee (not the leader) of Organization A. You believe in what you do and what the organization stands for. Your leader seems to genuinely want everyone to have good lives and doesn't work anyone too hard. As you smirk and murmur to your colleagues at pool parties, this is because the leader is friends with the governor, and got a law passed artificially protecting you from competition, which is why you have a good income without working too hard.

Then the leader dies or steps down, and a new CEO takes over - one who reads SSC and Marginal Revolution. "Enough with this laziness! Company X has their own lobbyists, and we can't wait for them to get the law repealed and be caught off-guard. 80 hour weeks! No vacation or weekends if you want to be considered serious around here! Constant aggressive deadlines! Do it 10x faster! We're depriving the rest of the world and future generations of the fruits of our labor, how selfish that is, think of all the hidden tradegies! Don't like it? Emigrate/quit and go to our competitor, who will probably have to do the same thing to keep up anyway." Would you say "Yes! Finally, our new leader is high-agency, and this is the moral thing to do instead of collecting rents"? Yeah, sure you would.[4] If you do, you burn out, ruining your health and family life, plus you have no more time to read SSC.


Certainly it's a difficult balance to find, and often you're just surfing a temporary inefficiency wave until that wave breaks and you're back in the same Molochian world as everyone else - but you should try to find it and ride it as long as you can. In the long run, we're all dead anyway. If you can have 5 or 10 more years of slack instead of zero more years, you are not being immoral to take it, and (for the Parfitians in the back) you can't be sure that the only thing you'd do by missing out on the slack is making yourself miserable with no other impact, thus doing the immoral thing of increasing the suffering of the universe on net.


[1] I've noticed that the tech world in general and EA especially is a haven for those who in the abstract, are horrified at the existence of slack (or at least that's the non-revealed preference.) In general consequentialists tend to neglect deontology - the role of duties in what decisions are moral. Consequentialists tend to look for abstract principles for actions to adhere to, but actions are not disembodied principles, they occur in time, and space, and social space - that is, in the context of whatever history and relationships, if any, you have with the people affected. Deontology clears up a lot of the confusion about what to actually do and when to do it, and who to do it with/for. I've also noticed conscientious younger people tend to be consequentialists, and older people season their outlook with more deontology as they age.

[2]Maybe this whole essay is just my own psychotherapy, justifying the following to myself: as a physician, every time I go home at the end of the day or take a day off, I am depriving people of potentially life-saving treatment. Some physicians, more in previous decades than todya, kept this in mind and worked ridiculous hours; many modern healthcare organizations are more than happy to take advantage of this mentality of self-sacrifice to make another cent, and then when you start making mistakes because you burn out, they kick you to the curb. Not unique to medicine of course, but I'm very comfortable protecting my time so I can have slack and enjoy my life, and what's more, I limit my responsibilities to my established patients, and not some abstraction of "possible humans in the universe". If you're a naive consequentialist (who doesn't understand deontology or respect the limits set by biology) you've probably dismissed me as Jeffrey Dahmer by this point.

[3]To beat a dead horse: this is not an anti-hard-work screed. If you like to work hard, focus on one thing and one thing only, you find it rewarding, great! Part of civilization's success is that we've set up a system that rewards you, and where the rest of us also by diffusion get the benefit of the wealth and technologies you create. But if your choices start taking away my slack - I'll ask my guild to take our Congressman golfing, after which an artificial moat may mysteriously appear. For a relevant culture-wide take on the same: I once read an account of an American traveler in Japan who said it's great to be a foreigner in Japan - because it's a safe, clean, beautiful, quiet place, due to the crushing social obligations of Japanese culture that keep it this way, and as a foreigner you can free ride on this. But you obviously shouldn't do anything to make it harder to keep the country that way!

[4] SSC surveys have consistently shown that oldest siblings are more likely to be readers. Though it's a stretch, it does make me wonder if an oldest-sibling-rich group concerned about these topics might tend to lack a healthy level of resource anxiety (no older siblings to finish all the dessert before you, hog the TV or soccer ball, etc.) This would lead them to always assume that protecting slack can only be about stupidity or laziness - "Aw, we ALWAYS have to stay on the little kid playground because of them!"

On the Good of Young Men Having Their Asses Kicked

I recently visited a martial arts school for kids, and was immediately impressed by - something. It took me a minute to put my finger on what I liked about the place. It was that they were serious, and firm. The instructors wanted these kids to get better, and they didn't need to crack a joke every minute to diffuse tension, or even be especially kind about criticizing someone's technique. And the kids responded well to it, and were focused, and improving. I found myself wishing to see more of this approach, and then wondering why.

Young men having their asses kicked by superiors genuinely interested in the improvement of those young men, is an individual and social good. I express my concern and record my defense herein because I think many young men today should have their asses kicked more. If you're a young man reading this, know that I was once a young man; also, that I should definitely have had my ass kicked more. Below I define ass-kicking, and explain why I believe this.

By "ass kicking" I don't mean physically, and I also don't mean pointless abuse. What I do mean is this - in second person to help you imagine and identify with it:

1. there is a person with higher status than you
   
   
2. they are training you and/or managing you, and they provide intense, frequent negative verbal feedback and potential consequences for underperformance...
   
   
3. for reasons in your best interest (this is critical)
   
   
4. who you won't avoid - because you recognize that tolerating their very negative feedback will help you improve as a person, at specific skills, and achieve your goals.

Expanding on each item above:

1. "Higher status" means the person has objective, measurable achievements that place them unambiguously above you - money, artistic production, athletics, climbing some ladder - that you are also in. If you're trying to be a better electrician, you don't care if an investment banker or mountain climber gives you critical feedback.
   
   
2. This intense, frequent, negative feedback is unpleasant for many reasons, among them that it concerns something you care very much about - some ability or position that you have chosen as part of your identity. The unfortunate paradox is that meaningful negative feedback hurts, and it has to hurt at least a little, if you actually care about the thing you're getting feedback about.
   
   
3. The person is actually trying to help you improve, often to very high standards - this is why it's not abuse - but their concern in helping you improve takes precedence over hurt feelings. Hurt feelings take time and attention to avoid, so by virtue of your superior not having to consider them, you improve faster. What's more, during ass-kicking, the atmosphere is serious. There is no tension release mechanism other than improving your performance. (As an aside, the ass-kickee often attempts humor is in these situations, to his detriment.)
   
   
4. You choose not to avoid the unpleasantness because you know this experience is in your own best interest, and therefore despite its unpleasantness, you choose to carry on; or you're in a setting you can't leave (e.g. the military) but fortunately your superior is trying to improve you rather than just abuse you.
   
   

Some examples of institutionalized ass-kicking are sports coaching, medical school, the apprenticeship process in certain high-performing high-status industries (e.g. high finance), and military training. (For a first-person account of a military boot camp, and interestingly, a distinction between cult abuse and military indoctrination, go here.) Near-universally, people who've been through an ass-kicking program express gratitude for the experience (after it's over) and recognize both the skills and personal transformation it imparted, but are quick to say they wouldn't want to do it again, possibly along with humorous stories of the most difficult superiors who kicked their ass particularly thoroughly.


Why is ass-kicking a good thing? And why am I focusing on young men?

Why am I specifiying young men? Let's broadly define "young" as 13-30. After this developmental window, it is very difficult to change identity and personality in the way that ass-kicking does, and in particular to obtain the benefits such experiences can produce. And I find that it's usually men who have a personality structure and defenses that most benefit from such experiences. A young man's psychological defenses involve a good deal of narcissism about how tough, strong, and awesome he is. When encountering situations suggesting otherwise, he rationalizes, avoids, or attacks. If anyone tells him he's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, he denigrates and/or retaliates and/or disengages. But when it's his superior (his supervisor in a job he wants to advance in) or drill sergeant doing it and he can't rationalize avoid or attack, he has three choices: a) fail b) be miserable because he can never understand that they're not just abusing him personally or c) he "gets it" and grows up and improves, not just in specific skills but in overall character.

It is my suspicion that, not only is ass-kicking happening less often, but also that option c) is being delayed in men's lives and more often happening during romantic relationships; and romantic partners are not enjoying the expansion of their near-parentified duties. Of course it's not only men who can ever benefit from ass-kicking, and certainly not all men will benefit from ass-kicking based on their constitution, but in my empirical observation, in general young men benefit most from ass-kicking.

Why is ass-kicking good? Beyond (obviously) the specific skills and professional identities that are being quickly learned and grown, the general benefits come down to three factors.

• A. We learn to control our negative emotional reactions and decouple them from the person providing the feedback. This is necessary unless you plan to go through life always killing the messenger (which some men certainly try to do.)
  
  
• B. We learn to recognize our flaws and shortcomings and tolerate the distress arising from them, and to turn that energy into something positive by working on them instead of being angry about them, denying them, or avoiding them. We also learn that our position in a hierarchy is not the entirety of our worth and identity. (Note, both B and A are really both forms of "tolerating the distress of being at the wrong end of a hierachical disparity." This both makes young men better able to work in groups, and produces empathy which they might otherwise lack, when they are later at the top of such an imbalance, not to mention improving reality-based confidence.)
  
  
• C. Not only do we decouple our emotional reactions to the person and the message, we learn to respect the person and recognize that they are helping us, even if it wasn't fun at the time.

A, B, and C correspond basically to "I have a long way to go to be a badass, it's okay that I have a long way to go but it's up to me to improve and I can improve, and while it's not fun now, I recognize that my superior did me a favor and that they're in the position where they are for a reason so I will respect and defend them to others." It adds up to the cliche character-building as well as dealing with adversity, being able to function in authority structures and understanding the basis for legitimate authority, i.e. that authority is not synonymous with force. In terms of Kegan and Chapman's hierarchy, ass-kicking is a maturing process that helps young men graduate from level 3 into level 4, and failure to do so has predictable consequences for broader society (see last paragraph.)

To be clear, nothing herein should be taken as justifying abuse. In fact, I think outlining the characteristics of ass-kicking helps us draw a distinction between ass-kicking and mere abuse. And even when an ass-kicking superior intends the ass-kicking constructively to improve the ass-kickee, if the ass-kickee can't tolerate it, they should be able to quit (withdraw consent.) Abuse is non-consensual, and is about pleasing a sadistic abuser, rather than (in the long run) helping the recipient. And what might be intended by the superior as direct feedback to improve skills, might not be tolerable to the recipient - who then should have the opportunity to quit (withdraw consent.) And even those of us nodding along with this essay and agreeing that ass-kicking is a good thing and was a good thing for us specifically, are usually still able to look back and distinguish between a hardass who you maybe even hated at that time but for whom in retrospect you feel gratitude and respect - versus a bully with an anger problem. (Of course abusers try to trick us sometimes by pretending to be ass-kickers.) Many readers will by this point be thinking of Sergeant Hartmann from Full Metal Jacket (note these links are NSFW and contains slurs) - he is hard but he is fair, directly states you will not like him, but he is trying to help his recruits and he tells them so. He is clearly pleased when they improve. He is an ass-kicker. In contract, Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross is just an abusive bully, and the ages of some of the men in the meeting suggest they are beyond the useful ass-kicking window anyway. He explicitly tells them he doesn't care about them, and just wants numbers for the company, figure out on your own how to do it or hit the bricks pal. Without Good Result A above, young men are more likely to keep thinking everyone who tells them something they don't want to hear is just another Alec Baldwin humiliating them.


Why did I write this?

It's my impression that opportunities for ass-kicking have decreased over the past half-century or so, at least in my country, the U.S. Why? I suspect it's a combination of our decreasing intolerance of direct-speaking authority figures, and constant consumer messaging: that you are special, you are the best, you should never be uncomfortable, don't listen to people who make you feel that way. Those may or may not be two different reasons. (I intentionally use "impression" and "suspect" not as weasel words but as clear signals of how you might weight these claims.) Therefore, as young men's opportunities for ass-kicking decrease, I predict America will face a worsening epidemic of narcissistic, oversensitive, immature, and adversity-intolerant men, who blame everyone else for e.g. why they couldn't finish college or hold down a job, and who can't tell the difference between bullies and legitimate authority. I leave it to the reader to decide if this trend is already visible.

Integers Are a Useful Fiction, But Math Is Real

Integers have no existence independent of our brains; they are a useful fiction humans have developed, extending on how our nervous system operates, but not pointing to something real about the universe outside of our skulls.

I am not a mathematician or logician, and I concede that this is not a formal proof, but rather a collection of circumstantial observations, pointing toward one conclusion. I may of course not be aware, or not have processed the implications of, work already done in the field that supports or negates any of these arguments or has relevant implications. If you are aware of such, please comment below.

There are several positions on the objective reality of math, "out there", in the objective universe separate from human experience. The tension is this: math seems "real" in that it works, and is useful, and yet, it is very unlike other things in the world. Is it "real" or a human creation? It's commonly taken that there are three positions regarding the reality of math:

• Platonism (or realism) – mathematical objects are real but abstract and outside of time and space, and our ability to apprehend them in the manifest world reflects this.
  
  
• Nominalism – math is empirically derived from our experience of the world. (This is agnostic to the question of whether abstract mathematical objects exist.)
  
  
• Fictionalism (or formalism) – math is a useful trick, employed by entities with specifically-constructed nervous systems; it is ultimately a language game that we use to make sense of the world. Some fictionalists would say this means that math is false, while others say this means it is meaningless, and/or that the property of truth or falsehood does not apply to math.

While typically these accounts seek to address the reality of mathematical objects generally, here I'm only interested in one. Indeed, in Wigner's words, mathematics is indeed unreasonably effective if fictionalism were true for all of math. I hope this is part of a continuing discussion about the reality of mathematical objects in general, and the implications of mathematical objects being a fundamentally different kind of entity, which I address at the end of the post.

1. Numbers are derived from the logic of Peano arithmetic. Peano arithmetic assumes the existence of the unit; that is, by positing the successor function, it assumes that the unit exists. The idea of the "fiction of the unit" is at the core of this claim about integers being invented - even in the formal construction of numbers, the unit is just assumed.
   
   
2. While not all numbers are integers, we do use a system of integers to represent the digits of all numbers, including transcendental ones. In fact, most numbers are not just irrational, but transcendental, which cannot be constructed algebraically. This means that most numbers cannot even in principal be accurately represented by integers (non-transcendental irrational numbers can be algebraically constructed using integers, transcendental numbers cannot.) At least some of the numbers that describe nature like pi and e are transcendental. It's worth pointing out that the inability to represent transcendental numbers with integers is not merely a trivial artifact of their infinite length - despite not being able to represent pi, the Kolmogorov complexity of pi is very much finite.
   
   
3. Historically, each time there is an innovation in numbers, it is first rejected as an absurd fiction, then accepted as a useful tool. This is well-illustrated by the history of negative numbers and then irrational numbers. This is exactly the pattern we should expect if in fact numbers are a useful fiction - except for integers, since our nervous systems had this quirk built in, and we never had to produce them effortfully in a rule-based system; we never had to get past the stage of disbelief.
   
   
4. Over a century ago, set and number theory encountered difficulties, most famously with Goedel's theorem. - "one cannot prove consistency within any consistent axiomatic system rich enough to include classical arithmetic": which is to say, integers necessitate inconsistency or unproveability. When asked what consequence we should expect in the real world from integers being a convenient fiction, this is the answer - for millennia we used units without trouble but as soon as we attempted to ground them in logic around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, we ran into difficulties.
   
   
5. You might object to my initial claim that if our nervous systems apprehend a thing, it must be real. This is incorrect, or rather it's not clear enough about what "real" means in this context. No, it's not that numbers are a hallucination - even if you hallucinate a dog, this doesn't disprove the existence of real dogs; if you hallucinate an abstract color pattern, this doesn't disprove the existence of colors. Rather, numbers are a kind of thing that exists only as subjective experience. We experience pleasure, pain, and emotions. They are subjectively real, they correspond to events in the world outside our nervous system, but cannot exist separate from a nervous system. Integers are the same category of entities.
   
   
6. Expanding on instinctive human knowledge of whole numbers - for millennia, humans have universally used numbering systems with units (usually one, two, and many) without any formal grounding. Some animals (including non-primate ones, e.g. crows) can count at least this high. Note that biology having evolved representational tissues (nervous systems) capable of representing mathematical objects is certainly not an argument against the reality of those entities - indeed, if we live in a universe where there are abstract entities unidirectionally causing things in the physical universe, you would expect some of those rules to appear in the brains of replicators that evolve in that universe, who will be imbued with some innate instrumental math sense useful for survival. The way we do this is using neurons which convert the input of continuous reality into a discrete fire/don't fire output. This is why the world seems to have discrete, countable objects when it is actually composed entirely of fuzzy gradients. Therefore, animals do not even need language to delude ourselves into believing in integers - this is where the "conceit" of integers is rooted, not in some philosophical mistake our ancestors made, but in the basic mechanism of how we perceive the world. (To extend integers indefinitely, we do need language.)
   
   
7. If the claim that integers are an invention of the human brain is correct, then we would predict that intelligent aliens would build a mathematics that did not use integers. Of course there are no aliens to talk to about this, but we have the next best thing: increasingly sophisticated computer systems. In at least two cases, computers have developed mathematics without integers as a primitive concept. In the first case I'm aware of, Wolfram Alpha "rediscovered" math without creating numbers. Later, computer scientists showed how large language models use trigonometry to do addition. There are intriguing hints that even in our nervous systems, integers are not primitive but rather an adaptation of spatial reasoning. Gerstmann syndrome results in a stroke in (typically) the left parietal lobe; symptoms include left-right confusion and loss of arithmetic abilities. In OCD, there can be a sensitivity to both orientation (lines and angles) as well as certain numbers. In second-language speakers, otherwise-fluent speakers often must still resort back to their native language for both numbers and directions.
   
   
8. I've deliberately left this point at the end of the list as it is the most metaphysical eyebrow-raising. If there is no such thing as a unit, only gradients, then there are no boundaries in the universe, and everything is the same object. This argument has even been applied to subatomic particles (see the one-electron theory.) If everything influences everything else, there are only gradients, and in reality there is only one unity (the universe as a whole) - then the idea of a unit beyond the universe itself is logically inconsistent. The unit of the universe would not actually be a unit either - if the only binary is existence and non-existence, then there is only one thing, and nothing that is not that thing. With no boundaries, it is meaningless to talk about a "unit".
   
   
   

The Making of a Dualist? Or at Least a Platonist

Initially I set out to show that math itself was a provincial tool of human cognition, and shrank my argument to just integers. I do think, based on the observations compiled here, that integers are not a coherent mathematical object in the same sense as other abstract math and logic entities. But I'm not making a claim about other objects, even about transcendental numbers (which is most numbers) - I have no suspicion that they are invented in the same way that I think integers are. It seems to me that if those of us who would call ourselves materialists in the philosophical sense, must recognize that if we believe in both the material world, and the reality of at least some mathematical and logical objects - objects which appear eternal, unchanging outside of space and time - then we are clearly dualists. Obviously this shouldn't sit right with us, which is what motivated my interest. And here I am, left in the surprising position of agreeing with the Platonists, just quibbling over which types of mathematical objects have meaning outside of a human nervous system.

The possible solutions both seem incredible:

1. True Platonic dualism. These objects exist outside space and time but are real because they affect us. They are causally asymmetric. It is this causal asymmetry that is key to their fundamentally different nature. They are a true uncaused cause, a true prime mover. Mathematical objects affect the material world, but the material world cannot affect them.
   
   
2. Platonic monism. These objects are real, but are not causally asymmetric. They can change, and there is some kind of feedback from the universe to math and logic. It is worth recognizing that the question of whether physical constants change over time and space remains an open one, with recent evidence in its favor (See for instance Murphy et al 2003 for evidence of change to the fine-structure constant over time, which has stood up to scrutiny for a quarter century at this point.) But this is more fundamental: how can the nature of a triangle change? Or the nature of identity? The spatial dimensions? One interesting solution to Platonic monism is that advanced by Tegmark, who argues the "hyper-Platonist" monist argument that there are only mathematical objects. (Notably, Tegmark is the senior author on the LLM paper I linked to above.)
   
   

Is There Such a Thing as Color Harmony?

Some colors seem to go together; others do not. The same goes, even more strongly, for notes. Some form pleasant harmonies, and others are dissonant. In the case of sound, it's more mathematically obvious what's different: harmonious combinations of sound frequencies (like a major third) are constructively interferent, and dissonant combinations are destructively interferent. Light waves have frequencies as well, though we usually think of them in terms of wavelengths.

Another interesting difference in our perception of sound is that our nervous system automatically does a Fourier transform for us, before the sound reaches conscious awareness. This is why you can listen to a chord, and hear the individual notes, instead of a mess of superimposed frequencies. That doesn't happen when we're seeing multiple colors - others, there would be no such thing as non-spectral colors like pink, and your screen couldn't fool you into thinking you're seeing more than the three frequencies it's actually sending to your eyes. There are also biological reasons that certain colors are more important to us just by themselves, without context (like red, which could be fruit or blood), as opposed to certain isolated frequencies of sound (what cause would our ancestors have had to be really attuned to a sound at 640 Hz?) Still, I've always wondered if colors "going together", or pleasant mixtures of pigments used in famous paintings, are actually making some kind of harmony, and we're attracted to those harmonies without realizing.



Above: what comes into your ear. Below: what your brain receives, post-transform. This is a major chord.



I've considered doing a proper color harmony experiment. As I just said, computer monitors don't allow this - I can't just make images online and ask people which they find more pleasing, because computer monitors just emit red, green and blue, and we're not actually looking at those pure light frequencies. I would have to buy specific LEDs and have people do the test in person. The expense of this hardware exceeds my interest in the result; and, if you think somehow subconciously we can tell the difference between the fake RGB hue, and the perceived hue, you're already agreeing that we are actually doing a Fourier transform with light perception.

So what I did, using the fake color imitations coming out of our screens, was to look at a simple artwork with just a few colors, and alter them so that they are making harmonious or dissonant chords. Below is Piet Mondrian's Abstact Cubes. Since he uses three colors, that means we can make a chord.



My approach was as follows.

• I found a website that would convert a wavelength into a perceived color (here.)
• I took the red spaces as the root note (e.g., the C in a C chord.) I chose the red spaces as the root of the chord because red does tend to be dominant, analogous to the way the root note establishes the basis of the chord, and because red is the lowest frequency. (Why didn't I choose tones for the white and black? While we're stretching the analogy, let's say that's black and white are the spatial equivalent or rhythm, an atonal drum beat.)
• I started with "C" (arbitrarily) at 780nm, which means the high C octave will be at 390nm. (For musicians this is counterintuitive. These are wavelengths, and as we go up the scale, the frequency gets higher but the wavelength gets smaller.) Also notice that humans can just barely see one visual octave.
• I used equal temperament, calculating the frequency as frequency = root frequency * 2^((number of half steps up)/12.)
• My hypothesis, which I expect will be falsified: individuals will display the a consistent preference for each color harmony (i.e., will consistently like major, minor, or discordant best.)
• As a side note: to highlight the likely inaccuracy of the colors (remember, we're looking at RGB monitors - you're not really looking at real shade) - I use two monitors when I work and even between the monitors, the colors are noticeably different. I hoped that the ratios of the wavelengths would remain the same, but on one of my monitors there was a difference between colors that looked the same on the other. Further complicating things, our color vision is not equally sensitive across the spectrum - it's much easier to discrimate a 1nm difference in the middle than at the edge of the frequency band we can see.

Above is the "scale" that results from this. Below are chord compositions based on the arbitrary C at 780nm. Major and minor are obvious enough; the discordant one is the root, a diminished second, and a diminished fifth. Do any of these compositions look more or less pleasing to you? And is this in accord with the harmony (that is, is major more pleasing than minor, minor more pleasing than the discordant one?) For reference, below each composition is each respective chord, made from the Szynalski tone generator. On the sounds, click to pop out if you want to hear them.


To avoid any special effect from these particular colors, I did another set of three (major, minor, and discordant) starting on the arbitrary E. If there's a harmony effect, the order of preference should be the same for both sets.

(Here I kind of like the discordant one, but I'm also a metalhead who likes diminished fifths.)

Maybe Mondrian knew what he was doing when he chose the root note for his composition. What would happen if I started with that one as the root, that is, normalized his red to the C below A440, and built chords from that? Here is the Mondrian color scale:



Here are the three harmonies, with the root note as his red, and the three same chords. Which one do you like most? Also, converting colors back into sounds - here instead of a piano I used an online tone generator to compare the major, minor, and discordant chords to the chord made by the actual colors in Mondrian's painting. The reason I used a tone generator instead of a piano is that, going in this direction (from light to sound) the color frequencies are likely to land between the notes,, and I wasn't about to de-tune my piano.
Interestingly, of these, the major chord is the one that most resembles the original work, though the original chord (the harmony from the colors of the original work, normalizing the red to the C below A440) is not a major one:



I hope you've escaped this without developing color-sound synesthesia. For next steps I may put up these harmonies (blinded) for a vote to see if people choose them consistently. If you want more, at some point I'm going to automate the pixel-counting of some famous paintings and assign wavelength values to each pixel (the Bridge at Giverny, the Scream, Starry Night, School of Athens) and see what kinds of chords those make.

Dimensions of Art

Above: a catalog of scents from the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents in Berkeley, California, USA.

Sometimes, innovations in art occur because artists have conceived of, and/or technology has allowed, novel ways of creating an artificial object/event purely for the purpose of experiencing it. For example - the development of perspective in the Renaissance; or the evolution of the institution of the artist as a person who we connect with; or photographs and recordings that let us experience a live performance at our leisure; or pictures that move and fool us into experiencing a solid moving object.

Breaking down artistic experience into its basic dimensions might reveal "holes" in artistic possibility-space where no one has made an effort to create, and for too long I've been thinking about what these basic dimensions are, and where the holes might be. Of course, at least some of those holes will exist for good reasons. By creating a list of these characteristics, we could create a matrix and more easily see where there are artistic innovation deserts. Originally I thought I would just make a chart, and look for structure in the N-dimensional space ("art forms with X usually don't have Y") and that would reveal the remaining holes in art-space. But the list is longer than I thought it would be, with approximately 10^69 possible combinations, so I just eyeballed it rather than looking for holes systematically. I include these first, along with the list of dimensions, then a final section containing thought experiments exploring the role of our connection to the artist in our experience of art.

This project amounted to a quick-and-dirty survey of the entire human artistic enterprise, and to summarize: visual art tends to be representative, sound art tends to be abstract. Using other senses in art is limited by technology, safety, and capital. Representative art usually attempts to include a coherent narrative. These are the defaults, possibly driven by biology, and departures from these tendencies are usually deliberate choices and/or driven by changes in technology. As photography drove a move to more stylized, more abstract art with a focus on concept more than execution, the same may be happening in the near future to sound art, and I predict the innovative sound forms I list here are those most likely to be explored in the next 1-2 decades.


New Forms, Based on Blank Areas in the Map of Art Space

Some of these likely exist, and I just haven't encountered them. Some of these have likely been tried, but they're just not interesting. Is that a certainty for all of them? Art varies in its capital intensiveness (movies at the apex, vs a single scribbler typing on a machine that everyone now owns) which might further limit experiments. I include only forms possible with current technology - no neural interfaces.

1. Silent films - in the sense that they do have sound, but no language (including text or signs.) Some of these exist (1981's Quest for Fire), but not as a genre.
   
   
2. Art with intentional synesthesia - associating certain sensory experiences or concepts intentionally, before experiencing art. If you want to fully experience it, you must train before you go! Some people study a musician's work before going to a concert. We do this unintentionally by accumulating knowledge about the world and art so that when we encounter an artistic reference, we can appreciate it (if you don't know the classics, the Bible, and Shakespeare, you're having a very different and more confusing or impoverished experience of Western art than you could be.) You recognize this when you start watching parody comedies with children who haven't yet had the time to store information about their culture.
   
   
3. Interactive electronic paintings; musicians who put out all the sound files used to make an album (including ones not included) for other musicians to use.
   
   
4. Scent sculptures - each object has its own fragrance.
   
   
5. Video game with switched "skins". I've avoided trying to define art, but still, a boundary case that I truly can't decide if I would include is video games. Obviously there is art in video games, but would I call the video game itself art? At football games, certainly there is art decorating it, but the game is at the core, and does not fundamentally change if the uniforms, the theme of the stadium, or the logos change. This is less clear in video games and possibly even some board games. Imagine a video game with switched skin, or randomly shifting underlying mechanics. This could be done either for video or tabletop games.
   
   
6. Paintings with color harmony rules similar to 12-tone serialism (using the frequencies of light of each color; note, we cannot see a full octave.)
   
   
7. I was about to inlcude surrealist or abstract photography, then I discovered Aaron Siskind.
   
   
8. Sound-art with recordings or imitations of natural sound, and minimal language or abstract (tonal) sound. I once saw Ikue Mori perform with John Zorn and Mike Patton, and that sounds she made were so bizarre and original that I found myself only able to connect it to plumbing sounds and the sensation of Pop Rocks.
   
   
9. A "blind" gallery. There are no labels with titles, years, media, or certainly artist names. I thought I would actually find this quite distressing, but then realized that this was my experience at Burning Man, and I'm only bothered by it, now that I reflect (and want to credit an artist I reference in this article.) What if I see something I like and want to learn more about the artist? It almost feels like a waste of time. But what if you were given a notebook to write down what you thought the artist was like and what they were trying to do? I'm not a professional artist, so I don't have a sense of whether they might be more or less interested in such an exhibit, but if it causes the audience to think more about them as an artist,
   
   
10. An actor who attends galleries as the "front end", a fake artist persona, with a made-up back story. Everyone knows this is the case but plays along. Gradually the actor gets involved with actually producing the art, and eventually it is suspected that she was the artist the entire time.
    
    I also asked Perplexity, and like many humans, it thinks of possible forms without thinking too much about the execution (I removed the ones with no clear means to implement.)
    
    Synesthetic Reality Sculptures would be a groundbreaking art form that merges representational and abstract elements while engaging multiple senses in an innovative way. This art form would create three-dimensional sculptures that transform based on sensory input from the viewer, blurring the lines between representation and abstraction. Key features of Synesthetic Reality Sculptures:
    
    
11. Proprioceptive Interaction: The sculpture would respond to the viewer's body position and movement, changing its form and color as the viewer moves around it.
    
    
12. Sound-Induced Textures: The sculpture's surface would change texture based on ambient sounds or viewer-generated noises, creating a tactile representation of auditory input.
    
    
13. Temperature-Sensitive Visuals: The sculpture would alter its colors and patterns in response to the viewer's body heat or touch, bridging thermal sensation with visual
    perception.
    
    
    WHAT ARE THE DIMENSIONS OF ART? The dimensions of art - its possible elements - break into two categories - sensory, and cognitive. The sensory (or innate, or physical) dimensions are those you could measure with a simple instrument - like color, time, or volume. The cognitive (or extrinsic) dimension require a human audience. The colors and shapes and sounds in a film are just projections on a screen or vibrations in the air - those are measurable physical, sensory properties of the movie. But, your brain knits together the sounds into coherent objects, assigns the sounds to them, understands the language and culture and emotions and intentions of the characters and actors and director - and you're now creating a narrative and using your theory of mind and this is central to your experience.
    
    Initially I thought this would be a simple task, but the intrinsic physical sensory dimensions are fairly limited. What the audience - the human brain perceiving the thing - brings into the work really is quite complex.
    
    While I'm trying to be as inclusive as possible, the emphases and omissions here will inevitably reflect my own tastes. (Imagine if everyone made such a list and it was nearly the same, or so different as to be alien - I think either possibility is interesting.) I also have next to no formal education in art history, so some of the holes I think I've found have likely been explored.
    
    
    1. INTRINSIC SENSORY PROPERTIES OF ART
    
    1.1 Time (change over time vs static)
    1.1.1 Interactiveness (how does it respond to audience)
    1.1.2 Rate of change
    1.1.3 Is there coordination between different senses or within the same sense
    1.1.4 Length
    
    1.2 Vision
    1.2.1 Number of spatial dimensions - one, two (image) or three (sculpture)
    1.2.1 Color
    1.2.2 Form
    1.2.3 Intensity and contrast
    1.2.4 Size
    
    1.3 Sound
    1.3.1 Volume
    1.3.2 Pitch
    1.3.3 Timbre
    1.3.4 Rhythm and Tempo
    
    1.4 Tactile
    1.4.1 Temperature
    1.4.2 Movement
    1.4.3 Smoothness
    1.4.4 Hardness
    1.4.5 Angularity, sharpness, or roundness
    1.4.6 Density
    1.4.7 Phase (gas/liquid/solid)
    1.4.8 Coherence (crumbly, intact)
    
    1.5 Olfactory
    
    1.6 Taste
    
    1.7 Proprioception/Vestibular - 4D films provide this and they've become more common in amusement parks.
    
    1.8 Passive or Interactive
    
    
    Notes on the sensory dimensions:
    • These dimensions are both more primitive, and for that reason more difficult to consider. Of course I wasn't able to fully remove the human element even here. I suspect that this is where the most productive "mining" could happen.
      
      
    • I haven't expanded on olfactory and taste for a reason. Visual and sound arts, and the coordination of the two (plays, movies), are the kings of the sensory world. This is because there are physical challenges to the others. For olfactory art - control of scent in space and time is difficult. One scent at a critical point in a play would not be technically difficult, or associated with an image (remember Scratch n Sniff stickers?), but how to make an olfactory symphony with multiple scents changing over time? How to ensure the scents disperse quickly enough and don't mix? This might be something for the first artists working in pure neural interface, where we don't have to worry about the experiences having an Ex Neuro origin. There's also a contagion concern - do you want to sniff something lots of other noses have been near?
      
      
    • Concerns similar to olfactory, but even greater, apply to taste-art. Food is mostly not taste-art. Yes, we "decorate" our food with extra flavors, but ultimately the reason we eat is for the physiological need for calories and nutrients, so I wouldn't count that as art. (A massive cake in the shape of the Taj Mahal that can be eaten after it is viewed? Principally for the entertainment effect - that would count as art because the fact that it is food makes it more interesting. You probably wouldn't make it at home and eat it by yourself; if you did it would be for the reward of seeing it, with - again - the thing being more interesting as a result of being edible.) Taste art would be something where the taste is mostly divorced from nutritional function. (Not e.g. diet soda, which mimics the nutritional function.)
      
      
    • Taste and tactile experiences are often destructive, therefore a work of art relying on these will have small audiences, especially taste.
      
      
    • I did not include all the tactile experiences humans can have (e.g. pain, vibration, itch) because those are more "invented" by our nervous system, others less so, like temperature. When something burns us, there is a measurable temperature of the object and our skin where it touches us, but the pain requires a central nervous system. That is to say: there is something hot on your foot, and your foot is in a shoe, so there is something hot in your shoe. But if there is a pain in your foot, and your foot is in a shoe, most people would not understand the pain as being in the shoe.
      
      
    • Size is an underrated aspect of art with a visual dimension; quantity is indeed a quality all its own. Probably the biggest surprise I've had, and strongest emotional reactions, from experiencing something in person I'd experienced only in other media, was seeing Goya's Saturn Devouring One of His Children in the Prado - because of its size.
    
    
    
    2. EXTRINSIC DIMENSIONS OF ART THAT HUMAN AUDIENCES ADD - while we bring these elements to art, they are inevitable to our experience. Daniel Dennett commented, in his comment on the old question "how do I know the red you see is the same as the red I see", that they cannot be the same, because of the associations we have with even basic sense experiences - you can't pry apart red from your other senses, memory, and thoughts about it.
    
    2.1 Interpretation - these are more subjective than the sensory elements, so some clarifying comments are helpful. Here, interpretation means the effect of the art on the the audience separate from the persona of the artist.
    
    2.1.1 Emotional experience - many of the other elements in this list are mostly a means to generate emotions, even the appreciation of abstract aspects.
    
    2.1.2 Representative vs abstract - In visual art, an image can be either a representation of the world (or at least of coherent discrete objects in the world) or completely abstract. Surrealist or cubist paintings are still representative, though e.g. Kandinsky or Matta are not. The obvious contrast here is between visual art, that usually represents something you could see, and music, which is non-representative sound - you could argue in fact music is abstract sound-art. The nearer to pure abstraction, the more difficult to avoid being unsatisfying. You might not enjoy a performance where you're handed the sheet music to Beethoven's fifth, any more than asking to hear a song and being handed a vinyl record (most of us don't have the hardware to translate the notes into any auditory experience, any more than we can run our fingers over the grooves of the record and hear it.) Some interesting examples of pure abstration are John Cage's 4'33", or the Museum of Non-Visible Art.
    
    2.1.3 Need for active interpretation of implied meaning - Orwell's Animal Farm has a political message and the characters are obvious parallels for (to him) contemporary political figures. Can be frustrating or tiring when the work seems to demand interpretation but you can't "solve" it.
    
    2.1.4 Language - are there words?
    
    2.1.5 Narrative coherence - is it a story, and does it have clear cause and effect (even if backwards like Memento), vs an abstract palette of shifting colors, or a surrealist movie with total lack of causality (Un Chien Andalou) or partial (Eraserhead.) Anything with any kind of narrative must either have the standard story elements of plot, setting, and character, or deliberately choose not to include them, and have the audience notice.
    
    2.1.6 Identifying with the performance - imagining your own body moving in the way the dancers are moving, or how you as an architect would have chosen materials for the building.
    
    2.1.7 Permanent or temporary - sand paintings; or Agrippa A Book of the Dead by William Gibson, which physically deteriorates after being read once.
    
    2.1.8 Tone - serious, comical, whimsical, dark.
    
    2.1.9 Status/community validation - basking in the glow of the Mona Lisa, knowing you will be able to tell others you did so. The crowds in front of this, versus at any other location in the Louv're reveal its importance in most humans' actual experience.
    
    2.1.10 Live or recorded performance (or not applicable) - would you watch a composer putting together a piece of music? Maybe, if she was also the performer, and was improvising jazz. It's harder to imagine watching a novelist typing or an artist painting, rather than their final effort. Then again, people pay to say symphony practices.
    
    2.1.11 Medium or instrument - I include this in the cognitive aspects rather than physical, because part of the experience here is not just the physical properties of the medium, a known medium the experiencer recognizes - a convention. (That's a trombone; that's burlap; that's tinsel and bronze.)
    
    2.1.12 References (in reverence or parody) - sometimes referred to as "literary reference" in media outside writing. Borges carried this idea to its extreme in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", about a writer who reproduces exactly the work by Cervantes.
    
    2.1.13 Style (and collision of style) - is it an Aztec codex? A Victorian dress? Some cross-fertilization of the two? In visual art, thanks to AI, we're flooded with these.
    
    2.1.14 Simultaneous experiencing (fellowship) - laughing at a comedy in a crowd is very different than watching it at home.
    
    2.1.15 Source of inspiration
    
    2.1.16 Driving medium in the creative process - is the music a score to a film? Or is it a music video where the music was primary? A novelization of a movie or a film of a novel? (Or created in parallel like 2001?)
    
    2.1.17 Innovativeness - (To keep our interest, art must continually walk a line between habituation to the familiar, and incomprehensible chaos.)
    
    
    
    Above, Triumphant Scale by El Anatsui, a Ghanaian/Nigerian artist who creates art objects (images? sculptures? textiles?) from found materials. Below, Frontier Psychiatry by The Avalanches, built out of samples, with the video made from found materials as well.
    
    
    
    2.1.18 Use of new technology or technique - separate from innovation. Without naming the specific technology or technique, there is an experience of seeing an early adopter at work - e.g., continuing of action in the Great Train Robbery, or Uccello's use of perspective.
    
    2.1.19 Exploration of limits and advantages of medium - Disneyland has a light show using water jets, which are projected onto as a screen, or in some cases directly illuminated from underneath (it's a nice way to create a 3D light saber.) Magritte's This Is Not a Pipe draws attention to the uncrossable gap between image and object. Extreme musicians try to affect their audiences physiologically with the "brown note". Twentieth century writers exploring and cleaving aspects of the authorial role and voice were using this element.
    
    2.1.20 Space/time/cultural context - is it in a museum? Someone's home? Is the building a former factory, or prison, or near a political leader's office? Is it a brightly colored object in a gray place, or is it made from local stone?
    
    2.1.21 History of the individual artwork, its history within the medium, and history of the medium itself. This is separate from merely reference to other works. For instance, capoeira as a form of dance emerging from slaves trying to conceal martial arts training.
    
    2.1.22 Expectation - are the actors remaining on the stage, or running through the theater? Are objects in a museum that you thought were purely functional actually part of the display? For the last one, at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, a railing on a stairwell was actually an installation that looked like a railing and served that function, but furtively also included warm running water on the surface where you'd place your hand.
    
    
    
    2.1.23 Moral judgment, disgust, or shock - (Above, gold-plated poop by Terence Koh.) I give this its own category apart from other emotional impacts because it tends to be a brief experience. Even horror films are not end-to-end torture porn. Dada was an early incarnation of the genre. An example, where I wish I knew the artist's name: at Burning Man in 2000, I was riding around looking at art. It was nearing sunset, and I approached a structure made from a dozen ten-foot-tall glass columns arranged in a circle, about ten feet tall, stabilized and connected where each column met a horizontal ring about every two feet. Coming closer, each column was actually a stack of jars, each a subtly different shade of yellow or orange, some almost clear, sparkling in the evening light. Still closer and I could see that it was not the glass itself that was colored, but a liquid in each jar. And each jar had a person's name on it. They were each filled with someone's urine. I try to tell the story in this way over the years so others can share the full experience - the curiosity, the revulsion, then a shift to slow-clap congratulations to the artist. I lingered at the spot for some time, watching others approach, inspect with furrowed brow, then shout "Eeewww" and cover their mouths, exactly as I had (and if I did my job, as you just did.)
    
    2.1.24 Cleverness - considerable overlap with abstraction. There is a Bay Area artist (who I cannot recall or find online; if you know, please comment) who once had an apparently popular exhibition where attendees paid five dollars for the experience of giving him five dollars.
    
    2.1.25 Intentional or serendipitous creation - da Vinci's experiment with tempera on stone for the Last Supper makes for an interesting story, but since it was flaking off within his lifetime, probably not his intention. Sometimes objects are created without the intention of being an art object, but people who went to college in the 90s will recall the beautiful blue Arizona Iced Tea bottles that found their way to people's dorm rooms as vases. And finally, outsider artists often seem to have a different experience of what they create, or do not predict or understand their effect on an audience. Wesley Willis does not appear to have been trying to make comedy music that made people laugh, but to many people, it's funny. This made some people uncomfortable, but he kept selling records and touring.
    
    
    
    
    2.2 Characteristics of Creator - As time passes, this has become more important, and I suspect will only increase with the use of AI to make art.
    
    
    2.2.1 Persona and life history - feeling you have an understanding and connection of the person, and can see the influence on what they produce.
    
    
    
    2.2.2 Body of work, style, media worked in, consistency with other work - (Above, an early work by Mondrian. Yes, he drew curved things at one point.) The thing I found most remarkable about the Dali museum is the number of media he worked in. Auto body detailing, jewelry, it was hard to think of one where he hadn't tried his hand, and this now influences my experience of his work.
    
    2.2.3 Sense of mastery - Vermeer's curtains are famous for their realism; on the other hand, you can't help but notice mistake in an attempt at a realistic portrait; or you see a statue, and wonder if it posssibly could been intentional. Close inspection of the Velasquez paintings in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum shows that much of the background were just dashes of dark color, which initially I found disappointing, but then stepping back to a proper viewing distance, I realized it produced exactly the represeentative effect he probably intended. In some ways mastery and innovation are opposing forces - it's too easy to explore an interesting new angle than just try to improve your technique, and in a competitive environment, comparison is easier, much like competition on price in economics (and the resultant race to the bottom, or some sort of shrouding behavior to avoid this.)
    
    
    
    Above: a Strandbeest by Theo Jansen.
    
    
    
    2.2.4 Authenticity of artist's life experience - imagine if you had bought turquoise jewelry from a Native American artist in Winslow, Arizona. Later you click on a story about an artist who was found to fraudulently claim he was Native American but was in fact Italian, and the picture in the story is the artist you saw. Do your feelings change about the jewelry? It's still the same object. (Similarly, once at a Bad Religion show, the singer made a comment about having signed to a major label after one of their albums came out. The crowd booed this development, at which point the bass player asked the crowd whether the quality of the already-recorded album somehow changed after they signed.)
    
    2.2.5 Artist's position in history and relationship to other artists and historical figures - did Verdi write a part specifically for her? Did she make a dress for a Persian shah? Was she arrested as part of a protest or revolution? Were any of her family members famous?
    
    SIDEBAR: THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS ON THE ROLE OF THE CREATOR IN THE EXPERIENCE OF ART ART
    
    
    
    Above: the No Name Art Museum in Jiaxing, China. This museum displays pieces by the artist collective No Name which consisted of Zhao Wenliang, Yang Yushu, Shi Zhenyu, and Zhang Da’an.
    
    Section 2.2 is still certainly incomplete. Much of what we get out of the experience of art is the experience of knowing about another person's inner life. An art museum with no name plates by any of the pieces might be quite frustrating to many people. AI is forcing a reckoning of how much knowing about the creator, the creator's characteristics, and even the existence of a creator matters to our experience. It's worth compiling some boundary cases about what it means to create something, and who or what can do, to as a vehicle for exploring this question.
    
    
    The Role of Personhood in the Experience of Art, Case 1: Intention versus Randomness in Method If you found out that Jackson Pollock had actually just used a fan to randomly spray paint onto canvas, rather than deliberately placing it, how would this affect your experience of it?
    
    
    The Role of Personhood in the Experience of Art, Case 2: The Influence of Species
    
    Form your impressions first:
    
    
    
    Top was painted by Congo, a chimpanzee. Second is the Makapansgat Pebble, at least 2.5 million years old, a natural object found at an australopithecus site - not modified, but carried miles from its initial location. Bottom is art, unmistakeable cave art! Made by Neanderthals, a different species.
    
    
    The Role of Personhood in the Experience of Art, Case 3: Taylor Swift Does Not Exist
    
    (Title stolen from a hilarious piece by Sam Kriss.) Taylor Swift's fans feel they identify with her, they understand her, they connect with her. Imagine that you find out that she has actually been at the cutting edge of technology, a kind of marketing experiment that was successful beyond the executives' wildest dreams: from the beginning of her career, there was an music-composing AI system (like the ones we can all play with now) writing her songs. She's a real person, she's just singing lyrics and melodies composed for her by a machine. This would profoundly change the way her fans react to her and her music. Of course, the disaggregation of roles in art production is not new. Why should we assume the best composers are the best performers? Holly Knight wrote hits for Pat Benatar, Tina Turner, Bonnie Tyler, and Aerosmith among many others, yet she's not a household name, for exactly this reason.
    
    
    The Role of Personhood in the Experience of Art, Case 4: Proximity of Agency and Consciousness of a Human to Your Experience of Art
    
    From the AI art test results on Astral Codex Ten. Worth clicking through to try it yourself. The caption for this one is: "One of these two pretty hillsides is by one of history’s greatest artists. The other is soulless AI slop. Can you tell which is which?" Try looking at both and imagining the person behind it - or, if youre like me, once you know one is AI and one is not and you can't tell which, suddenly it's just a blank.
    
    
    
    
    
    Above, Aditya Ramesh, lead engineer on DALL-E 3. Below, the Wintergatan marble music machine, with Martin Molin, the machine's creator. If you think Ramesh is NOT creating art, but Molin is (or at least performing it), why?
    
    
    
    
    The Role of Personhood in the Experience of Art, Case 5: Deliberate Creation as Art
    
    Above, we wondered about the proximity of agency to the artistic experience, how directly causal it was; what if there unambiguously was no agent causing it? Imagine we lived in a universe where Mark Rothko had never lived. You're hiking in a desert area, on the Earth of this Rothko-less universe. You see a pattern like this on a rock, composed of lichen and mineral deposits.
    
    Orange, Red, Yellow, Mark Rothko (1961)
    
    "Pretty, and how strange that it made that geometric pattern," you might think. You might take a picture of it, but it may or may not be your favorite thing you saw on that hike. (There are lots of areas on Earth that look manmade, many of them wall-like.)
    
    This is a very different experience from the one you have in this world, where Mark Rothko did live, and you see what he did deliberately placed on a canvas for others to look at, likely in a high-status place and knowing that other people have viewed it and gained pleasure from doing so. You place it in the context of Rothko's life experience and his other work.
    
    Even if, in our Rothko-ful universe, you went for a hike and saw that same pattern, you might think, "How strange that it made that geometric pattern, it looks like a Rothko." You might take a picture of it, but it may or may not be your favorite thing you saw on that hike.
    
    
    
    A picture I took as I flew south over California's Central Valley during a late winter's afternoon. On social media I referred to as a Rothko sunset. I actually don't even like Rothko, but I do like status, and comparing the sunset to it lets other people know I am the sort of person who knows Rothko.

Two Absurd Music Videos and the Importance of Human Connection

Cult of the Snowman, Doopiidoo (AI), 2025:




Hell, Clown Core, 2019:




The first one, a sort of silly nightmare, approaches video surrealism far more closely than any absurdist play or comedy ever has. The second is reminiscent*, in a good way, of John Zorn. (As an ex-saxophonist myself I'm proud that the most bizarre cerebral work in jazz tends to come from saxophonists. See e.g. Eric Dolphy.) But what I'm most interested in, is how much more interested I am in the second one, seemingly because humans created it.

I make no argument about AI Not Being Able to Produce Real Art - I think that debate seems quite over by now, and there's no innate, essential trait differentiating AI- from human-generated art that exists outside of our skulls. If you told me I misread the date on the video, and in fact Clown Core is all AI-generated as well, I would shrug, then having learned that, my interest would diminish, with no change to the actual video and audio. It's not just the machine-vs-human aspect of it: if I found out that say, the band Carcass (one of my favorites) had for all these years outsourced their songwriting to someone at their record label, my interest would similarly decrease. When I see or hear art that appeals to me, I want to know about its creators, what kind of people they are, about their backgrounds and training and what it was like to produce the work. (Note in the case of Clown Core, they've never officially revealed their identities, which makes them more compelling still.)

There may, very soon, be a status value to "artisan novels" or "artisan symphonies" produced manually by humans. This troubles me only because I don't at all understand the appeal of artisanal products (soap, bread, bicycles) and in fact I might be a little too vocal about rejecting their value. Being honest, the people who get excited about them usually strike me as trying a little too hard to signal their taste and authenticity, and sometimes as old farts pining for a long-lost age. In only being able to maintain interest in human-generated art, I may grudgingly be joining their ranks.



Granted, I'm not aware of any AI engines that are proactively churning out surrealist videos without any human supervision, entirely motivated by their own programmed-in utility function. There are still humans involved in the decision tree to create these things, if only at a very abstract level. Not just the fact of human involvement, but the intensity, matters also. What if you found out that Dali determined what he would paint using a dictionary and dice? For my part, in fact that might deepen my appreciation - because he, a fellow human being, conceived of it, and executed it. Though I'm not aware of any such experiments, I'm sure artists have tried randomizing their art in various ways. In fact, the automatic painting some surrealists did strikes me as the opposite of random - trying to produce "inscapes" (like Vertigo of Eros by Roberto Matta, above) that were even more authentically the product of the artist's mind than something he deliberated over and sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Supposing there is some deep subconscious within the large language models that they can expose with their own products - would I care more? No, that seems even more boring and pointless. So why do I care when humans do it? The answer must be that as a social animal, I am compelled by connection with others of my species, even with someone I can never meet.


*Clown Core also uses the lyrical technique of An*l C*nt, who pioneered the practice of clearly not saying any of the printed lyrics in the song and just screaming; possibly they make up the words printed as lyrics after they've finished recording.