Author: Andrew Sullivan

Linda Besner wonders if the promise of an Internet as a great cultural leveler – granting an audience to obscure artists as well as to the well-known and well-funded – might be wildly overstated:

In The People’s Platform, [author Astra] Taylor discusses how the supposedly open, free, and hierarchy-busting world wide web has failed to do better than a roomful of public television commissioners in encouraging the production or consumption of risky independent cultural products. In fact, it does significantly worse. Internet traffic follows a statistical pattern known as power law distribution; essentially, while there is a wide range of available options, almost everyone is crowded together at the most popular end of the spectrum. It’s a problem that’s getting worse: “In 2001, ten Web sites accounted for 31 per cent of U.S. page views,” Taylor writes, “by 2010, that number had skyrocketed to 75 percent.” Most nights, 40 per cent of the U.S.’s bandwidth is taken up by people watching Netflix movies.

In a similar vein, Dougald Hine challenges notions of the Internet as an agent of “liberation from the boredom of industrial society, a psychedelic jet-spray of information into every otherwise tedious corner of our lives”:

At best, it allows us to distract ourselves with the potentially endless deferral of clicking from one link to another. Yet sooner or later we wash up downstream in some far corner of the web, wondering where the time went. The experience of being carried on these currents is quite different to the patient, unpredictable process that leads towards meaning.

The latter requires, among other things, space for reflection – allowing what we have already absorbed to settle, waiting to see what patterns emerge. Find the corners of our lives in which we can unplug, the days on which it is possible to refuse the urgency of the inbox, the activities that will not be rushed. Switch off the infinity machine, not forever, nor because there is anything bad about it, but out of recognition of our own finitude: there is only so much information any of us can bear, and we cannot go fishing in the stream if we are drowning in it.

There was an objective way to find the answer:

[R]esearchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from “ugly” to “beautiful.” Two weeks later, the mathematicians viewed the same equations and rated them again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. The orbitofrontal cortex is associated with emotion, and this particular region of it has shown in previous tests to be correlated with emotional responses to visual and musical beauty. …

The study found … that the beauty of equations is not entirely subjective. Most of the mathematicians agreed on which equations were beautiful and which were ugly, with Euler’s identity, 1+e^iπ=0, consistently rated the most attractive equation in the lot. “Here are these three fundamental numbers, e, pi and i,” [mathematician Colin] Adams says, “all defined independently and all critically important in their own way, and suddenly you have this relationship between them encompassed in this equation that has a grand total of seven symbols in it? It is dumbfounding.”

(Image of Euler’s Identity scarification via Flickr user gruntzooki)

David Graeber considers the possibility:

Is it meaningful to say an electron “chooses” to jump the way it does? Obviously, there’s no way to prove it. The only evidence we could have (that we can’t predict what it’s going to do), we do have. But it’s hardly decisive. Still, if one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little like intentionality, something at least a little like experience, something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every level of physical reality as well.

Why do most of us, then, immediately recoil at such conclusions? Why do they seem crazy and unscientific? Or more to the point, why are we perfectly willing to ascribe agency to a strand of DNA (however “metaphorically”), but consider it absurd to do the same with an electron, a snowflake, or a coherent electromagnetic field?

The answer, it seems, is because it’s pretty much impossible to ascribe self-interest to a snowflake. If we have convinced ourselves that rational explanation of action can consist only of treating action as if there were some sort of self-serving calculation behind it, then by that definition, on all these levels, rational explanations can’t be found. Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.

Update from a reader:

I’m a grad student in evolutionary biology and currently TA an introductory evolution course. I had a strong reaction to your post – one surely expected by Mr. Graeber, but perhaps worth airing.

First, the scare-quotes around “metaphorically” are misplaced. This usage is the literal definition of metaphor. Evolutionary biologists talk about the agency of DNA as useful conceptual shorthand, which accurately describes the outcomes of genetic evolution while grossly misrepresenting the mechanism. “The allele wants to help the copies of itself carried in other individuals,” is easier to say and is more intuitive to communicate than “the frequency in the population of alleles encoding for behaviors that harm the individual but help close relatives will increase if the cost to the individual’s reproductive output is less than the benefit to reproduction received by the relative multiplied by the probability a copy of the allele is also carried by the relative.” The statistical sorting leaves behind genes suited for propagation, so the ‘selfish’ analogy works better for genes than for snowflakes.

Second, the evolutionary explanation for consciousness and free will isn’t really addressed. Like so much of biodiversity, it can be seen as an adaptive emergent trait. Behavioral plasticity is a huge advantage. Deterministic links between particular stimuli and behaviors are widespread across the tree of life, but cannot accommodate novel stimuli and likely do not scale to the number of relevant stimuli encountered by complex animals. Breaking the deterministic links in favor of flexible decision making is exactly the kind of solution consistently ‘discovered’ by natural evolution. The emergence hypothesis seems to me more plausible than particular agency, for at least two reasons.

One is that, while the behavior of electrons cannot only be predicted probabilistically, there are many levels of biological organization between electrons and humanity that behave in an exceptionally predictable manner. In the lab, I use enzymes to manipulate DNA molecules; no such science would be possible if these proteins were not reliable replicating, cutting, and ligating machines.

Second, I suspect most people would agree that consciousness is present in non-human animals, and would further agree that, whatever it is, there is more of it in an ape or octopus than a fly, jellyfish, or sunflower. Agency as we observe it correlates strongly with neural complexity, which fits well with the notion that a sense of self emerges from the billions of neural connections housed in large-brained animals.

I don’t mean to go full “dick-head athiest” on you. The piece certainly is interesting, thought provoking, and the sort of thing that brings me back to your blog (and reupping my subscription any day now). It reminds me of my go-to response if I’m asked about my belief in God, to avoid the unfortunate conversation that can so easily follow: No I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in electrons.