You do run into these people, I run into these guys on the apps, who just put you to shame intellectually. I had this very occasional thing, just a few times, with this folk singer when I was living up by Columbia who corrected, or at least clarified, my understanding of the uncanny valley, which is one of those things I think I really ought to understand, but never quite feel like I do. It’s not a very difficult concept when you see it written out, but it’s one of those ideas which, to me, seems like it should have more to it. I’m like the scholar who when he was diagnosed with a terminal disease said that he looked forward to never having to look up the word “hermeneutics” again. The folksinger also had this kind of great view that…
(I had set aside 8-10 this morning to blog, but I got a call from my co-worker wanting to share his progress on a project. Not exactly Coleridge’s person from Porlock, but the World does seem in its way to fight against its own representation and analysis, like a parent obstructing therapy. Dickens supposedly could write and participate in a conversation, but he really in a way was the World and the world can’t interrupt itself.)
What I was getting at before, my folksinger’s idea about social media, I guess is relatively obvious, but he’s right that it’s somewhat crazy to think that quite a lot of people are living in all but slavery mining rare earths or working twelve hours a day making phones so that the rest of us can be artists. Here I mean artist in its broadest almost pathetic sense—as a vocation of last resort. The physicist, Michio Kaku, says that aliens would no more be interested in human art than we would be in art made by squirrels. I think I would be interested in art made by other animals. I mean I think it’s sort of interesting that crows make saws and chimps make termite fishing tools. I know some elephants paint, but that’s always struck me as a bit of a trick, like an orangutan making pancakes, although I suppose elephant paintings could tell us something about elephant perception and possibly the subjective experience of elephants assuming, as I do more or less, that there is such a thing. Wouldn’t these aliens have something like exoculturalists who would be interested in human art, if not in itself, at least as a means to understand human…human what really though? Kaku has this idea that they would be interested in human science and math, which is hard to imagine if they were able to contact us, since presumably theirs would be more advanced, but maybe civilizations evolve past art. Once human subjective awareness is understood and possibly even reproducible, what exactly would the role of art be? Still, even if we imagine movies and novels being superseded by some form of shared lucid dreaming, wouldn’t some people or post-human entities not be tasked with or take it upon themselves to dream full-time? Without art, again in its broadest sense, what would these dreams comprise? Would they be more like directly accessing the plane of Ideas? No dreaming, just thinking? Brodsky has a poem about how he wishes that he could see the stars knowing nothing of astronomy. I feel like the very little I know about astronomy makes the stars far more interesting than if I thought they were holes in the firmament, although I supposed the collapsed ones kind of are, so maybe once consciousness is really understood, perhaps other more interesting mysteries will reveal themselves, Proust’s representation of subjective mental processes, for example, will seem like an ancient cosmology, charming in itself, but serving as a kind of gesture toward the possibility of a kind of knowledge it cannot even imagine.