Alex Ebert, the musician who fronts Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and writes on philosophy and culture, opens with a video he made from his experience as a producer. The loudness wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s compressed recordings until an album's waveform looked like a solid block with no dynamic range, and Ebert treats this as a picture of the dialectic: oscillations rise in frequency until positive and negative can no longer be distinguished, at which point a new state emerges that stacks with rather than replaces the old. He applies the model to consciousness, distinguishing animal automaticity from the specifically human capacity to problematize an object that already matches its mental schema. The closing turns to culture, invoking Alexander Bard's barred absolute and arguing for exclusion as a condition of pluralism.
Guest: Alex Ebert
In brief
- Ebert argues that loudness-war compression eliminated dynamic range, replacing a soft-to-loud spectrum with an undifferentiated maximum.
- He treats the collapse of distinguishable oscillation into a new phase as a model of dialectical change, in which new states combine with prior ones as synthesis rather than superseding them.
- He argues the human brain differs from the animal brain in its ability to deliberately problematize an object even when prediction and schema already agree.
- He says animals do encounter prediction errors, but they resolve them rather than manufacturing problems where none exist.
- He suggests humans are drifting back toward animal automaticity, and that this return will be neither the relief people imagine nor straightforwardly bad.
- In the closing he argues that exclusion is the premise of pluralism, that total inclusion converges on homogeneity, and that creative institutions need a firewall between user metrics and their own judgment.
Full text
So, I'm going to start the broadcast. Okay. So, before we begin this, um, I'll just explain a little bit about what you're about to see. Um, uh, obviously I'm a not obviously, for those who don't know, I'm a musician. Uh, I've been staring at screens, uh, audio files for most of my life. And while staring at audio files, I am prone to doing what everyone else does, is compressing those files to lift the valleys up to the peaks so that you create a general loudness effect. And this compression obviously erodess dynamics. Dynamics are the sort of distribution of peaks to valleys. So the more quietness and then the more loudness, the more dynamics because soft to loud ratio is broader, then you have more dynamics.
But what was started to happen in the late 90s is all com uh composers and producers uh started wanting everything to sound louder and louder and louder and something called the loudness wars happened and sort of culminated in like the early 2000s um in which by the end if you actually look at the waveform of an entire album it just looked like blocks of image. It didn't even look like waveforms anymore because everything had been brought up to the peaks. even the quiet parts were loud. And so instead of a dynamic range of uh of sonics, you had a nondamical static range of maximum loudness. Now this it started to occur to me that this uh process was we could overlay this process over human development um and that it was generally representative of uh the dialectic um and we can get into exactly what this is but what you're about to see is a representation of the dialectic and the reason why this has implications with regard to consciousness will hopefully become clear as I begin to talk and I'll put this video away and then I'll just talk to you on the screen but first I made this video uh to demonstrate um the different phase transitions of dialectic.
What you'll see is a um and let me know if you can hear me talk while it's going. Can you hear me as I speak? Hopefully that's a yes. What you're seeing is increasing frequency of oscillations negative to positive down and up increases in frequency. The relation between its oscillations collapses until finally. You can no longer tell the difference between down and up and you get a new phase transition, a quant a qualitatively new sound. a new state, a new brain state. But then that state cannot last. And so there is a self uh uh repulsion in which negative and positive forces again produce determinate meaning like oh I see where that goes up and that goes down brain stem.
And this applies to to any sort of stuff. But anyway, I'll just let you watch the video and we'll talk about what this means. Now, as you can hear, the different phase transitions, the different tones are starting to stack on top of each other, producing chords. So it's not that one replaces the other, it's that one combines synthesis. Now I'm going to pause that there. What I'd like you to notice about this image is that it's very difficult to tell one oscillation from the other when this is happening. There are no longer any determinant any that is to say like differential oscillations. It's not like you can say oh this is that oscillation here and over there is another oscillation.
They're too condensed to be able to tell um one from the other. and um and that's where I'll end the video and then we can begin talking about uh the the topic I want to sort of uh speak on here. All right. So, keeping the video we just saw in mind, I want to talk about the very beginning of uh human consciousness. The the place at which human consciousness forked from animal consciousness. We like to describe animal consciousness as a state of pure automaticity, which is to say a state in which the animal is automatically engaging with its environment and any prediction errors that occur for the animal.
So for instance, if the animal has a basic schema of its environment and it says, "Yes, I know what this thing is. I I know what this nut is. In fact, I was born knowing what this nut is, and I'm going to go squirrel it away in this dirt because that's what I automatically know how to do. Everything that I do with my environment is a state of automaticity. I'm not questioning once I pick up the nut as a baby squirrel, wait a minute, is this nut a nut? What is this nut really? That's not what the squirrel's doing. The squirrel is automatically going, I know what this nut is.
I was born with it already represented in my cognitive schema and I know what to do with this now. I go bury it and so on and this is how I act. I act automatically with my environment. Now this state of automaticity that we observe in animals is like we're almost jealous of it. You know we we we very often talked about how animals are in a sort of symbiotic relationship with their environment. they sort of automatically know how to integrate themselves with their environment and the environment with them. There's a symbiosis there that we're almost jealous of that a lot of us say, well, we would like to return there.
And I think the arc of the talk I'm about to give shows that we actually are sort of returning there, but that the very return to that state is not necessarily what we think it is. It's not necessarily going to be an arrival that we're going to relish forever. It's not necessarily a good thing and it's not necessarily a bad thing. But what I'd like to suggest is that the what differentiates the human brain from the animal brain is our ability to problematize to look at the nut and say this is a nut. I know it's a nut. I learned it's a nut. I have the schema.
I have the category nut in my brain and this matches that. So my prediction of my environment is correct. This is a nut. I think it's a nut. It's a nut. It's a nut. Yes. Everything says yes. However, what if it's not just a nut? This ability to intentionally problematize objects that are otherwise in perfect uh harmony with our mental schemas, with our predictions. is what separates humans from other animals. Now, other animals still encounter problems. They still encounter prediction errors where they think, let's say a squirrel sees a uh a glass nut that was made for a Christmas ornament, right? And the squirrel runs to the nut thinking it's a nut, but then starts playing with like, wait a minute, this isn't a nut.
Oh, prediction error, right? An error is triggered at which point the squirrel figures out how to deal with that error. Does the squirrel decide? Well, I'm going to incorporate now glass nuts into the category nut in my brain and from now on, every time I encounter a glass nut, I just readily assimilate it and I treat it just like a nut or do I have to create a new category for this which is not nut and then every time I encounter one of these shinier objects, I know to avoid them. So that process of encountering an error or a problem is handled automatically within every brain that we know.
In fact, it has to be handled as automatically as possible because evolutionary selection selects for organisms that handle information in the most efficient way possible. And the most efficient way to deal with information is of course automatically. If you're sitting there deliberating about everything, that's not efficient. So, historically uh evolution has selected for the most automatic uh uh handling of information and all thinking therefore converges on the automatic. And another way of saying that if you like, if you want to be spicy, is that all thinking converges on thoughtlessness. And yet humans were able to say, "Yeah, but what if this isn't enough?" They were able to hack the automaticity of thoughtlessness, which puts us in immediate symbiosis with our environment, and say, "What if it isn't?
What if that tree is not just a tree?" Now, it sounds like a stoner thought, right? A wasteful thought. But then you start thinking, "No, no, no. What if that tree is not just a tree, bro? What if that tree could be the foundation of a house? What if that tree could be the handle of a hammer? What if that tree could be paper that we could write on and so on? So this ability to enter a state of problematicity, again I call, this is a word I invented, but it's a state in which we intentionally trigger prediction errors. We intentionally think about what's there. even though it's not causing a problem, an automatic problem, we still say, "What if that thing that is perfectly exactly what I expected it to be is not simply what it is?
What if there's something else?" And I think the entire history of human consciousness has been this story of problematicity that the moment at which we sort of split from our uh animal ancestors is the moment at which we were able to intentionally problematize. Now what's interesting about this is that also means it's the moment at which we were able to be energetically inefficient on purpose. We were able to create mutations that did not conform to the highest energetic efficiency of the mental operations of the of the mind. So when we look at humanity and we're like, geez, humanity really seems to be out of whack with its environment. Well, yeah, that's the whole gift of humanity to be in not symbiosis.
And yet, what did this state of problematicity primarily produce? Technology. Let's go back to the idea of the tree. What if the tree is not just a tree? It's also a house. It's the beams for the reconstruction of my studio which just burned down. It's the handle of the hammer and so on. The development of technology through the arisal of problematicity slowly has done what? It slowly collapsed the phenomenological spacial temporal parameters. And let me just put that in plain English. It has slowly started to collapse our experience of space and time. And I'll get to what why this is important because I think this is pretty phenomenal.
When we collapse our experience of time and space, we collapse our our our environment, our experience of the distance between ourselves and an object, which is the relational apparatus of space and time. We slowly collapse that. I'll give you examples. The time it took to take a covered wagon from New York to Los Angeles, let's say back in the day, is three months. Now you can get there in four hours. A collapse of the experience of space and time. It used to be you had to send a letter and wait two weeks for a response or much longer. Now you can call and immediately collapse the space and time between yourself and someone else who is very far away.
Now, let's imagine this process at its apotheiois. And by the way, there's many more examples. The time it took to create a fire versus flicking on your heat in a central air and heating system. We're constantly collapsing the experience of becoming and approaching the moment of being. And I say moment of being because when you fully collapse, fully optimize your relationship to your environment, your environment then conforms to the mind. Your environment, there is no delay between the expectation and the realization. And we're seeing this just barely as we start to see people siloed in their own social media environments where your own predisposition to information, news, culture, politics is being fed back to you so that you do not encounter a prediction error.
So that you do not encounter something that surprises you. So that you do not encounter something that works against your predispositions. So in other words, technology is now a technology that was born out of problematicity is now erasing problematicity and collapsing the distance between ourselves and our environment. And if we think about the apotheiois of you know travel and the collapse of spaceime into sort of like a light speed ship let's say where effectively we each become photons. We each become everything everywhere all at once. As you may know, photons do not experience space or time because they are at light speed. They are everywhere all at once.
So they don't have any becoming. They are pure being. They exist in a single moment. Now for those of us who like meditating and so on, we'd be like, "Oh, wow. So the singularity is going to be great." And we should embrace technology for collapsing the spaciotemporal uh boundaries of phenomenological experience because eventually they will collapse space and time so much that we are just like photons and all we experience is being. And isn't that what we want to lift ourselves up out of the pain of becoming? The pain of the experience of being in a mortal uh uh body. The pain of watching someone die or dying ourselves.
The pain of war, the the pain, the pain of struggle. Yeah, that is what we all say we want. And for those of those of us who meditate and experience states like that, we love them. But we also really really really love narrative. Right? If you've ever been in AA or you've ever gone to a movie, um you notice that the things you want to see on the screen are not uh the arrived states of the heroic character. You don't want to see the character when they're sort of just like, "Yep, I did it." And that's the movie. You want to be like, "Well, where's the struggle?
Where's the heroic arc?" We want to see the arc. We want to see the becoming, not the being. I mean, we'd like to see the being at the end, but we want to see the becoming. We view our own lives that way. If you've gone to a AA meeting, I used to go to a lot of those. You don't want to hear the story of the guy who's like, "I smoked some weed and I got clean. Everyone's like, "Boo." You want to hear the story of the guy who like went through the absolute drudges of experience and came up like the phoenix out on the other side.
That's the most important person in the room. That's the person to give us the most uh rewarding narrative experience. And we view our own lives in the same way. Even though we hate it in the moment, we reflect mostly uh very often fondly on our difficult times, the fact that we got through them and so on. They conform to the heroic arc uh narrative. So I say that to say that let's just say that technology is good and technology is going to collapse eventually the becoming the spaciotemporal boundaries and parameters between making a fire or in just thinking I'd like a fire boom there's a fire you know that's the idea of the singularity after all now that eradicates the experience of becoming it gives us pure being and that would seem great, but it might also eventually be boring.
So, what I'd like to say is that the future of consciousness should be thought of not as the apotheiois of the current trajectory of technological singularity which would eventually collapse the experience of becoming. But it should be thought of in terms of what is the next homization moment? What is the next fork? Just like we forked off from our from the automaticity of our uh animal ancestors who were in perfect symbiosis with the environment and therefore always behaving automatically. Well, guess what we ended up doing through the very problematicity that forked from animals and provided us with infinite arrays of problems to come to infinite arrays of new answers.
We ended up producing the very same state of automaticity through technology. We want everything to be automatic. We want to not have to think about whether or not a tree might be a tree or not a tree. We we don't want to have to think about how to, you know, is this stone just a stone or could it also power my computers. We want to simply be in symbiosis where that spacial the spatial temporal parameters between us and objects is fully collapsed and everything we think automatically happens. Perfect imminent manifestation. Well, technology, let's just say, might actually produce something like that. But then we would have returned ourselves precisely to the automaticity from once we came.
Isn't that funny and ironic? It is going to be an isomorphic state, quantitatively isomeorphic. And this is where I want to bring us back to the video. In the video, if you notice, and I'm then I'm going to wrap up. We saw determinant lines. And I use that word determinant, indeterminant a lot, but you can think of them as differential or hey, I see that and that line and that line and I can tell the difference between them. But when they collapse, I could no longer tell the difference. It became kind of confusing. If I asked you to point at one specific line, you couldn't do it because there was too congested.
It was too saturated. Well, when technology and we've seen graphs like this, what a singularity is mathematically is precisely the moment at which determinant uh uh uh nodes or determinate um mathematical objects become indeterminant visav relational saturation. And we've probably seen like a sine wave that eventually becomes so fast that it reaches what you know mathematics would call undefined. it reaches like a terminal velocity. Well, each time you enter one of those states of indeterminacy, it happens to be isomeorphic or equivalent to any other indeterminacy. And I know I'm getting a little heady here, but hopefully this is going somewhere. Again, I'm freestyling. My point is that nevertheless, even though it's the same as the animal state, it is going to be qualitatively different.
And I usually try and uh uh show this in in in a little parable I I I like bring up called like the drunk or the monk. They're both in a state of like indeterminacy. They both seem fully mindless, but the monk is somehow qualitatively different than the than the drunk, but we can't say how outwardly on the surface they look identical. Let's say they're both just like slouched over in a doughnut shop, but one is drunk and the other is enlightened. there's a qualitative difference if not a quantitative difference. They're both in a state of indeterminacy and they're equivalent but the indeterminacies are qualitatively different.
So what we're heading toward is yes another state of anomalia of automatism but it will be qualitatively different I think. So I'm not a full pessimist on that. But my question as to what is that is the culmination of the current move. What will be the next break from automaticity? If we are in a state of pure being, what will be the next becoming? And I'd like to leave you with this because this is what I've always held as a belief as a kid. I've always liked to think of technology as a crutch or maybe better than a crutch like a no, let's just say crutch, a crutch that lets you learn how to walk yourself.
And that yes we will become sort of like completely glombmed on and unified with technology to an extent but at a certain point the wetwware will have been trained by the firmware or the hardware and we will be able to let go. We will say wait a minute this is sort of boring let me try doing this without the aid of the technology and we will come to see that we actually can uh fly metaphorically speaking that we can produce the same sense of being without the technology and that that will be a feature of our next the the next round of our conscious becoming. Hopefully some of that made sense. I know I have a very short time in which to have spoken. Um, and now I'll turn it over to I think we're going to do some question and answers or um what do you think that you know points towards like where where we're heading you know in ter in terms of um our our present state of discord and and dynamism like um yeah I mean I think that I think that we're heading toward a kind of technological singularity that will probably be in the aggregate um pluralistic.
So you will have sort of pods of conscious singularity and we're already sort of seeing this like I was saying like you're in the MAGA pod and all you see is reflected back to you the very environment and very information in news which you already had predicted would would be occurring. Um you don't see any information which is discordant with your reality. And the more that that occurs, the more that your environment reflects back to you precisely what you uh predicted it would, the more the spatial temporal parameters collapse and the more you are effectively in an informationational singularity uh where nothing is triggering a prediction error and you're in a state of constant automaticity. Now, when we zoom out to the globe as a whole, uh, it will probably look pluralistically so, so that you see different pods, the woke and the MAGA and the this and the that, and they're all in their own little informationational singularity. And that'll probably be an intermediate stage.
um and or potentially reflect the different operations of the brain itself having uh sort of isolated singularities with regard to their operational contribution to a general global brain. Okay. But what about when like hurricane Helen happens and your entire system structure is wiped wipe just basically going to happen to everybody. This is a great this is a great example. I mean, the global or climate change, let's call it, global warming. Um, it's it's in it's it's increasingly rare as technology developed, it was increasingly rare that the true environment or that the natural environment of the natural world stopped effectively selecting for human mutations so that we were no longer able to determine is this cultural mutation actually adaptive.
We didn't know. We don't know if Taylor Swift is adaptive, right? We don't know if it's adaptive to spend our weekend at Burning Man. We have no sense of this because we self- select for these mimetic qualities, for these trends. We don't know if ripped blue jeans is adaptive. It's pro they're probably not. Like if you're thrown into the Gobi Desert, you probably don't want pre- ripped jeans. But because we have so intensely mitigated the ex or the the extent to which environment has selective powers over us, we've been able to sort of just like drift off and we can call it c you know Robin Hansen calls it cultural drift.
What but what he does describe it the way I do where I what I do is I describe that we don't really have a genuine environment that would exert selection pre pressures on us. But when we have global warming or suddenly a hurricane and climate change, all of a sudden we're going to have the reintroduction of genuine selection pressures and those trigger genuine uh uh prediction errors that we have to grapple with. And um yeah, you're right. I mean this technological singularity could very easily be disrupted and these and these little pods of informationational singularity could very easily be disrupted uh with environmental catastrophes which force us to reconcile with one another. Maybe we discussed this a little bit last time around kind of like so you know we had uh this guy Warren Naidik on wrote a book about cognitive activism.
actually you were going to be on that one with him and I think he was really his his his ideas but he talked about how you know as kids are now using the smartphone uh well basically how the technology is remapping the brain or or reshaping you know the inner environment of of the brain even like you know in terms of like neurohysiology or whatever. Now the hippo campus is not getting used by young people. So they actually will never be able to develop like spatial navigation or spatial memory. By the way, which is perfect a perfect example of the collapse of spatiotemporal parameters that I was talking about like the fact that our use of technology is offloading our ability to navigate the world is again an example of this sort of collapse of space and time that technology is producing. But anyways, yeah, but I was so I mean, you know, so I I consider that kind of terrible and you can really see how people's memories like cultural memory memories ability to like remember contexts or like how we got, you know, here, you know, is sort of is sort of attenuating, you know, over with the pressure of social media and sort of effort to stay up to the instantaneous like thing that's happening or whatever.
Um, but I guess in a way like you say, okay, if kids, you know, if these kids are developing and they're now in their 20s and or whatever, they don't really have the hippo campus, you know, they're more in a way in the now. In a way, they're a little bit more zen in a way. That's the that's the irony. And we have to hold both both polls where we then but then isn't it really the case of for us to really take serious like I'm really into Zogen. I think we talked about this a little bit last time like that the idea is that you have to spend like 30 years kind of developing you know in like Gergev terms like building your soul before you can like let it go like if you don't even develop it it's just let goes from the beginning there's not much there you know you have you sort of have you know you have realization without a realizer or something like that you know well it's the drunk or monk thing I think yeah there's different qualitative states of automaticity if we're if we're dropped directly into a state of automaticity which has not developed through other stages or has not earned itself.
The quality of that automaticity, the quality of being in perfect symbiosis with your environment may be that you are a Mr. Potato Head. You're just a vegetable. You you you have nothing to give or offer or and the experience is cheap. Um, so you know, I think that this comes the the the real problem here I think that we're discussing and we can continue to hedge and it's easier to do that. But the question is do we go all in on technology or do we say no? Do we say no that's wrong and actually the way to develop is is without it. Um, we seem to be the answer seems to have been made for us and I don't know who it was made for.
I don't think it was made for us by Elon Musk. I think it was made for us by our predisposed compulsion towards states of stasis. Uh we want to return to the womb and I I thoroughly believe that we want to return to a state of indeterminacy. We want to return to a state of the womb in which all of these spaciotemporal parameters are automatically uh uh occurring. We're in perfect symbiosis. We have the same same self-same temperature and liquidity of our very own body with the external world. And therefore, we feel no differentiation from it. And so thereby we are our external world. Thereby everything is internality.
Everything is the self and we want to return to that because that uh effectively solves the rupture of internal external division which occurs upon birth and then begets the death drive. So I think that the the question as to whether or not which direction we want to go, I'm a little more of a pessimist or I don't think we have quite as much agency as we I think as we think we do. Um either way, we're headed toward one singularity or other. That is the very nature of of of dialectical progress or process. Um the question is as you say more to do with uh managing expectations about what those are going to be and then attempting to seed uh ideas such that the next time we have a rupture which produces a dynamic of becoming uh it is predicated on certain ideas and certain grounds even though those might not be manifest now they will manifest in the future.
I think conferences like this are dropping the idea seeds u necessary for for rebirth. Um I had a couple of thoughts. Um oops I lost one. Oh, I was kind of curious how you how you would um kind of like uh well, what one thing was, you know, yes, maybe we're going for this new, you know, amniotic sack like singularity with our technological embeddedness, but the other hand, people seem incredibly lonely and and vacuous and empty and unhappy. So, um how does that, you know, kind of work with this dialectic? I mean, if we're getting what we on some level want subliminally, like we want to have like, you know, every taste can come from Amazon to our doorstep and, you know, we can watch the most incredible virtual porn or have a AI sex doll that satisfies every need and we never have to leave our, you know, living room.
But, I mean, yeah, on the other hand, the trajectory seems to be people becoming more and more miserable, lonely, unhappy, sexless, you know, all that stuff, you know. Yeah. I mean I think that the then then that's those are the seeds for the next self-repulsion. Um so we we would reach and I think boredom is very important a philosophy of boredom here like um you know boredom precipitates uh dynamic change and self-repulsion. Um, but I think that those are telltale signs of the fact that uh the technological singularity won't last and that we'll all at some point become bored and self-repulse. Um, which is to say that that state of indeterminacy or or absolute communion, immediate commu communion with our environment, with our news, with everything we're fed, everything we know, everything is nothing is triggering a prediction error is going to become something that is immensely unrewarding uh in the end and then creates a self-repulsion from that which begins a new stage of becoming.
Um, you know, I could speculate on in the more near term how these manifest effects of uh of technological loneliness um may play out, but um I would just sort of be speculating. Yeah. And what I guess it would be fun also to maybe discuss you know what Adam uh is is you know Adam Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. please testing the sort of culture of healing uh and then the healing from healing and how like you know do do you see like he's sort of I guess been critiquing a little bit of the narcissism and implicit like colonialism and kind of self satisfied aspects of this sort of transformational kind of like burning man you know IA kind of like psych psychedelic culture um yeah what what what do you think about that in terms of your your um I I think I saw a great uh quote last night that that refers to that that speaks to this a little bit at least speaks to some of my view on this and it's not a bad I don't mean mean it in the same way George Carlin meant it but it's that if you think there's a solution you're part of the problem and um and what I mean by that is that again problematicity the idea that maybe this is the tree may not just be the tree that's problematized.
What else could it be? I I'm not sure if the tree is just the tree. That state of problematicity which begat technology begat a bunch of problems that we then solved. Okay, if it's not the tree, then what it oh it could be this. It could be that. Oh, we could use it for this. It's not just the tree. Now if you think that there is a solution to the current uh uh paradigm for instance of politics um you're already presuming that there's a problem um and your new solution is going to then be get new problems and so on and so forth. It's obvious, it's obvious to all of us, I think, that if we simply just stopped trying to solve everything, if we stopped trying to solve how I get to work, how uh uh to even stop climate change, and we would basically just stop all production and return to a state of tribal uh you know, Dunar's cap community.
Um then everything would sort of all the problems of the world would sort of stop. But at the same time, the problems aren't simply bad things. The problems aren't simply things that we can walk away from. we are obviously compulsed toward problem solving. There's something about it we find absolutely irresistible. Um so in terms of healing from healing uh which which of course is a great phrase um healing in the first part is the identification of a problem with yourself that you say okay I have some kind of problem I'm going to I want to heal from this I'm going to take from a bunch of different indigenous modalities and I'm going to say if you have ever experienced this try this well the thing is we've we all have a fundamental trauma and that is birth.
We all have a fundamental rupture of the of our internal amniotic sack and that is the rupture of birth which created a an isolation that we have never recovered from and never will. And so we begin trying to heal from that. Uh but then clearly the process of attempting to heal from that created more problems. Um primarily because there is no healing from it. primarily because there is no healing from birth. Birth is birth. The the proper approach I think instead of the idea of mitigating pain, it's the embrace of pain. We're here in human bodies in and we want to make the human experience spiritual.
Well, aren't we already spirits that are inhabiting human bodies? Why not just be in the human bodies? Why constantly trying to transcend the human experience and replace it with something that is being? We landed here by some virtue of absolute miracle. To experience becoming, to not be photons, to not be everything all everywhere all at once, to not have everything immediately manifest uh for our uh uh enjoyment. And um and so I think that the embrace of just the general messiness of life um in some ways is the healing from healing for me. Um and to see again the the beautiful moments at which we are or I feel like I am in a state of being or arrival and then the moments at which I have to rupture or I feel self-ruptured into a state of dynamic uh problematicity which feels maybe discordant and disjointed but which in retrospect end up becoming my big stories that I can tell you my big cinematic heroic arc.
Uh you know I was a drug addict. Whoa, look at me. I had a lot of pain. All this breakup. I nearly killed myself. All of these things they're like, you don't want to hear about like, so tell me about your like happiest moments. Like, okay, sure. I could tell you like I was sitting in bed and I was watching this thing and I had just taken a hot bath and a was amazing. You're like boring. I want to hear about like how you survived something, you know? And I think that uh I think that that's important to look at the the narratology um of our preferences can help us sort of like whenever I have someone that comes to me like they're like, "Oh, I have this problem and blah blah blah." I just try and help them see the cinema of it.
Do do you have this feeling I have this like horrible perception recently that everything that I used to think about as culture is becoming kind of like irrelevant in some weird way. like there just isn't doesn't seem to be the same like gustoa or jwissance in like films, books, music or anything. I don't know. It's just a question of getting older or just we've let let me list through the top 10 films of 1972 for you. It was The Godfather, uh, Last Tango in Paris, uh, The Poseidon Adventure, Deliverance, Deep Throat, which was a undistributed porno, and uh, and and several other very good movies like on the sort of French Connection level.
2022, it was Hedgehog 2, uh, Spider-Man 5. It was literally it was Aquaman two one. It was all it was just a list of uh of uh the same and and and here's an interesting thing. I I this is a topic for another day. But why is that? Why are movies converging on the same benality? Why did we have such idiosyncratic strange and confrontationally interesting movies back then and then now we just have almost everything is the same. everything is the superhero movie and so on. Actually, we have ourselves to blame. This is largely a function of the democratization of the creative process. And what's happening is that automaticity, the algorithms and the companies which are now publicly owned are figuring out that actually brains do converge on the automatic.
And the most elegant state of brain function and consciousness is the automatic state is the state which does not uh have to deal with prediction errors which does not have to think. Again thinking converges on thoughtlessness. And so the more thoughtless the consumption can be the more automatically we consume it. Now they figured this out by doing uh audience testing. They figured out by democracizing the very process of film making. Um, and that's something we have to self-reflect about. Do we want to exist in a state of pure automaticity where we are never challenged and where we're in perfect symbiosis with our predictions of environment? Or do we want to create art which is by definition in my view real art is the intentional creation of prediction errors, the creation of surprise, things that make people go like to quote an old song from the 90s, things that make you go hm, right?
But I mean it's like yeah, if you look at cultures like Tibetan Buddhism, you know, or like Egyptian, you know, they repeated the same stuff over and over again. like the the the Tibetan monks would paint these incredible mandalas or green taras where there'd be like you know almost like a constant replication of them like we became obsessed you know with this idea of like innovation and eccentricity and individuality yet these sort of more esoteric cultures didn't seem to have that uh obsession kind of the opposite I mean I think a lot about um Albert Kamu wrote a book called the rebel where he said that ultimately there are only two possible worlds for the human mind either the world of rebellion or the world of the sacred. Uh and ultimately we're we're heading in one direction or the other. So we've been completely in the world of rebellion and now like I think the world of rebellion is very tiring like you know to see another film about you know some you know gangster or like whatever some ego drama or you know another broken romance you know set of songs or whatever. It's like it just feels like this endless retread.
So that suggests that, you know, we have to begin to toggle back towards something sacred, you know, or there's nothing, you know, of interest in a weird way. Can can I just say one thing before Adam jumps in just to this effect and I think it's something we've all experienced and it speaks to the transcendence of repetition actually. Once repetition becomes redundant and then you repeat that redundancy enough, it self-trcends. So there's almost nothing we have to do about it. Exactly. And the I I think we've most of us have probably experienced something called semantic satiation. Um but I I like calling it semantic saturation, but it's the idea if you've ever been given a mantra.
The mantra might be gobbled. It might literally be pillow, let's say. Um just looking at your pillows back there. But if you repeat pillow, you know what a pillow is. It's something you put your head on. But then you start repeating it enough enough pillow pillow pillow pillow. And then there's some quantitative threshold. You don't know where it is. You don't know when it's going to happen. beyond which suddenly pillow means what the universe I don't even know what pillow what is pillow wait is pillow pillow pillow is anything suddenly it enters a state of indeterminacy again so that we could think of the video I showed again pillow pillow pillow pillow pillow pillow pillow pillow pillow and all of a sudden it collapses into a state of indeterminacy and it could in that indeterminacy it has infinite potential remember indeterminacy and infinity are are the same thing here within any within any any limit A saturation is indeterminant.
A saturation has a quantitative indeterminy which is isomeorphic to infinity. It has infinite potential. And that's why when you do a mantra and suddenly you've you've repeated pillow so much, all of a sudden pillow becomes this amazing this amazing portal to a state of uh of sort of transcendence. And so I think that there is a if there's a silver lining to any of the homogeneity, it's that homogeneity itself if taken to its access point self transcends. Jordan, yeah, just had a observation or a comment rather than a question going back to um kind of the like culture cultural crisis. I think what we're really experiencing is more of a curatorial crisis because you have like the big um popular IP blockbuster movies that seems that or you know pop music that seems to drown out the rest of it.
But there are all these other books, movies, other pieces of art that are coming up. There's it's so spread out. It's so difficult to find to search for them, especially with lack of um everyone's a critic now. Everyone's just follow following trends in the in the sea of social media. So, it's much harder to find interesting transgressive art that is out there, but it's become more and more elusive. Um, so like yeah, if there's a way to kind of like create a new culture of like actual taste makers that, you know, could actually attract people to, you know, their a silo where their flavor of turn is, you know, is available.
Yeah. I mean, this brings up an important uh uh and I think Adam has spoken about this kind of thing before. I certainly have audience capture uh which I've experienced a lot. And again this comes back to that the more you democratize a process even if it's a private process and in your mind you're thinking about your audience and you know one of the first things they teach you in writing school or creative school for the creative class is know your audience. What does your audience want? Give them what they are supposed to give them what they already expect. And again this comes back to a state of automaticity.
You're trying to optimize the process of creation so that the people who receive the creation don't have to think. Yeah. And that art because what you end up producing is something converging on the benal again. So what you need is a curatorial class who does not give a And that's very difficult. I think in some ways the only way to not give a is to literally block yourself off from the feedback loop between artist and and audience. And the closer that feedback loop is, the more frequency you for instance post and and these days very difficult. Like for instance, if you're making your living on Substack and you have to produce a lot or you you you really want to gain a lot of followers on Instagram, you have to post with such frequency that that space collapses between feedback of audience and production of content that eventually they become the same thing.
Again, the collapse of the spacio temporal parameters of creation, they become the same thing. So you're giving them exactly what they already expected and it literally is the same thing and then they're basically creating the content because everything they expect you to post you do post and if you post something they don't expect they leave you right now. How do we create and cultivate a culture which likes being challenged which is like oh interesting thank you for that challenge that makes you know and it's a it's a very precarious situation we find I never thought of that before. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. How is it precarious? Precarious.
It's a very precarious situation. It's precarious because it's almost impossible to break out of it. It's It's precarious because I think that art livens the spirit. I think that dynamism is an very integral part of the video I showed you before. Without the dynamic part, the disruption, the part that actually disrupts the automaticity, disrupts the expectation, the part that is self-reulsive. Without that, you just have a single state of stasis, static uh uh uh inert. And people love it because, oh, it feels like inertia. Everything's automatic. It's exactly what I expected. But it's also inert. It's also non-dynamical. It's also dead. And um and it's precarious in that sense because I think it deadens the soul and it drives me nuts as a musician and artist.
Yeah. And what's even worse is the economic incentives. People are making money like you know uh you know being influencers on social media writing your newsletter. So that's why it's like so hard it's so so hard to even to find the space where you can be cut off from that pe to actually create original what what original or really transgressive pieces of art. Maybe we need like a new monastic tradition like people just need to go exactly completely cut off for for several years and create something that we've never seen before. Exactly. And there may even need to be, you know, in a monastery there's a sort of what Alexander Bard would call like a barred absolute basically just a membrane or or like think of a a a nightclub uh bouncer, right?
Not everyone gets into the room. So you need a Netflix where like not sorry not everyone can get into it. Sorry, this is an invitationonly Netflix and you have to be have you have to have been recommended by a friend because we know as a company that if we let everyone in, even though we say we don't care what they all think, we're going to conform to their views. We're going to see the metrics and we're going to be affected. So instead, we're going to have some sort of like firewall between the uh user metrics and our creativity or we're going to have a a a you know an exclusionary measures.
And I know that that's a very difficult thing for any liberal to wrap their mind around as a good thing. The idea that like, well, exclusion is bad. Exclusion, exclusion is bad. No, no. Exclusion is actually the very premise of pluralism. And that if we actually involve everyone, we end up converging on homogeneity. Um, I don't know about you guys, but in New York in the early 90s, uh, when I visited as a kid, uh, it was pretty amazing. You'd go from Chinatown to Little Italy to Harlem and whatever and you'd feel like you were entering these incredibly rich subcultures. And today, what is it? It's all New York.
Like, where are except for Chinatown, which is miraculously held on. Everything is just New York. And it's boring and it and it and it's not enlivening and um artistically inspiring. And um and that's where we're headed as a society. If we totally get rid of um of exclusionary measures,
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.