Destroying your Dreams for Fun and Profit

When I start creating something (or planning to), I usually have a vision. I'm going to write, draw, paint or program this really cool thing.

The more I sit and think about it, the more awesome it gets.  Yet, as soon as I put pen to paper, the pain starts.

I start sketching, and .. I dunno, it doesn't look quite right.  I keep going and before long I'm holding my head in my hands. What is this ill-formed monstrosity that's emerging on my paper?

This isn't coming out right..

This isn't how I imagined it..

What's going on?

This sucks!

All that's happening is my blundering efforts are doing nothing but failing to live up to my vision. Aaugh!

This can last an uncomfortably long time. Sometimes, I quit.

You're not what I had in mind

The Trough of Creativity

This has happened to me enough times that I noticed, and named it the Trough of Creativity.

Things start awesome, then soon degenerate into a wilderness, and feelings of regret that I ever started.

'Trough' - like a low place, with potato peelings. And mold. Not the sort of mode that feels like 'art happening here, man.'

If I persist, however, something interesting happens: a new thing begins to take shape. It doesn't look like my vision, but, I dunno, that bit is sorta neat.

Before too long, I'm happily clucking away, adding detail to something that I'm happy with. Something unexpected. Something real.

This is the trough of creativity - for an illustration, I can get out of the trough in about an hour of steady work. The main problem is that psyching myself up to begin the descent can take weeks!

Visions are Empty Lies

The main problem is that my 'vision' of my project is deceptive. I think that I've got a clear picture in my head of how it's going to look. The more time I spend thinking about it, the clearer that picture gets.. or so I think. All that's left is to draw it, write it, right?

What I really have is a clear picture of how awesome it's going to look. How awesome? Really awesome. I can totally imagine myself, looking at the finished artwork, feeling like a million bucks. The figure's stance? Out of this world. My grasp of lighting? Divine!

Just like in dreams - I'm reading a book, but when I wake up, I can't remember what it said. This happens because the book didn't say anything. All the parts of my brain that process language were happily asleep; the part that knows what it feels like to read a book was dreaming.

My daydreams are just the same - exciting, tantalizing, but almost entirely devoid of useful detail.

The worst part is that I can't tell. I think my vision is all worked out but for the doing. This is the ghost's lie.

To Begin, First Kill Your Dream

This is painfully obvious once I start the business of actually creating. I can have a vision of holistic beauty without imagining any actual details. For a real-life piece of art, however, the holistic impressions only come from the parts working together: there need to be parts, or there's no whole!

What keeps me from entering the trough is this:

I believe the vision is real, and I don't want to damage it.

I'm scared, because my unconscious knows that as soon as I start, my precious daydream is going to be blown away like a puff of smoke.

And yet, this is the only way to begin.

The Will o' the Wisp

I think the proper use of vision is as motivation.  The hunger to create shows up like a will o' wisp; the only thing it's going to do is lead you off the path and into the swamps. But that's as far as it goes.

If you want to go any further, you're on your own.

Better keep moving.

Does the Universe Exist?

Here's a thought that boggles my brain from time to time - what if the universe didn't exist. I'm not talking about stuff, like chairs and people and planets. That's a little unusual, but it's not so hard to imagine a universe that's got nothing in it, an infinite void. But that's not what I'm talking about. What if the void didn't exist either? Not only was there nothing, there was nowhere for it to be.

This hurts my head for a while, but then it starts to seem plausible. Unperturbed nothingness seems pretty elegant. Why should there be physical laws at all, let alone arbitrary arrangements of matter and energy? Why does the universe exist at all?

Does it?

Let's assume that physicists eventually come up with a complete description of the universe, a theory of everything. (Not a theory of "everything", including waltzes and parakeets, but a complete description of the root level of reality, the 'building blocks' as it were.)

What's the difference between this set of rules and the actual universe? What gives life to the rules and makes the world they describe real, or is the mere possibility of a universe just as real?

To quote Stephen Hawking:

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

What if it's nothing?

Okay, I admit this sounds totally bonkers, but consider the following thought experiment:

Let's assume for the moment that (1) you're a materialist, and you believe that cognition, self-awareness, intelligence, etc. are the output of computations (say) of the human brain.

Let's further assume that (2) we eventually develop artificial intelligence, maybe in a giant Game of Life, maybe some other way.

Unlike a robot brain, the AI we create isn't wired up to perceive the outside world, only events in its own simulated world - in essence, we've created a simulated universe (which may follow different laws than our own). So there's a society of simulated beings all chatting away with one another, or whatever they're doing. These aren't video game characters, mere sprites, these are rich, thinking beings that - when wired up to our world - behave just as richly as humans (though their thought processes and mental architecture might be very different), that just happen to be experiencing a completely virtual world.

Are these beings having a real experience, like we do? It would seem so, following from (1).

If you're still with me, here's where it gets weird. Is their experience somehow reliant on us running the simulation? Does it matter?

At first, it seems so. After all, if we never run the simulation, no experience for them, right?

Consider: if we pause the simulation, wait five minutes, and restart it, they'd never know. All their brains would freeze, along with everything in their little simulated universe, and be restarted, and they'd be none the wiser. In fact, if it's deterministic (like Conway's Game of Life) we could even rewind it a little and replay it. They're still motoring on like nothing had happened. These disturbances don't affect them at all.

In fact, run it backwards for a few years, turn it off, and when we get to the year 2076, start it over from the beginning. They still have no idea.

So it seems to me that the experience of these simulated beings is only loosely connected - if at all - to how and when we run the simulator.

Does it matter if we run it at all? If so, how?

If it doesn't matter if we ever run it, does it matter if we even invent it?

If not, it seems that a whole realm of existence and experience is 'out there', without us lending any energy to it whatsoever.

Back to us. If indeed we can find a simple theory of everything, maybe it's utterly unnecessary for anything to breathe fire into them. Perhaps all of experience is just the interaction between ephemeral possibilities of actuality. The universe doesn't really exist at all!

What I Love About Einstein

I'm working my way through a copy of Robert W. Lawson's translation of Einstein's Relativity. This isn't a mathematical treatise, but a tiny paperback written by Einstein in 1916 to explain relativity to non-physicists.

It's a quaint little book, partly because of the language - but most strikingly by the way it stands in stark contrast to the modern era of predigested sound bites that deliberately pander to the gut instincts and short attention span of the intended audience.

As Einstein writes in the preface,

"Despite the shortness of the book, [it presumes] a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader."

I don't tote this around to look smart on the subway, that furrowed brow isn't deep thought so much as frustration at the fuzziness of my own mind. No, I picked this up after reading something about relativity and suddenly becoming desperately curious to learn just how Einstein was able to envision a description of the world so utterly different than the classical view that preceded it.

Not in the sense of, "My God, just how smart was he?" but literally: how do you make a discovery like this?

In case you're rusty, relativity is a refinement over the venerable Euclidean geometry, whose origins go back as far as 300 B. Euclidean geometry views of the world as composed of infinitely long straight lines, utterly flat planes, and perfect spheres. I first started learning it in primary school, and learned more about it for so many years afterwards that its abstracted, clinical view become second-nature to how I looked at every day things.

My kitchen table may not be a perfect plane, but that's table's problem, right?

As Einstein puts it,

"By reason of your past experience, you would certainly regard everyone with disdain who should pronounce even the most out-of-the-way proposition of this science to be untrue. But perhaps this feeling of proud certainty would leave you immediately if someone were to ask you: 'What, then, do you mean by the assertion that these propositions are true?'"

Geometry of any sort is just a mathematical contrivance, useful to the extent that it can be used to describe reality. If you get in a convertible driving 80 km/hr, and you throw a baseball ahead of you at 50 km/hr, classical mechanics would suggest that the baseball is would start off traveling at 130 km/hr, relative to the road. So far so good.

The key observation that spurred Einstein forward was the experimental discovery that the speed of light is not relative to the motion of the observer. Briefly, if you're zipping along at half the speed of light, and someone on the road shines a laser after you, classical mechanics would predict that the laser passes you at half the speed of light. What actually happens is that the laser light zips by you at full speed.

In fact, no matter how fast you're going, in whatever direction, light will still pass you at the same speed, regardless of the motion of the light source relative to you.

This is bizarrely counter-intuitive, to say the least - and if you think that's weird, the implications of Relativity are even more bizarre. The fact that Einstein came up with a rigorous geometry that made sense of this state of affairs was such a coup that his name became a household synonym for 'genius'.

The paradoxes of Relativity make for fascinating reading, but it's not my goal to rehash them here. What I want to do is highlight what Einstein had to do to get to a solution, and that was to question his own assumptions.

These weren't assumptions that had been given to him explicitly, like unjust laws he intuitively knew had to be overthrown and - dammit - he was the guy to do it! These were assumptions that nobody knew they held.

Imagine yourself doing a bit of math to try to figure out this speed of light business, and you find yourself muttering, "Hmm, divide this by the velocity.. carry the one.. and, oh yeah, I guess I'd assumed that distances were the same for everyone. Whoops." (erase erase erase) "And now multiply by the .. oh wait, I suppose I was assuming that time passes the same for all observers. How daft." (erase erase erase)

This doesn't happen every day. It requires a rare combination of precision of meaning, shaving each statement of belief into its component parts to be independently scrutinized, with the integrity to be willing to let go of any of them that don't pass muster, plus the courage and willpower to follow through with reconstituting the surviving pieces into a new worldview, however unfamiliar.

Whether or not your university calculus has rusted out of your head completely (as has mine), or if math has never been your friend, in an era where argument is increasingly reduced to punchy ad hominem attacks, this strikes me as an eminently worthy and useful mental posture to strive for.

That's what I love about Einstein.