The Mezzanine and The Size of Thoughts by Nicholson Baker
Are the thoughts of the average person more numerous and interrelated than they were 500-1000 years ago? One tempting negative hypothesis is that we have outsourced the storage of information, produced so quickly and profusely by modern society, to extra-cranial media such as books and hard-drives. In this sense, our thoughts are like our eyes: the same organ they have always been, but enhanced with technology.
This is a thesis I now doubt. I suspect, instead, that the average modern human intakes a far greater quantity of information, across a much wider and more diverse range of fields than they did in the past. Whether or not this information is true is less important than whether it is information – that is, whether it possesses structure distinguishing it from chaos. That we intake such ‘content’ more rapidly than, say, our grandparents, is intuitively plausible.[80] This produces a problem of management and organisation parallel to that in other information-management systems such as legal systems, economies, and government administrations.
To understand this problem, however, one needs to have the right model of thought. In this regard, I think, surprisingly, the most useful model is that found in the modernist novella ‘The Mezzanine’,[81] elaborated in two related essays (‘The Size of Thoughts’ and ‘Changes of Mind’[82]) by Nicholson Baker.
I will explain this model succinctly. In particular, how it solves the following puzzles related to the logistical problems alluded to above:
(1)Why do people often change their minds without realising or becoming conscious of the change?[83]
(2)Why is it that you (often) cannot identify why one of your beliefs has changed?
(3)Why is it that all people possess mutually inconsistent or contradictory beliefs?
And, more importantly, how the ‘opacity of thought’ which the model posits is essential for the everyday experience (though not necessarily reality) of ‘free will.’
Before I describe the model, I recommend reading the works listed above. Not because you won’t understand my explanation otherwise (in fact, my presentation may be clearer and more direct), but because Baker is a fun, extremely readable writer. He specialises in minute descriptions of qualia. The Mezzanine has an entire page describing the act of taking a piece of tape off a dispenser.[84] In ‘Model Airplanes’, he gives the following narration of craft glue:
“When you tweaked off the dried wastrel from an earlier session and applied a gentle pressure to the Testor’s tube, a brand-new Steuben-grade art-blob of cooling poison would silently ensphere itself at the machined metal tip, looking, with its sharp gnomonic surface highlights and distilled, vodkal interior purity, like a self-contained world of incorruptible mental concentration, the voluptuously pantographed miniaturization of the surrounding room, and the artist’s rendering on the Monogram box top, and the half-built fighter itself, along with the hands that now reached to complete it; and as the smell of this pellucid solvent, suggestive of impossible Mach numbers and upper atmospheres and limitless congressional funding, drove away any incompatible carbon-based signals of hunger or human frailty, you felt as if your head had somehow gained admission to and submerged itself within that glowing globule of formalism and fine-motor skills.”[85]
Baker’s prose style is logically independent from his ideas – you could find value in the latter without enjoying the former – though the two are closely related.
The idea in The Mezzanine is quite simple. We typically divide our thinking into the conscious and subconscious; our higher-order beliefs (the kind that could be formulated into communicable natural language) are treated generally as belonging exclusively to the former. It feels odd – though not entirely inappropriate – to describe oneself as a subconscious Catholic. Baker argues that, conversely, in reality:
(1)Many – perhaps most – of our beliefs, preferences, values, and views (‘thoughts’) continue to exist when we are not explicitly considering them;
(2)During the preponderant period in which our thoughts exist within our subconscious (or at least in some non-conscious space), they develop and change;
(3)They develop and change following diverse relationships with one another (imagine a densely connected web) which, whilst sometimes ascertainable with deliberate conscious evaluation, are often obscure to us.
His thesis is that whilst we might deliberately adopt viewpoints or change our mind (‘update’), this small mental worktop is a fraction of our total worldview. Under the surface, there is a process by which one’s thinking constantly adjusts and shifts, both from the continual, slow realignment and mutual interference of existing thoughts, and the addition of new ideas and material. We can call this the ‘Web Model’ of thinking. As the total volume of ‘information’ a person juggles in their mind increases, the density of their Web grows, and the proportion handled by their conscious mind recedes.
Baker seems to accept it is possible to revise an opinion by choice within the Web of Thought, though is sceptical this is the typical case of belief formation. He gives the following contrast:
“We are bound to make lots of such future-directed choices: they are the reason for risk-benefit analysis. But at the same time, on the outskirts of our attention, hosts of gray-eyed, bright-speared opinions have been rustling, shifting, skirmishing. “What I think about Piaget” is out there, growing wiser, moodier, more cynical, along with some sort of answer to “What constitutes a virtuous life?” Unless I am being unusually calculating, I don’t decide to befriend someone, and it is the same way with a conviction: I slowly come to enjoy its company, to respect its counsel, to depend on it for reassurance; I find myself ignoring its weaknesses or excesses—and if the friendship later ends, it is probably owing not to a sudden rift, but to a barnacling-over of nearly insignificant complaints.”[86]
Whether this accurately describes how most people form views is a different question from whether it ought to. Baker is least convincing when he implies his model inevitably applies to questions susceptible to empirical study,[87] such as whether ‘Keynesian economics is spent’, or ‘the influences of urbanization on politeness.’ Allowing such views to develop unattended rather than in response to, say, evidence is epistemically reckless, and may help explain Baker’s somewhat disastrous revisionist history asserting moral equivalency between the Nazis and Allies in WWII.[88]
Conversely, he is significantly more persuasive when it comes to morality, virtue, vice, aesthetics, and taste. Here, it seems to me that most of our opinions on these things do develop unseen, and that there appears to be no serious alternative to the Web Model for their creation and development.[89] It is difficult if not impossible to contain matters of taste or preference within neat, quantified boxes (say, one’s favourite hobbies, foods, art, or sexual positions). Instead, such preferences develop organically; in turn from them, the actions, objects, and practices we place value on; and ultimately the basic ‘fixed points’ of our moral map. For Baker, this unsorted bric a brac is central not merely to our opinions, but identity itself. The Mezzanine’s protagonist, a generic office worker, is obsessed with this idea. He tracks the slow replacement of ‘childish’ thoughts with ‘adult’ ones,[90] and ponders the rate of his new thoughts,[91] even compiling a ‘periodicity table’.[92] The message is simply: you are what you think. While we might laugh at the protagonist’s frustrations with the replacement of paper towels with hand dryers, or his excitement and pride at discovering you can apply deodorant after putting your shirt on, these mundane experiences are, in aggregate, the very substance of his life.[93] This substance, as Baker suggests, often has virtually nothing to do with the ‘big’ ideas found in philosophy;[94] nevertheless, there they are, stacked together in a heap of mutually interfering gray matter.
There are different degrees to which we can allow our views to undergo extracurricular change; indeed, the degree of one’s self-reflection (the larger and more actively engaged the mental worktop of conscious attention), may even be a kind of proxy for rationality. A simple description of ‘managing the Web’ is Rawls’s Reflective Equilibrium, where the thinker explicitly considers and weighs their different beliefs and makes decisions about which are to be preferred or how they may be reconciled when apparent conflicts emerge. This pressure for consistency is a driving force behind view change. The extent to which one attempts to hold consistent views, versus maintaining irrational compartmentalisation or blasé, blatant contradiction, will determine how new points interact with old. I think it is clear no-one except the clinically insane is above some pressure for consistency in their web. Yet the degree to which this occurs consciously certainly varies between Joe Public and Joe Rational. Baker’s model is especially good at explaining the phenomenon of slow, inadvertent view change. To adopt a deliberately charged example: say your aunt, an avowed feminist, becomes strongly opposed to transgender rights. Is this likely to make her more or less in favour of traditional gender roles?
Baker’s model suggests, as we see across a wide range of views, that the interaction of this thought (transgender women are not women) can have unexpected and often unacknowledged effects on others (one’s definition of womanhood). This is straightforwardly the result of (1) thoughts having an intricate, internal structure of assumptions, claims, value judgments, and emotions, at a sufficient depth to become cognitively opaque or unclear to the thinker;[95] (2) the fact we possess a great number of them, producing in turn a highly complex web of heterogenous thought-relationships, one we cannot possibly cognitively monitor; (3) the desire, explicit or tacit, to ensure one’s thoughts are consistent and ‘march in the same direction.’
In this way, a new fixed point added to the web surreptitiously influences those around it, which in turn begins to irritate and influence other points. One may not even know one’s views are changing. I doubt there is a perfect cure for this uncomfortable process using techniques of the human mind alone.[96] It is a modern phenomenon triggered by the vast increase in thoughts of the modern person – the vastly accelerated rate, not of thinking, but of input, intake, and exposure to new ideas. We have too much material to synthesise deliberately and in this absence our subconscious mind takes over. The notion of the underlying web of belief helps explain the very modern concern over ‘junk-media’, or more exotically, ‘info-hazards’ and ‘memeplexes’, an irrelevant anxiety if we were confident in our ability to marshal and organise our thoughts perfectly.
Resolving the problem of surreptitious view-change would require, as Baker suggests, a kind of externalised bulletin of one’s thoughts and how they interact:
“If one of the wire services were able to supply each subscriber with a Personal Opinion Printout, delivered with the paper every morning, it would be a real help: then we could monitor our feelings about Pre-Raphaelite furniture, or the influences of urbanization on politeness, or the wearing of sunglasses indoors, or the effect of tort language on traditions of trust, as we adjusted our thoughts about them week by week, the way we keep an eye on lightly traded over-the-counter stocks ”[97]
This is no longer a thought experiment but a potential blueprint. Just as LLMs can be used to organise other areas of burgeoning societal complexity (law, accounting, education), why not the burgeoning complexity of our own minds? Perhaps if we were closely monitored enough, what we read, eat, say; our life history, micro expressions, little sighs, eye movements, heartbeats, and sleep cycles, a Personal Opinion Printout (POP) could be produced. We would achieve ‘super-transparency’ in our thoughts, and with such knowledge likely also the power to alter (‘engineer’) our views more easily and directly.
The cost of super-transparency is a disenchantment with human agency. The sensation of free will requires uncertainty behind the causes and processes of our choices: within this uncertainty (A or B? Whichever shall I choose?) lies the sensation of the free chooser. This holds true for ourselves just as it does for our experience with other agents. We do not regard plants or jellyfish as autonomous choosers, nor, I suspect, will we regard other animals once we better understand their basic behavioural triggers. In a deep sense, the complexity, and therefore related unpredictability, of our ‘Web of Thoughts’ is a direct measure of our apparent free will. Those who respond highly predictably are little more than NPCs; though I would probably agree with Baker that no human being is equivalent to a gear, cog, or cucumber in their ability to astound or surprise.
The danger with the POP is that it will pull back the curtain, both on ourselves and others. This would be the most extreme form of ‘over-thinking things’, and, in addition to the danger of veering off into inhuman and bizarre views ordinarily out of reach beyond the gravitational pull of common-sense, there is the risk it will poison all genuine, unself-conscious enjoyment of everyday aspects of life. Ideas of your true self, or what your heart ‘really wants,’ make sense because enough of your identity is hidden within your opaque Web of Thought. Using the POP, no preference will be innate; every aspect of your personality will be contingent; your reaction to adventure, surprise, and unexpected delights will all be predictable and plannable. Everything will be a lifestyle choice.
The optimistic reading of the POP is that most people like to like what they like, or in other words, will be hesitant to accelerate beyond ‘mediocristan’, and that they will use such technology as a properly compartmentalised tool – as part of a life they otherwise live independently and enjoyably. Our thoughts will no longer sneak up on us, but we will anticipate their changes far in advance: we will all be sages. Such tools will be carefully but not overly regulated, confined solely to the use of individuals for themselves rather than corporations or the government. Until we reach this point, however, we are at the mercy of our Webs of Thought. Even now, in reading this review, another point has been added to your web, grating, pulling, stimulating, and contradicting your ever-changing cognitive strands, to be rejected perhaps, but not avoided altogether.
Appendix: The Mezzanine Protagonist’s lunch-time Periodicity Chart:
Subject of thought
Number of Times Thought Occurred per
Year
(in descending order)
L (protagonist’s partner)
580.0
Family
400.0
Brushing tongue
150.0
Earplugs
100.0
Bill-paying
52.0
Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum cleaner, greatness of
45.0
Sunlight makes you cheerful
40.0
Traffic frustration
38.0
Penguin books, all
35.0
Jobs, should I quit?
34.0
Friends, don’t have any
33.0
Marriage, a possibility?
32.0
Vending machines
31.0
Straws don’t unsheath well
28.0
Shine on moving objects
25.0
McCarthey more talented than Lennon?
23.0
Friends smarter, more capable than I am
19.0
Paper-towel dispensers
19.0
“What oft was thought, but ne’er” etc.
18.0
People are very dissimilar
16.0
Trees, beauty of
15.0
Sidewalks
15.0
Friends are unworthy of me
15.0
Identical twins separated at birth, studies of traits
14.0
Intelligence, going fast
14.0
Wheelchair ramps, their insane danger
14.0
Urge to kill
13.0
Escalator invention
12.0
People are very similar
12.0
“Not in my backyard”
11.0
Straws float now
10.0
DJ, would I be happy as one?
9.0
“If you can’t get out of it, get into it”
9.0
Pen, felt-tip
9.0
Gasoline, nice smell of
8.0
Pen, ballpoint
8.0
Stereo systems
8.0
Fear of getting mugged again
7.0
Staplers
7.0
“Roaches check in, but they don’t check out”
6.0
Dinner roll, image of
6.0
Shoes
6.0
Bags
5.0
Butz, Earl
4.0
Sweeping, brooms
4.0
Whistling, yodel trick
4.0
“You can taste it with your eyes”
4.0
Dry-cleaning fluid, smell of
3.0
Zip-lock tops
2.0
Popcorn
1.0
Birds regurgitate food and feed young with it
0.5
Kant, Immanuel
0.5