When We Cease To Understand the World
I.
Science fiction typically tries to imagine how the world will progress, and then tells a story about the implications of that progress. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut is a strange dual to that: fictional science, embellishing the real history of 20th century progress, each story more fictionalized and fantastical than the last.
The typical chapter of Cease details an overwhelmed genius grappling simultaneously with the weight of their thoughts and with physical hardship. Schwarzschild sits in the trenches of the first world war, routinely being gassed, while finding the first solution to the Einstein field equations. Heisenberg's face is "no longer recognizable"--deformed by pollen allergies-- when he sits in Gottingen, and goes into functional exile in search of relief, where he's then beset by migraines. Schrodinger labors on his wave equation while he frustrates endlessly over an adolescent girl he's meant to tutor, rending his hair and his surroundings with lust for her and shame at himself. Inevitably, our hero, on the brink of complete madness or death, makes a breakthrough. The opposite of incremental success, instead each revelation comes at the moment of maximum exertion and valence. Each subject learns in turn that only by standing on the very edge of the abyss can you see into it.
Once our hero has illuminated one bit of that abyss, he doesn't much like what else he gets a glimpse of. We come back and back to the idea of singularity; of some lurking, creeping darkness. For Schwarzschild, what starts as an ignorable limit case of his field equations evolves into a philosophical idea of the black hole that consumes him, "spreading across his mind like a stain, superimposed over the hellscape of the trenches". Grothendieck could intimate but never fully see his "heart of the heart", an ultimate generalization of algebra from which all mathematical structure flows. Einstein was disgusted by the implications of a probabilistic universe: "[He] sensed that if one followed that line of thinking to its ultimate consequences, darkness would infect the soul of physics... a fundamental aspect of the laws that governed the physical world would remain forever obscure, as if chance had somehow nested in the heart of matter..."
Cease has a certain uncommon character to it due to its fictionalization, which at times can feel like dishonesty. It exaggerates details, invents anecdotes or entire arcs wholesale, and deeply romanticizes its subjects. It sits in an awkward niche between alt-history and magical realism. Benjamín Labatut defends the style by insisting in interviews that "anything that comes out of a writer is fiction". The early chapters are nearly accurate to history, but as the book proceeds, scientist by scientist, we veer further off the historical path and descend into a madness and romantic ramblings, ending without any rational faculties intact, only able to reason by vibes. The final chapter, "The Night Gardener", resembles no specific historical figure. It describes a man thoroughly post-reason, who lives in a constricted world, a single village ripe with mystery and superstition and memories he can't quite get right. You get the sense he's lost something profound; he's resigned to physical tasks-- tending his garden-- bereft of any real agency.
The night gardener used to be a mathematician, and now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing. He told me that he had had the beginnings of a brilliant career but had quit altogether after encountering the work of Alexander Grothendieck…
It's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics ... The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.
So he gardens now, tends to his own and also works on other properties in town.
II.
Thirty one years ago, in 1993, Vernor Vinge predicted, though far from the first to do so, that something he called a "singularity" would take place "no earlier than 2005 and no later than 2030". In his telling, such an event was the moment at which machine intelligence would so meaningfully surpass human intelligence that we would become second-class intellectuals; forever left behind in our grasp of the universe, if we survived at all.
It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown.
- The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era, Vernor Vinge
He reports that John Von Neumann, Freeman Dyson, and Stanislaw Ulam were enamored with the idea and wrestled with it as early as the 1950s. Why? How did all of these intellects converge early on such a notion, and why did it torment them?
The most brilliant people in society are in a strange spot. They simultaneously enjoy relative advantage in understanding, power, or agency over others, but are embarrassingly mortal and impotent in the face of the entire universe. This seems about enough to drive many of them mad; they can exercise the talents they've been given, but are obsessed with imagining what further brilliance would look like and what miracles it would unlock.
Inevitably, we arrive at the idea that there is only so much variance in human intelligence, that the physical structure of the brain may only support thought up to a certain point, but yet there is no physical law that some other structure would support vast power beyond that. When such a structure arrives and hums with its own life marks the global peak of human agency and understanding of the world-- for thousands of years, our mastery and comprehension of our environment has moved more or less monotonically upwards, but no longer and never again.
III.
These two notions of singularity—knowledge that we can brush against but not fully comprehend, and that moment in history when our own intellect is forever surpassed by that of a machine—are two sides of the same thing. The first exists in the space of ideas, and the second exists in time. Together, they represent the limit of what it means to be a human intellect; the boundary beyond which we cease to understand the world.
Perhaps this is the idea, the heart of the heart. The place where all paths of inquiry or thought experiment lead. The half dozen disparate geniuses that Labatut details arrive at the same madness by wildly different routes. Our great scientists, after what by all measures was an astonishing half-millenia of progress that doubled human life expectancy and went from horseback to the Apollo mission, are not comforted by their victories. They're tormented by what's next.
The idea of such a limit of our own understanding, a singular point beyond which we can't see, must be irresistible. It is an addictive idea, lodged in the consciousness of so many thinkers, impossible to dispense with. It reflects their own insecurity at the limits of their reasoning, it is a void that they cannot see inside of and that is beyond reach. It's an attractor state for the intellect just as these same people see it as an attractor state for the universe: all world lines ultimately lead to the singularity, as do all patterns of thinking.
The structure of the book itself, sliding from accurate record to complete fiction, taking with it our ability to discern what's real or not, mirrors what it's like to approach a singularity. By the end, you're as confused as the characters; you're no longer matching up events with Wikipedia histories, but are instead totally content to be fed whatever romantic imagery Labatut wants to put in your head. You're reading without agency.
In the final chapter, we hear the Night Gardener contemplate the muted world which he lives in:
The way this small town is built is very strange. Whichever road you take, it will invariably lead you down to a small patch of woods tucked away at its lowest edge, one of the few areas that survived the giant fire which ravaged the region at the end of the Nineties, threatening the existence of the town itself ... It has a strange magnetic power over me, it pulls me in and leads me down and down towards the old path that reaches the lake.
IV.
I'm a bit obsessed with the inevitable. When I was a child, I developed a sort of weird epistemic obsession with the inevitability of evolution. For the first time, playing for big stakes, I wasn't taking someone's word for something, memorizing, or playing catch up. Given some assumptions about genetic heritability and a sufficient frequency of mutation generation to generation, I felt that the effects of natural selection simply must follow. I considered evolution all but true from first principles: less fit animals were less likely to survive, and only an improbable sequence of miracles could counteract this effect.
The most compelling ideas, whether in science, music, literature, or any other field, all have this nature to me. Each piece falls exactly where it must, and while you can be surprised at first contact, always in retrospect it feels as though each component could not have been anywhere else nor foregone. Maybe great ideas and great art are low energy states in the mimetic landscape, and we converge on them because we are destined to move downhill, towards simplicity, generality, and exactness.
The great scientists, the philosophers, artists, science fiction writers who wrestled with a Labatut-style apocalypse must view it with this same stark inevitability. Each time we try to do new physics, to overhaul our understanding of mathematics, we push towards this limit. The incentives to increase the computing power available to us are immense. Every year, now faster than ever, we're building the total capacity of machine intelligence closer and closer to that of all humans. By what probability zero miracle could we not arrive at the obvious result? All journeys run through the same darkness, eventually; there is a limit to all things, each has its season, and each has its end.
Schwarzschild was inconsolable. He babbled about a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world, and he lamented that there was nothing we could do about it. Because the singularity sent forth no warnings. The point of no return-- the limit past which one fell prey to its unforgiving pull-- had no sign or demarcation. Whoever crossed it was beyond hope. Their destiny was set, as all possible trajectories led irrevocably to the singularity. And if such was the nature of that threshold, Schwarzschild asked, his eyes shot through with blood, how would we know if we had already crossed it?
The only new part of today's existential angst about artificial intelligence is in its minutiae. Really, it was foreseen at least a century ago that the universe must evolve into some great, indescribable attracting basin, even if one could not predict any one of the hundreds of steps required to get our current conception of AI from where they were.
The anxiety you might have about it now just joins a great tradition of contemplating that which can't be described but that we're rushing towards nonetheless. Maybe it's some ironic comfort to think that past geniuses were driven to insanity by these ideas decades before you were born.
V.
So what's left to say? I've taken you as far as my intellect will let me, and all I can do now is reason by gesture:
Genesis // Confusion
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
- Morning Song, Sylvia Plath
Self-Reliance // Understanding
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
- Invictus, William Ernest Henley
Falling // Approach
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
On The Other Side
You’re a golden retriever. You exist in a world you do not understand, surrounded by miracles you could not comprehend if given interminable eras to contemplate them. You experience nudges to your behavior for ends you cannot guess; you are punished or rewarded arbitrarily for a set of actions that serve the desires of some intellect you cannot model. You can either surrender to the whirling and maybe joyful chaos, or try to resist and pay the price of debilitating anxiety. You feel as if in a dream. You've lost something, but you can't quite remember what.