Feb 28, 2021 01:56 AM
https://nautil.us/issue/97/wonder/litera...ke-science
EXCERPTS (intro plus interview): . . . Angus Fletcher, 44, an English professor at Ohio State University. Fletcher is part of “group of renegades,” he says, who are on a mission to plug literature back into the electric heart of contemporary life and culture. Fletcher has a plan—“apply science and engineering to literature”—and a syllabus, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, his new book...
[...] Is a big part of the difference between human brains and computers the fact that computers lack consciousness?
No. I’m making a completely mechanical argument for novels, literature, and narrative. Consciousness is like the existence of the 913th dimension. It may exist. It’s not up to me to say that it doesn’t exist. But I can tell you right now, no human is ever going to establish a definitive proof one way or the other. That’s because it’s a metaphysical problem. Humans exist in a physical space. The reason science and engineering have advanced is because we bracketed the problem of consciousness as something unanswerable. So it’s possible that computers are conscious. It’s possible that they’re not. That’s something I don’t think anyone can answer.
How did science advance because the problem of consciousness is unanswerable?
Let me say it this way. We can get everything we want in the world without understanding where consciousness comes from. So why are we pouring all this energy into it? The only reason for doing it is because people have a religious spiritual impulse. It’s like chasing God. We know where that got the monks in the Middle Ages.
Where did that get the monks?
It didn’t get them to invent the laws of thermodynamics or invent computers or discover evolution by natural selection. It got them into a lot of arguments. I think humans enjoy having arguments about irresolvable problems. It gives us something to do. What’s the best baseball team? What’s the source of consciousness? But other than as a ludic pastime, consciousness is not something that I think anyone would seriously investigate scientifically.
Are you saying the study of metaphysics did not lead to developments in science?
That’s exactly right. That’s the narrative I would tell. In the Middle Ages, people were obsessed with the questions, “Who is God? What does God want?” But we discovered over time, starting with Machiavelli and moving into Francis Bacon and the 19th- and 20th-century scientific revolutions, that the human brain can’t answer those questions. That’s because the human brain has evolved to practice science. Science is about making hypotheses and testing them in our physical world. It’s not about reaching the metaphysical. And literature is the origin of the modern scientific method.
Why do you call literature a technology?
A technology is any human-made thing that solves a problem. Most of our technology exists to master our world, to domesticate space. That’s why we have smartphones and smart homes and satellites. Literature tackles the opposite set of problems: not how to master the nonhuman world but how to master ourselves. It wrestles with the psychological problems inside us. Grief, lack of meaning, loneliness—literature was invented to deal with these problems. To have happy and democratic societies, effective engineers and scientists, we need people who are joyful, not angry, who have a deep sense of empathy and purpose, who have an ability for logic and problem-solving. You get all these things from literature.
When you call literature a technology, it sounds like you’re saying literature’s a machine.
I am saying it’s a machine! It’s a machine designed to work in concert with another machine, our brain. The purpose of the two machines is to accelerate each other. Literature is a way of accelerating human imagination. And human imaginations accelerate literature. This technology is just sitting on our bookshelves and almost none of us are using it. Students now flee literature departments for the sciences and engineering.
That makes the act of imagination sound so mechanical, don’t you think?
In one regard, narrative is a mechanical act. It doesn’t require imagination. It doesn’t require free will. It’s possible humans have no imagination and no free will. Yet we can still write novels and poetry because the fundamental constituent of those things is narrative... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS (intro plus interview): . . . Angus Fletcher, 44, an English professor at Ohio State University. Fletcher is part of “group of renegades,” he says, who are on a mission to plug literature back into the electric heart of contemporary life and culture. Fletcher has a plan—“apply science and engineering to literature”—and a syllabus, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, his new book...
[...] Is a big part of the difference between human brains and computers the fact that computers lack consciousness?
No. I’m making a completely mechanical argument for novels, literature, and narrative. Consciousness is like the existence of the 913th dimension. It may exist. It’s not up to me to say that it doesn’t exist. But I can tell you right now, no human is ever going to establish a definitive proof one way or the other. That’s because it’s a metaphysical problem. Humans exist in a physical space. The reason science and engineering have advanced is because we bracketed the problem of consciousness as something unanswerable. So it’s possible that computers are conscious. It’s possible that they’re not. That’s something I don’t think anyone can answer.
How did science advance because the problem of consciousness is unanswerable?
Let me say it this way. We can get everything we want in the world without understanding where consciousness comes from. So why are we pouring all this energy into it? The only reason for doing it is because people have a religious spiritual impulse. It’s like chasing God. We know where that got the monks in the Middle Ages.
Where did that get the monks?
It didn’t get them to invent the laws of thermodynamics or invent computers or discover evolution by natural selection. It got them into a lot of arguments. I think humans enjoy having arguments about irresolvable problems. It gives us something to do. What’s the best baseball team? What’s the source of consciousness? But other than as a ludic pastime, consciousness is not something that I think anyone would seriously investigate scientifically.
Are you saying the study of metaphysics did not lead to developments in science?
That’s exactly right. That’s the narrative I would tell. In the Middle Ages, people were obsessed with the questions, “Who is God? What does God want?” But we discovered over time, starting with Machiavelli and moving into Francis Bacon and the 19th- and 20th-century scientific revolutions, that the human brain can’t answer those questions. That’s because the human brain has evolved to practice science. Science is about making hypotheses and testing them in our physical world. It’s not about reaching the metaphysical. And literature is the origin of the modern scientific method.
Why do you call literature a technology?
A technology is any human-made thing that solves a problem. Most of our technology exists to master our world, to domesticate space. That’s why we have smartphones and smart homes and satellites. Literature tackles the opposite set of problems: not how to master the nonhuman world but how to master ourselves. It wrestles with the psychological problems inside us. Grief, lack of meaning, loneliness—literature was invented to deal with these problems. To have happy and democratic societies, effective engineers and scientists, we need people who are joyful, not angry, who have a deep sense of empathy and purpose, who have an ability for logic and problem-solving. You get all these things from literature.
When you call literature a technology, it sounds like you’re saying literature’s a machine.
I am saying it’s a machine! It’s a machine designed to work in concert with another machine, our brain. The purpose of the two machines is to accelerate each other. Literature is a way of accelerating human imagination. And human imaginations accelerate literature. This technology is just sitting on our bookshelves and almost none of us are using it. Students now flee literature departments for the sciences and engineering.
That makes the act of imagination sound so mechanical, don’t you think?
In one regard, narrative is a mechanical act. It doesn’t require imagination. It doesn’t require free will. It’s possible humans have no imagination and no free will. Yet we can still write novels and poetry because the fundamental constituent of those things is narrative... (MORE - details)
