WARREN ELLIS LTD

Quantum physics still hurts my head. Just when I feel like it’s swimming into focus for me, it goes away. Or, put another way:

The ψ wave is something unclear, which determines the probability that the electron will be observed in one place rather than in another. It evolves in time according to the equation written by Schrödinger, as long as we do not look at it.

HELGOLAND was probably my last best shot at getting hold of it, and I put it down thinking that the conclusions it led me to were way too simple to be true, and therefore I’d gotten it all wrong beside his best efforts. That said, the takeaways I could grasp were useful. It’s interesting to imagine a plane of the world where the future is not determined by the past.

However, Rovelli’s own grasp reaches wider. In exploring his field. he both goes into digressions and discusses where his field impinges on others. There’s a wonderful sidebar about Aleksandr Bogdanov, which tied right into something I was working on at the time. And the following, on perception:

The majority of the signals do not travel from the eyes to the brain: they go the other way, from the brain to the eyes. What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see. This information is conveyed from the brain to the eyes, through intermediate stages. If a discrepancy is revealed between what the brain expects and the light arriving into the eyes, only then do the neural circuits send signals towards the brain. So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain – only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do.

When we look around ourselves, we are not truly ‘observing’: we are instead dreaming an image of the world based on what we know (including bias and misconception) and unconsciously scrutinizing the world to reveal any discrepancies.

In the words of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Hippolyte Taine, we can say that ‘external perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling “hallucination” a false perception, we must call external perception “a confirmed hallucination”.’

That is a glorious thing. We’re just filtering our perceptions to check if we’re hallucinating correctly. Sighted sentience reinterpreted as dreaming meat. I’m curious as to whether or not auditory perception works that way too. Or, do we dream a touch before the touch? I have a lot more questions than answers after reading this book, but I suspect that on some level Carlo Rovelli would be okay with that. If nothing else, the book is a call to keep learning.

HELGOLAND, Carlo Rovelli (UK) (US)

A sequence from THE UNNAMABLE PRESENT by Roberto Calasso: (UK) (US)

The move from Dadaism to Dataism, from Dada to Big Data, happened over exactly a century. And there are those who claim that Big Data will supplant Sapiens and drag him helplessly along like a straw in the mighty flow of information. We will then be close to knowing almost everything we don’t need to know.

The religion of Dataism, according to Yuval Noah Harari, is based on these dogmas: “Humanism thought that experiences occur inside us, and that we ought to find within ourselves the meaning of all that happens, thereby infusing the universe with meaning. Dataists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not shared, and that we need not—indeed cannot—find meaning within ourselves. We need only record and connect our experience to the great data flow, and the algorithms will discover its meaning and tell us what to do.”

“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.” A notion from which there is a corollary: “Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”

THE UNNAMABLE PRESENT was a difficult book for me. Calasso, whose theme is the interaction between myth and literature, frequently comes across to me as a Christian conservative writer. (Note the use of pronoun “his” for Sapiens, too.) But his work is a kaleidoscopic mosaic of ideation and erudition, and, when in full flow, he is an almost unique writer and thinker. I’ve only read two of his books, and I suspect I will end up exploring the whole of his oeuvre with the exception of his retelling of the Bible. Difficult books are important for me. I need to push against what I think I believe.

Today, having power means knowing what to ignore. Calasso sweeps us down through a whirlpool of ideas and connections and opinions to land right on that simple true statement.

But there’s a trap in that statement. The framing leads you to assume “power” as externally projected. That’s not the point. It’s about the internal power to think, to focus, to reflect. To stop tending, as Venkatesh Rao phrased it, the Global Social Computer in the Cloud, just because it’s trained us with rewards for oiling its cogs with our heart’sblood. And everything is the Global Social Computer In The Cloud now.

It is, in fact, the power to write books like Roberto Calasso’s.