The Meaning of Life

If this was just a project to understand thinking on the meaning of life, I would be done! Well, you know, lazy-done. Fortunately, understanding the meaning of life is just one component of the larger project. For this post, I’ve gone through some books which take different perspectives on the question of how to live a meaningful life, and do I. have. ANSWERS. 

That is, there are a lot of people who have thought about this question already, and even some deep scientific work (especially over the last forty years) that seeks to understand what makes life feel “meaningful.” Much of this work also makes a point to distinguish “meaningfulness” from “happiness.” It’s a well thought-through question, historically.

On the topic of “the meaningful life,” I’ve looked at Viktor Frankl’s The Will to Meaning, E.O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence, Paul Bloom’s The Sweet Spot, and Emily Esfahani Smith’s The Power of Meaning. In this post I want to offer some definitions around “the meaningful life” and ultimately complicate my simple three-tiered model of “meaningfulness” from the first post (meaning at the level of the word, at the level of the story, and at the level of the life).

Scientific definitions of meaningfulness 

Emily Esfahani Smith’s The Power of Meaning, provides a fantastic meta-synthesis of the science around “meaningfulness.” She and Bloom both take a very bottom-up approach to understanding meaningfulness. That is, they start with the assumption that “meaningfulness” is a naturally occurring human feeling that can be broken down. She asks, what facilitates these naturally occurring feelings of meaningfulness?  She nicely distills the science into four core characteristics of a meaningful life: belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence.

“When people explain what makes their lives meaningful, they describe connecting to and bonding with other people in positive ways. They discuss finding something worthwhile to do with their time. They mention creating narratives that help them understand themselves and the world. They talk about mystical experiences of self-loss” (40). Her book is an examination of all of these aspects of a meaningful life, and, upon reading it, I imagine that it’s a pretty effective approach to creating a meaningful life.

Reading The Power of Meaning gave me the sense of things being kind of wrapped up. The question of the meaningful life has been answered! There are four parts, and just do these things, and you’ll experience a meaningful life. Of course, that’s not totally true. I suspect that the finality I felt from reading Smith comes from how nicely she summarizes the science around meaning. I do think if you wanted a self-help text about how to live a meaningful life, you could read this and be done! Fortunately for me, the questions that I want to answer are weirder and less useful, so no one has written a book about them yet.

Meaningful Pursuits 

How valuable is the category of “a meaningful life”anyway? In The Sweet Spot, Paul Bloom discusses meaningful pursuits as a more logical alternative to a meaningful life. The question of “does life have meaning” is kind of nonsensical, he argues: “For me, this is like asking whether a bicycle suffers from clinical depression and answering that it doesn’t.  There is a sense in which this is correct, but a better answer would be the notion of being clinically depressed just doesn’t apply to bicycles” (162). Life is not a thing with meaning, really, just as bicycles are not things with emotional states (for more on the absurdity of the question of if life has a meaning, see also, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). 

So instead of a meaningful life, it’s more logical to look at a single endeavor or goal (something derived from a specific human view of the world) as meaningful or not. Climbing a mountain or raising kids, Bloom argues, are meaningful pursuits. It’s a useful notion, and one that can help expand my taxonomy of “scales of meaning.” It also brings up the question of where meaning is “located.” For Bloom, a life is not a thing which contains any inherent meaning! More on this topic in another blog post.

Evolutionary Meaning 

EO Wilson’s book, The Meaning of Human Existence, is one of my favorites of the few I’ve read so far. He expands my ideas of what it means to ask about a “meaningful life.” I love that he takes the time to think through different possible definitions of “meaning” en route to his own evolutionary-biology-based definition. 

He contrasts a “scientific” worldview with a more traditional worldview of making meaning. First, he discusses the more traditaionl expectations around  meaning: 

In ordinary usage the word “meaning” implies intention, intention implies design, and design implies a designer. Any entity, any process, or definition of any word itself is put into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religion, and in particular their creation stories. Humanity, it assumes, exists for a purpose. Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. Both humanity and individuals have meaning. (12)

Wilson, here, brings another important piece of context to the conversation of the meaningful life: organized religion. Perhaps one reason why I have some expectation of a meaningful life is that I grew up in a society where organized religions are prevalent. Even if one doesn’t follow an organized religion, the idea that there are frameworks (religion) which give a “why” to all situations is influential. Why did Rex die? It was in God’s plan. The plan might be mysterious, but there is an intention behind all situations and circumstances in some religious worldviews. 

But this isn’t how Wilson wants to think about meaning for his project. I’ll do another long quote because I really like his writing: 

There is a second, broader way the word “meaning” is used and a very different worldview implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. There is no advance design, but instead overlapping networks of physical cause and effect. The unfolding of history is obedient only to the general laws of the universe. Each event is random yet alters the probability of later events. (13) 

So, for Wilson too, life is not random and meaningless. Or, maybe, life is not meaningless because it is random. The current state of the world, of humans, of you is an expression of the process of getting here. If the current state of human affairs “means” something, it is an expression of the historical process of arriving at this  moment in exactly this way. 

I’ll spend more time with Wilson’s definitions of meaning  in a future post. For this one, I just wanted to capture the scale and intention of his definition of meaning. It’s big, it’s historical, and has a very clear goal of what it is trying to describe.  

Conclusion 

One thing that I’m taking away from these readings is an adjustment to my original framework that described meaning at three levels: the word, the story, and the life. Shockingly, I think a more nuanced model will be more interesting!

Here’s what I am thinking: first, I want to add some more levels of scale–like Bloom’s “meaningful pursuit.” Second, we need to separate out meaning-in-the-world from meaning-as-experienced. That is, there are things that “capture” meaning, and there are ways that people experience meaning. I think they correlate, but they are different. In the table below, captured meaning is on the X-axis here, experienced meaning is on the Y-axis. I’ve marked the levels which I think best correlate to one another. 

In general, for captured meaning (or “meaning in the world”) on the X-axis, it seems like there are still obvious areas of improvement. What about all the other ways to capture meaning like in paintings and photographs, films, and shows? I imagine that these will slot in right around the “paragraph” and “story” area. There also seem to be too many things that fall into that last “Serial / Anthology” category, maybe there are more ways to capture large-scale meaning. Databases? 

Finally, there is an element that’s not captured here: Worldview. I’m taking worldview to mean a set of organizing principles that dictate how we make meaning. As EOW describes above, religions contain and propagate worldviews, and they tend to be different from scientific worldviews. I think that worldview is ultimately our interpretive lens. How does a story become meaningful? We must interpret it, and we do that according to a worldview. More on this in a future post, too, I just wanted to toss it out there now as both a complicating factor and something that provides a link between the x-axis and y-axis on this diagram.

Me & Meaning

Me & Meaning

I am someone for whom meaning does not naturally accumulate. My memory is poor. I don’t easily shuffle and string the events of my life into narratives to share with friends and family. I don’t bring a strong worldview that can organize information for me. When I finish watching a movie or reading a book or looking at art, my mind tends toward emptiness; I haven’t started processing the significance or making my own meaning from the art. I think of it as being semantiphobic, as in meaning-repellent. Like hydrophobic materials that shed water, I seem to naturally shed meaning.

There are upsides and downsides to the semantiphobic way of being. On one hand, it leaves me receptive to other life philosophies. Other ways of making meaning are very appealing to me, and because they have no strong internally-broadcast ideologies to compete with, they have a relatively frictionless entrance to my mind. Be it marxism, feminism, capitalism, I am attracted to understanding these ways of making meaning, and I think I can grasp them pretty quickly.

I struggle with  sematiphobia because all meaning making has to be very intentional for me. As soon as I stop trying actively to apply a lens of meaning making (like those described above) I stop making meaning. This ladders up to an arch-problem: it often seems as if I am leading a meaningless life. I mean, I am, right? By definition, I am not making meaning out of the events of my life. But the question may not be that straight-forward. What do people mean when they say they want to lead a “meaningful” life, anyway?

The meaning project

So that’s what this project is about. I’m interested in the way that people make meaning, and the expectations that I’ve built around “meaning.” It’s a really broad topic. Fortunately, I’m anchored by my personal experiences around meaning: there are a few times in my life when “meaning” has surfaced as a significant within itself. I’ll walk through three instances here. First, in english grad school I was exposed to the tactical understanding of how meaning is made at the word or symbol level, second switching from academia to a career in design forced me to reflect on how weird the academic activity of creating meaning from stories was; and finally my encounter with the depression following the career switch brought me into close contact with meaninglessness. I’ll talk through the significance of these three below. Here we go!

Tactical meaning

The first “anchoring” idea of meaning for me is meaning at the level of the word or the symbol. I encountered it first when I was in grad school for English. I found this interesting at the time I first encountered it, but I was too wrapped up in the speed of grad school to give it special attention at the time. In retrospect, it’s fascinating and has shaped all of my other thinking about meaning. 

This part can deep dive into academic theories, which I’ll avoid for now. To go back to early semiotics, Ferdinand de Saussure had a concept of signs that broke them down into “signified” and “signifier” i.e. a concept (the signified) and the sound-image that evokes that concept (the signifier). He defined the sign as anything that creates meaning. The relationship between the signifier and signified, he said, is arbitrary (is this true?).

This one feels like the “smallest scale” of all of the types of meaning I want to discuss. It’s almost like talking about the  atomic units of meaning. As soon as I tried to remind myself about this theory and the thinkers that I was attracted to at the time, I was swept away into a sea of wiki pages. Working with semantics and semiotics in this project  will test my ability to write about something that I know I don’t know very much about.

Meaning and use

I studied English in college and then started the process of getting a PhD in English. After a few years, I decided to leave and move into design. While I had already been working with meaning in school, the first time I became independently  interested in the question of meaning was right after I got my first job in design. I worked for an agency that did interaction design work (websites, apps, computer tools of all kinds). In design, I felt that I had moved into a new kind of making, I was making tools. Tools that were supposed to be useful to people. It was then that I realized how unusual what I produced when I was in english was.

In english, I produced interpretations of texts. Texts, like all things, are ambiguous and can be interpreted in many ways. Much of what people in english and textual studies programs do is make arguments about how to interpret that ambiguity in texts. That is, we make arguments about how to make meaning from a text or story. So, theoretically, when someone reads an interpretive argument, they now have access to a new way of making meaning.

How weird! How different than what I was then doing, creating tools. On one hand, it was a pleasure to create something (in design) of such undisputed value. The things we made were designed to help. And we made them because someone asked. I was paid well and design as a practice was becoming an obvious good in the tech sphere. But at the same time, how much less engaging I was finding it than english work. I wondered about the difference between these activities and outputs: creating meaningful textual interpretations of stories and creating useful digital tools. This was the first time that I was struck by the significance for myself of working with something that was “meaning-first” as opposed to “utility-first.” It was the first time I took notice of “meaning” explicitly as relevant to my life.

A meaningful life

The next time I was struck by meaning was not much later. I was still living in Oakland, still working for the same company doing design work. I was feeling empty at work, and more depressed than I had for a while. I was bouncing between being stressed during my day at the office and exhausted afterward. I wondered about my life and how to make it feel more fulfilling. In fact, I got interested in one way of asking this question about fulfillment, “what is a meaningful life?” Is it possible? Is it actually the same question: what is a meaningful life, what is a fulfilling life, what is a purposeful life? While it feels like a pedantic distinction, at the time, I thought there was a secret to be unlocked in understanding what it meant to have a meaningful life. I did some research, read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and decided to back off the question and just start doing therapy … until now!

Conclusion

So there you have it. Three scales of meaning: Meaning at the level of the word, at the level of the story, and at the level of a life. It’s not clear to me what the relationship between these three is right now. I do feel that there is something interesting to be explored in this space, perhaps something novel and unique to me and the way that I make (or don’t make) meaning.

What are the stakes of the project? There are a few big questions that emerge from looking at these three “scales” of meaning together.

1. Does looking at these three scales of meaning together help them to inform one another? Does looking at meaning at the word or story level help us think about meaning at the life level?
2. Is there something to be gained from thinking about having a meaningful life rather than a purposeful or significant life? Or are they just absolute synonyms with very little connection to other kinds of meaning?
3. What does it mean to “mean”? The more I hang around this word, the less it specific of a definition it has to me. Especially as we move away from the specific and technical definition at the word level, it seems to have a less precise usage.
4. What is the relationship between meaning and use? Are they dimensions or properties of things? Can things have more or less meaning? More or less utility?

Thanks so much for reading this introductory piece. It helped me to get my initial thoughts together. My plan is to blog about this project throughout the research to create documentation as I go. Ultimately, that blog might be the final outcome, or it could evolve into something else.

Vulnerability at work

As a manager, and as a human, mental health runs my life. It affects all of us all of the time. Yet, in my experience, it’s still not talked about that much in the work place. It’s a sensitive topic, as is anything health-related. Yet, when I see myself struggling or my employees struggling, it is far less often because they lack the skills. Rather, it usually has to do with some facet of mental health. For example, in the last three years at my job, I’ve struggled with a number of things that relate to mental health and ultimately worsen my ability to do the job well. Here are some of the big ones: demotivation, defensiveness, depression, overcompensating for imposter syndrome, people pleasing, and I’m sure tons more stuff that I don’t even understand yet–truly, the mind is an enigma.

Even for these relatively garden-variety maladies, knowing that I am struggling, or that these are common, widely-shared conditions, is a challenge and something I’ve spent some years in therapy working toward. So it makes sense that this is a tough thing to address in the work place; it’s a tough thing to address in the privacy of one’s own mind! One of the techniques that I have found effective for getting a conversation going about mental health in the workplace is vulnerability. Sharing the things that I fear, and the things that I am ashamed of, about myself has helped other people know that it’s OK for them to do the same. It also starts to give other people a vocabulary to think and talk about these issues in the first place, especially if they struggle with similar challenges.

So that’s what this essay will be: an effort to share some challenging, mental health related things of my own to a broader group. It’s an effort at pushing myself to be more vulnerable. I hope to inspire more vulnerability from others in the workplace, especially others in leadership positions. Even writing this I have some fears, and I will offer them now as an opening volley of vulnerability: a fear that people won’t find it useful, a fear that I will be perceived as unprofessional, a fear that this whole thing will be read as cheesy and clumsy, and even a fear that people won’t find it vulnerable enough. I don’t know what to do with those fears, but I’ve put them out there, which is what vulnerability is about.

I also want to do a quick privilege check going into this essay: I’m a straight white guy at a tech company. My mental health challenges, while real, are not often extreme. It’s definitely not going to be as easy for everyone to talk about mental health as it will for me. I have a lot of security in my job and expect very little possibility of retaliation for putting this piece out there. Still, my goal remains the same: be vulnerable, and encourage vulnerability from others. I hope that it’s helpful. Now, let’s get into it!

Conflict Avoidance

I avoid conflict. When there is conflict of almost any kind or severity I tend to have my flight or fight instinct activated which gets me worked up, and I tend to end up feeling some form of fear in the moment and then strangely sad and exhausted afterward. I’m not proud of it, and there are lots of obvious ways that it challenges my ability to be an effective teammate and leader. It’s a bummer. It’s one of the major areas that I have been working on and is still very much a work in progress. Conflict avoidance has lots of implications in the work place (giving tough feedback is hard, avoiding working with smart but contentious individuals, etc), but one of the clearest yet sneakiest example in my professional life of conflict avoidance is my hyper vigilant need to detect possible miscommunications. Did someone say or write something that could be misinterpreted by another party? Especially if it is on a sensitive topic, this is a recipe for disaster, my brain tells me! When I hear someone starting to explain something in a meeting, but not doing it in the best and clearest possible way for their audience, I can immediately feel the fight or flight kicking in. Uh oh, my body thinks, there will be a miscommunication and then a conflict. I get worked up, and end up feeling bad, and it further corroborates my formula that conflict is bad.

While, like all of these sorts of defense mechanisms, this instinct likely grew out of a useful place, it now does more harm than good. For example, when my teammates don’t explain the context for our work clearly, I immediately start sweating. How will this work be interpreted? Will everyone be confused? Of course, it’s a good instinct to want people to understand, but I don’t even have any evidence yet that they don’t understand–my teammate just didn’t explain it as I would have. Even when the risk of conflict doesn’t directly involve me, but is just a potential for conflict or misunderstanding, I start to feel fight-or-flighty. Like, I recently saw a blunt request on Slack by my boss for a teammate to do a task that I think they’ll interpret as being “too junior” for them, I start to get a little itchy. Should I say something now? They’ll hate this! I note that it would be easier for me to let this go by, except I know this particular teammate will engage in conflict if they feel threatened–if it was anyone else, it wouldn’t worry me. It shows me that my concern is less around the clarity and fairness, and more around the desire to avoid conflict down the line even if the situation warrants conflict.

Since working on this in therapy, I think of my misinterpretation-related conflict avoidance as symptomatic of two very common cognitive distortions (from a CBT lens). First, “fortune telling,” whereby one predicts how things will unfold without enough information. I basically think that whatever I see as something that could be misinterpreted will be misinterpreted and will result in a conflict of some kind. A lot of wasted mental energy goes into this. It is also an example of “catastrophizing” whereby one assumes the worst possible outcome for scenarios, no matter how unlikely they are. You can see how both are present in the examples above. When I hear someone explaining something unclearly, I make some big assumptions: first that it will be misinterpreted (fortune telling) and secondly that this misinterpretations will spiral into an aggressive conflict (catastrophizing).

These tendencies are clearly in place to keep me safe. Safe from the outcomes of real conflict and miscommunication. But honestly, they usually just burn energy and introduce a lot of unnecessary stress.

Identity maintenance

The next major lesson that I’ve been working on has been around maintaining a specific reputation or identity in the office (and everywhere!). This manifests especially in terms of wanting to appear smart, pragmatic, hard working, interesting, and honest (henceforth referred to as SPHIH). Those actually happen to be in order of importance too, oof. I’m not sure when or why exactly these got programmed into me as the way that I want to be seen by the world, but it feels like I had notably little say in it. Nevertheless, I am loathe to betray my need to be perceived in this way.

This is a really tough one; my rational mind does a great job justifying why I need to appear these ways to everyone all of the time. I don’t want people at work not to think of me as SPHIH, that will limit my career mobility! I don’t want people in my personal life not to think of me as SPHIH, that will limit my friend circle and I’ll be all alone. The bonus challenge with this rationalization is that even acknowledging the identity maintenance doesn’t make it easy to change. Like conflict avoidance, it’s a survival mechanism, and I don’t want to stop surviving! 

So how does it play out in a work environment? I was recently giving a rehearsal presentation to my boss and her boss. Of course, this is a situation where, even though it was an informal rehearsal, my need to maintain my SPHIH image was activated (authority figures!). What I noticed afterward was that my need to appear SPHIH was actually at odds with getting meaningful feedback on the presentation. In fact, it almost seemed to matter less to me whether I’d successfully conveyed the information than whether I had succeeded in making my bosses see me as SPHIH. Of course, seeming smart usually does mean making a compelling presentation too, but in this case I had over-prepared in ways that were not useful to the kind of feedback that I needed. I needed feedback on the fundamental ideas in the presentation, but had made everything too polished so I would look more prepared. I could probably have just shared things in a document and gotten better feedback; plus I ultimately put myself under more stress for no reason. 

So you can see some day-to-day challenges in that example, but I’ve found that this derails my life in larger ways. For instance, it’s easy to extrapolate this single example about giving a presentation to, say, a job interview. I love doing job interviews, or applying for schools, because when done well, it’s basically all about getting validation that I am perceived how I want to be perceived (SPHIH). But ultimately, I find that I will pursue jobs that give me the SPHIH validation even if I am not that interested in them. That’s because the feeling of being validated on these key things has historically been more important to me than pursuing a satisfying career (or, at the very least, the need for validation subtly shifts me off course over time in way that can become debilitating).

Wrap up

Thanks for sticking with the essay; I’m happy to have been able to share it. Even if these specific examples didn’t resonate with you, I assure you that whatever examples you have of your fears, vulnerabilities, things that are difficult for you day-to-day, will resonate with your team. I also assure you that understanding yourself, and sharing that understanding with others will help both of you feel more connected and supported. Give it a try! Let me know how it goes.

25 Minutes of Research: Consciousness

For my first quick research project, I wanted to take on a project that was both juicy but also manageable: the nature of consciousness. Talk about biting off exactly what one can chew. 

This question interests me from a perspective that I did not find commonly discussed: how our own understanding of consciousness can shape how it works. Or perhaps that is better phrased as a question: can our own understanding of our conscious mind shape how it works? I found that this was not what other people were talking about in my 25 minutes of research, but there might still be something interesting that is worth piecing together from my original questions and the “findings” of this research.

First, what is consciousness? Why, it’s everything you experience, according to Christof Koch, famous consciousness guy who apparently also writes short essays for Nature. That includes all the sensory inputs, sense of self, memory, and future projection of self. 

My brief research shows that a few key questions dominate the history of consciousness studies (not a real phrase): first there’s Descartes. He proposed that the mind and body are obviously separate. And not just that, but they are made of totally different things: the mind is made of special, magical, god-given stuff. This seems to be the driving question of consciousness in philosophy for a while, until more recently it has been supplanted by the more common notion that, no, it’s not separate, the mind arises from the body. This view, I think, is called physicalism; i.e. it’s all physical. 

Aaaand, really, we’re still at like exactly this question. Why so stuck? It seems that we are reaching a place that is a little outside of ability to study. We can examine the brain, but we can’t really examine consciousness per se, except through self reporting. That is, people just have to tell us about their experience.  We can examine the brain through scanning techniques, but we’re actually interested specifically in not that. We’re interested in the connection (maybe) between that and what our day to day subjective experience is. Or, you know, that it is. 

So in our state of “stuckness,” it seems that people start asking questions that are a little more peripheral to the central questions of the relationship between mind and body. The big point of contention seems to be that there is the experience of consciousness as something special (i.e. unique to humans or at least mammals or at least animals) , and then lots of arguments about how actually no it’s probably not. My favorite from an interestingness perspective is “panpsychicism” which basically says that consciousness is not special because any system has the potential for consciousness if it has enough information, enough information organization, and enough information interconnectivity. That’s right, your cell phone has a very high likelihood of consciousness. But we can’t really know for sure, we could infer it, but only the cell phone knows what its own experience is like, or that it has an experience at all.

The other philosophic question arises around how significant consciousness is. Is consciousness something we really need to be thinking about from a scientific perspective? The question emerges from the very related questions of why we evolved consciousness at all. One philosopher frames the question of why we have consciousness this way: “but the point is that evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t!” It seems like this makes consciousness more interesting for some (why have it if we don’t need it!? That’s not how evolution works!) and less interesting to others: the majesty of the brain and humans etc. just doesn’t need a theory of consciousness to explain very much. Humans are interesting to study without it. 

OK, so back to my original question: does understanding consciousness changes how it works (the question no one is asking!). I became interested in this question when I started reading more mindfulness books. One book in particular, The Untethered Soul, describes consciousness like a tractor beam. It focuses on one thing at a time. There’s a conveyer belt of thoughts going by, and the consciousness tractor beam sort of picks them up and examines them as they go by. Then, ideally, from a mindfulness perspective, it puts them down again. But it doesn’t always work this way, sometimes it gets stuck on one item, and then like a too-slow assembly line worker, all of the other items on the conveyer belt start piling up and you, the owner of this conveyer belt and tractor beam system, start to feel crappy. 

I found this to be a powerful metaphor. It offers an explanation of how consciousness works relative to the rest of the stimuli, what may go wrong, and what you can do to help (allow the tractor beam to disengage from its fixation so it can continue to happily scan new things coming in). What’s amazing to me is the plasticity of the system. Who knows if that’s at all really how consciousness works–If my research has revealed anything it’s that our understanding is pretty limited–but still imagining it works that way may help you to take positive action.

So does it connect back to any of the major questions? Those are: what is the relationship between the physical (brain, body) and the sensation of experience; is consciousness a unique phenomena of some kind; and is understanding how consciousness works a significant part of understanding humans. I think the closest question is the one around the relationship between the mind and body. If you have a new metaphor for understanding how the mind works, does it in turn change how the brain works and then indeed change how the mind works? You would need a firmer theory about the relationship between mind and body to really answer this. I think it is uncontroversial to say that culture and learning changes the structure of the brain (both is small ways and in big ways, see The WEIRDEST People book). And, I think it is uncontroversial to say that those leanings shape our perception of the world. 

So while it is only tangentially related, the thinking has helped me refine my interest and question: is it possible for a metaphor of consciousness to change the way consciousness works? Or does consciousness just work however it works and if you happen to get a metaphor that accurately estimates how consciousness works then it’s a powerful thing? 

The next steps here would be to really dig into this specific question around metaphors of consciousness. I want to understand the relationship between the metaphor and the functioning of consciousness. 

“Yes, I clicked on this item, and it did not displease me.”

I do not like to use Facebook. There it is, upfront. I will occasionally pull up Facebook and here is how such interactions proceed: Glance at newsfeed; think that “in order to be useful I need to strip my Facebook of all but, like, three people;” and then I close the tab. Michael Cobb’s piece in the recent PMLA, “A Little Like Reading,” makes an argument that, despite my reservations of Facebook generally, I would agree with.  I would argue, however, that his examples need some serious context (and serious context), that they receive! The thing that first strikes me about Cobb’s piece, which argues for the potential virtue of Facebook-style reading of numerous tiny clips of information, is how informed our man Cobb, really is.  Bringing to bear on his discussion of Facebook well-informed discussions of Susan Sontag, Theodore Adorno, and Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire, at the very least (after all, the man’s staff photograph is with Snoop Dogg; he is clearly well-networked).

While the stakes of Cobb’s argument are not such that one can easily disagree with his conclusions, I do wonder what are the implications of his process: that to do something interesting with the “light, like” reading Cobb must necessarily contextualize these likings in a network of theoreticians.  Obviously, Cobb does not disavow this practice, and I in no way mean to “call him out” for this seeming conflict.  Cobb admits and advocates for this kind of contextualization, “Rarely can we not interpret a thing, encounter any work of art without a whole bunch of knowledge, a whole bunch of desire, and all of those mental categories that make art into something useful” (205).

Playing in parallel here is what he is considering in the debate between the “good” and “bad” kinds of negativity.  The bad kind, presumably, is the “endless nothings,” and the “positive” kind—the difference is still somewhat unclear and perhaps someone can illuminate this in the comments if my stab seems too in the dark—which seems the same except it is productively set against “the mind.”  Here he quotes Adorno quoting Hegel: “The life of the mind only attains its truth when discovering itself in absolute desolation” (206).  The virtue of nothingness, then, is that it allows a freedom of the mind, of mental associative activity, which is hampered by a too rigorously structured something.  Here, again is Cobb on the productivity of the “nought” of Facebook:  “You stare into something that can feel like a hopeless oblivion, and then it can stroke divine thought, or a peculiar combination, which will not yield sovereignty in meaning, or precise ordering of time, or even a good essay” (206). As I mentioned, the stakes are, in a way, quite low. He continues that the myriad feeds of information can “intrigue you as much as…the best and precise narrations in that book you wrote about religious hate speech eight years ago” (206). Finding the mind, intrigue generally: it is hard to disagree that these things could emerge from looking at Facebook.  However, Cobb seems necessarily to have couched this gentle, ephemeral insight in a heavily contextualized essay.  What his argument ends up looking like is that one can be sparked by interesting patterns in media like Facebook, but in order to articulate said sparks, one still needs deep immersion in other “deep” discourses.  The mind can only be discovered in the “nought” if one has already synthesized a great deal of structured something. Again, it is not a contradiction of any kind; it is simply the one-layer-removed from Cobb’s argument that I find complicates the essay in useful ways.

Cobb gives no specific examples of how this works with an example actually from Facebook, perhaps, no snark intended, because the examples are simply too ephemeral. The question is, then, if this is simply “the mind finding itself” as Adorno and Hegel and Cobb want to suggest, is what Facebook reveals only the structure of the mind already examining it?  Perhaps, then, this explains why an article about reading Facebook is really an article about interpreting Melville, Carson and Dickinson through certain well-regarded theorists and vice-versa.

Manovich’s Human-Scale Data

While Lev Manovich will reject a number of definitions in his reformation of “media visualization,” the project reaches a newly organic stage in the final examples of his “Visualizing Vertov” piece.  The relationship between eye and interface, and the shifts in this relationship, undergird each of “Visualizing Vertov,” “Media Visualization” and “How to Compare One Million Images?”  The focus, however, will remain visualizing data in a way to make it, once again, human scale.  Something most human, I argue, occurs in the final examples of “Visualizing Vertov.”

In “One Million Images” Manovich focuses on the eye and interface but with a more sever critique of the eye.  Not only is the eye not scalable to different data collections, but “[t]he second problem with using our eyes is that we are not very good at registering subtle differences between images.”  Wisely, I think, he shifts to a complaint of the interface more singularly in “Media Visualization:” “Although it may appear that the reasons for this are the limitations of human vision and human information processing, I think that it is actually the fault of current interface designs…This access method does not allow us to understand the ‘shape’ of overall collection and notice interesting patters” [sic].  Here, we can again notice interesting patterns!  Phew. The trick is to change the scale of the project to one at which we can use our apperceive apparatus to notice “shape.”

However, the idea of media visualization does not, I would argue, come to fruition until the last couple of examples in his “Visualizing Vertov” piece: “Anatomy of a Shot” and “Visualizing Movement.” Notably, figures 8.2 and 9.4.  These images represent shots “averaged” into a single image.

FIG 8.2

FIG 9.4

The process works differently here than in the graphs and “montages” of images. Shots averaged together most completely fulfill the definition of “media visualization” in which  “pictures are translated into pictures” but also, pictures, as well as they can, do not hide the original images of the media under consideration.  Manovich makes a special note of this move away from this traditional graphs: “Typical information visualization involves first translating the world into numbers and then visualizing relations between these numbers.  In contrast, media visualization involves translating a set of images into a new images which can reveal patterns in the set. In short, pictures are translated into pictures.” The result, at first and for a good while, is “images in a collection superimposed on a graph” (5).  Such graphs offer little more information that the graph itself would, except perhaps to understand the axes more intuitively.

What seems, however, the final result of this project, most nuanced interpretation, and most engaging image built from images, are these composite images of shots. They do not, admittedly, have the potential to convey raw-ish information like the superimposed-upon graphs, but differently do more with the visual data.  Namely, they seem to have the potential, of any of these visualizations, to tell us something we did not know, and to beg further questions, rather than, as Manovich often freely admits, verify claims. The image apprehends something itself of the shot beyond the algorithm used to generate it.

These approaches have problems, too.  For example, with projects 8 and 9 in “Visualizing Vertov,” Manovich tacitly acknowledges the inability of such projects to scale (the problem in the other two pieces).  In fact, the projects seem only to reveal movement at a single scale.  If an object within a shot moves too quickly, the movement will be erased from the composite image.  However, if an object moves too slowly, the object would appear stationary in the composite shot.  In this way, an object’s ability to be perceived has a direct relationship with the “scale” of the data set, the scale here being the length of the shot. I note these particular examples, however, because these exact complications generated by the composite images offer the greatest potential for a future project.

The bag of nails that you already own

A professor of mine tells me that the trick to academic writing is translating associative connections into logical, causal connections–a fact of the academy that I find showmanshipy yet absolutely true.  With topic modeling, the relationship between scholar, association and logic strains yet further under the computing weight of algorithmically generated association.

Ben Schmidt, in his “When you have a MALLET, everything looks like a nail” post, notes one of the methodological “saves” of working with two-diminutional graphical data plotted on a familiar plane rather than language (bags of words): one can intuitively recognize error.  He identifies the whaling map in which the LDA algorithm grouped together the eastern seaboard shipping and some pacific whaling into a single “topic.” Schmidt writes,

 This is a case where I’m really being saved by the restrictive feature space of data. If I were interpreting these MALLET results as text, I might notice it, for example, but start to tell a just-so story about how transatlantic shipping and Pacific whaling really are connected. (Which they are; but so is everything else.) The absurdity of doing that with geographic data like this is pretty clear; but interpretive leaps are extraordinarily easy to make with texts.

The question becomes, what is the threshold for a reasonable connection.  Indeed, Schmidt’s interpretation seems particularly not literary.  It seems to me that the “just-so” story about the connection between these two seemingly unrelated patterns would be not only what an academic of literature would accidentally expand on, but would be precisely the bit of information that he or she would be most likely to expand on, turn into a conference presentation, and tote about the conference circuit as a lively report on some unexpected associations (hence, I suppose, Schmidt’s warning).

Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac’s “Learning to read data” offers a counter-balance to the impulse to avoid spurious associations (or associations above the spuriosity threshold, which, as Schmidt implies, we must place somewhere).  The problem at the other end of the spectrum is throwing away data that does not already confirm what we believe, that is, eliminating data that does not support the conceptual associations and categories that we have already built.

  A troubling corollary to this is a tendency to throw away data that does not fit our established concepts. When Cohen discards a striking correlation between “belief,” “atheism,” and “Aristotle” as an accident of the data, he does just this. Whether or not the correlation is accidental should be decided by statistical analysis rather than the feeling that it doesn’t make sense. If we required all data to make sense—that is, fit our established concepts—quantitative methods would never produce new knowledge. If the digital humanities are to be more than simply an efficient tool for confirming what we already know, then we need to check this tendency to seek validation.

It seems as though Schmidt may be on the verge of doing just this—or, at least, encouraging literary people that thrive on association to do this—throwing away data that does not fit into a pre-established topic.   What is the happy mean here?  Heuser and Le-Khac advocate for doing some follow-up statistical modeling to check out the validity of these inchoate associations (when it rains algorithms…).  This is, however, where a more traditional literary scholarship could also take over.  Perhaps after getting a whiff of some new associative logic, it is time to set off into one’s text(s) and attempt a demonstration on the grounds of compelling and satisfying persuasive writing. Or do we want to see our field move further forward than this?

Reiterative Criticism

What if we treat algorithms as primary theoretical texts?  This seems to be, beyond suggestions rehashed from other theorists, one of Setphen Ramsay’s primary contributions to the matrices of questions that constitute the Digital Humanities in Reading Machines.

 In order to write the program, the critic must consider the “how to” of a deformative operation, but once that text is written, the output will be one that places the same critic into a critical relationship not only with the text of the result but with the text of the program as well. (66)

Aside from his work with the Oulipo and the Fibonacci sequence, however, Ramsey provides few examples of how this interaction may function.  In looking at the code he does make an important distinction between the “procedural,” and the “functional.”  While the functional describes a relationship, the procedural, that is, code, can “perform the relationships it describes” (65).

My question, if one would want to use code, procedures, as interpretive “texts,” where does this kind of text stand in relation to other forms of critical-text-as-primary-text?  To respond, I look to the similarity of Derrida’s Of Grammatology to Ramsay’s description of code as a primary text.  Here, Derrida describes Rousseau’s hiding and showing himself through writing:

 Let us note that the economy is perhaps indicated in the following: the operation that substitutes writing for speech also replaces presence by value: to the I am or the I am present thus sacrificed, a what I am or a what I am worth is preferred. “If I were present, one would never know what I was worth.” I renounce my present life, my present and concrete existence in order to make myself known in the ideality of truth and value. A well-known schema. (142)

Ultimately, Derrida works toward his conclusion of irreconcilable meaning: “Difference produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing that it makes impossible” (143). However, what interests me in the above passage is the way in which Derrida restates—neatly by the sentence—Rousseau’s logic a number of times and turns it over to make it seem a schema!*  Once he states it three times, after all, it seems quite old-hat.

In this way, Derrida codifies and generates a procedure and a formula from the intelligence he sees in Rousseau’s writing: procedural in that Derrida’s writing is performing the work that he describes (deconstructing) while, at once, generating for us a formula (a schema) that describes Rousseau’s logic. The formula, not as immediately apparent, one might say is the average amalgamation of the statements that Derrida puts forth, the abstract description of all three statements.

Indeed, what may upset traditional scholars about the computer-aided analysis is that, beyond word counting and data mining, the procedures are hidden.  Knowing the procedure, allowing one to put the code in open conversation with the critical work it performs, removes the threat: “For surely there is nothing in the procedure that makes any claim to truth value beyond what is already stipulated in the critical act” (80). However unclear one may find Derrida’s writing, there is his procedure, laid out and labeled.

*Not sure from what Spivak translates “schema,” nevertheless:

1.a. “Any one of certain forms or rules of the ‘productive imagination’…”

1.b. “An automatic or unconscious coding or organization of incoming physiological or psychological stimuli” (OED)

Works Cited:

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.

Ramsay, Stephen. Reading Machines. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011.

“schema, n.”. OED Online. December 2012. Oxford University Press. 12 February 2013

 

Semantic Tagging

If there is a controversy among the use of TEI, it seems to be the appropriate degree of “semantic” markup. David Golumbia argues that a minimal markup is ideal both for the longevity of archived texts and the utility of those texts:

No doubt, some researchers may wish to create highly rich, structured-data-based applications driven off of this archival language data, but it would be a grave error to try to incorporate such markup into the archive itself.  That would actually obscure the data itself, and the data is what we are trying to preserve in as ‘raw’ a form as possible. (Golumbia 117)

The minimally-marked texts function as a sort of raw data, true, but it seems even the most powerful tools have a limited functionality with raw data in this form. Voyant Tools gives one a taste of just what a software tool can do with such a semantically-undeclared, raw text: search and count words and then display those search results in a variety of more and less useful fashions.

While this potential is interesting (see the Radiolab story about the professor who, from looking at the declining variety of words in her texts, found that Agatha Christie had undiagnosed Alzheimer’s), the question arises: isn’t even this most basic level of encoding an interpretation?  I find that Paul Eggert and, later, James Cummings’ response to this compelling: TEI provides a “phenomenology, not an ontology” of the text (Cummings).  As though one could provide the ontology of the text? Text essence? Text Dasein?  Probably not, I believe, “book” Dasein. The problem seems to be one of expectation: semantic encoding leads intuitively to the expectation of ontological capture.  While considering metadata, then, perhaps there is a line to be drawn in what metadata is for purposes of display, and what metadata passes beyond visualization of the text.

Cummings presents an example that falls between the silent metadata tagging of XML texts and traditional critical scholarly work when he recommends a digital text that can have varying degrees of critical apparatus.  This is metadata but not hidden metadata and not metadata that manifests without one’s go-ahead (in Cummings example at least, it sounds as though one can choose which metadata is available at any given time). Here is Cummings’ description of the text many-editions-in-one digital text:

Electronic publications can, if suitably encoded and suitably supported by software, present the same text in many forms: as clear text, as diplomatic transcript of one witness or another, as critical reconstruction of an authorial text, with or without critical apparatus of variants, and with or without annotations aimed at the textual scholar, the historian, the literary scholar, the linguist, the graduate student, or the undergraduate. (Cummings)

This text, I imagine, does change the ontological status of the text, and this change manifests as phenomenological alteration.  Imagine, if one will, having a text of Moby Dick which could include either zero footnotes, or footnotes for the layman, footnotes for the undergrad, and footnotes for the grad student (would you like to read Moby Dick on easy, medium or hard?).  One would have a sense at any given point of incompleteness while reading the text, as if bypassing layers of associative, interpretive work available at only the toggle of a menu option.

Works Cited:

Cummings, James. “The Text Encoding Initiative and the Study of Literature.”  Companion to Digital Literary Studies.  Ed. Susan Schriebman, Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell 2008. Web. January 30, 2013.

Golumbia, David.  The Cultural Logic of Computation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Print.