Quote of the Day

On any important topic, we tend to have a dim idea of what we hope to be true, and when an author writes the words we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments. Needy readers have an asymptote at illiteracy; if a text doesn’t say the one thing they need to read, it might as well be in a foreign language.

—Daniel C. Dennett, to Edge

Quote of the Day

Evolution is all about processes that almost never happen…Take the set of infrequent accidents—things that almost never happen—and sort them into the happy accidents, the neutral accidents, and the fatal accidents; amplify the effects of the happy accidents—which happens automatically when you have replication and competition—and you get evolution.

—Daniel C. Dennett

The evolution of art

If you’ve been watching Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey as faithfully as I have, you probably came away from last night’s episode with a newfound appreciation for the wonders of natural selection. Darwinian evolution, as Daniel Dennett likes to point out, is probably the single best idea anyone ever had, and it’s since been applied to fields far beyond those of biology. The notion that ideas and abstract concepts, for instance, are subject to selection pressure—both within the human mind and in the larger world beyond—is a familiar one, and every writer knows how it feels. Life is full of story ideas, and the means by which one or another wins out is a mysterious one, with selection often taking place below the level of conscious thought. Even once you’ve started a story, it can go in any number of directions, with the author selecting and discarding variations based on their perceived rightness, a process that happens all over again once the story is released into the wild. (The publishing industry is a battleground for survival of a particularly ruthless kind.) And if you want to harness the power of evolution in your own work, it’s not a bad idea to take a few cues from nature itself:

1. Move through a series of useful intermediate steps. My favorite part of last night’s Cosmos episode was its takedown of the argument, common among proponents of intelligent design, that an organ like the human eye is too complex to have evolved by chance. It may be true that half an eye isn’t very useful, but an approximation of an eye certainly is, and there’s a beautiful sequence illustrating how the eye evolved from a series of intermediate stages, each useful in itself: a cluster of a few photosensitive proteins develops gradually into a depression with an aperture and finally an eye with a lens. And this is a striking analogy to how the creative process works. Half a story isn’t any more useful than half an eye, but a finished rough draft—one that takes the entire narrative from beginning to end, however imperfectly—is both a sketch of the whole and a template that can be refined through successive revisions. And it isn’t until you’ve got something that holds together on its own provisional terms that you can start to make it better. (This is part of the reason why I always start with a detailed outline, which is the roughest version of the complete story that can possibly exist.)

2. Introduce a little randomness. Natural selection proceeds as a succession of accidents, with random mutations in the genetic code that usually lead nowhere, but occasionally result in a useful adaptation. The process of writing a story can’t work in quite the same way: unlike nature, we’re writing with an end in mind, and most of us start with a plan. Even with such a teleological approach, however, it’s still possible to embrace a productive element of chance. I’ve described my own methods in detail, but every author will develop his or her own strategies for making raids on the random. Nicholson Baker, for instance, used a random number generator to reorder the chapters in his novel The Anthologist, and although he discarded most of the results, it led to a handful of promising juxtapositions that were preserved in the final draft. Even if you aren’t as systematic about it, you’ll soon find that every finished novel represents a compromise between the vision that the author had at the beginning and the unpredictable variations that the process introduced. And it’s essential to be able to depart from the plan enough to incorporate the unexpected—and to test it diligently against the alternatives.

3. Give it time. If the diversity and ingenuity of the adaptations that nature creates can sometimes seem unimaginable, it’s because natural selection operates over millions of years. Time, scale, and variation can do remarkable things. Artists, unfortunately, don’t have that luxury: we can only write one version of a story at a time, and we only have a few months or years to get it done. Even on that reduced level, though, time is crucial. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the importance of rendering in the creative process, and the fact that most novels need a year or so to percolate in the author’s mind, no matter how fast we can write. There’s a simple explanation: most of us only have so many good ideas at any one time, and if we can extend the period of writing, we’ll increase our chances of finding an idea that can be applied to the problem at hand. It’s possible to take this too far, of course, and there always comes a time when the draft needs to be sent out to meet its fate. But even a break of a few weeks can have positive effect, especially if we’ve turned our attention to other projects in the meantime. And when we do finally go back to the work we’ve set aside, we’ll often find that it has evolved in our absence, when we weren’t even aware of it. Now that’s some intelligent design.

Do novelists have free will? Part 1

Recently, as part of a writing project I’m hoping to finish within the next couple of months, I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of free will. Free will, like consciousness, is a phenomenon that seems perfectly obvious in our everyday life but increasingly elusive the more we try to pin it down. As David Eagleman points out in his book Incognito, science has long since established that much of what we think of as our own intentions and behavior arise from parts of the brain that aren’t immediately accessible to conscious thought. In the famous Libet experiment, for instance, subjects were told to flick a finger at the time of their choosing, while recording what they perceived as the exact moment at which they decided to move. What Benjamin Libet discovered was that readiness potentials associated with muscle movement could be detected in the brain about half a second before the subjects were conscious of having made the decision. Later tests have found similar brain activity as much as seven seconds in advance—which implies that consciousness, at least under some circumstances, is really just a way of retrospectively rationalizing actions we’ve undertaken before we’re even aware of it.

To some extent, we all know how this feels. This morning, for instance, while mulling over today’s blog post, I brushed my teeth, showered, shaved—and then brushed my teeth again. Why? I don’t know. My eye happened to fall on the toothbrush by the sink, and without any conscious input whatsoever, my “brushing my teeth” subroutine was absentmindedly activated for the second time in twenty minutes. Later, I made coffee and my morning omelet, and it’s safe to say that I was operating mostly on autopilot: I was watching my daughter and thinking about what I was going to write at the same time, so I was more than happy to outsource my breakfast to a different part of my brain. This kind of automation is a necessary part of survival, as well as basic happiness: I’d go crazy if I had to consciously think over each step of such routine activities, much less to remind myself to breathe twelve times each minute. It’s far less comfortable to acknowledge that higher levels of our actions and behavior may be equally out of our control, but the more we try to grasp what we mean by free will, the more it seems to slip through our fingers.

Opponents of free will certainly have a strong case on their side. Every human thought or action arises from the firing of the brain’s neurons, which in turn are governed by the laws of physics, and attempts to explain consciousness by reference to quantum mechanics are really just a way of replacing one mystery with another. Go down far enough and we’re nothing but physical processes, and any event in the brain, big or small, can be traced back to another. Even if we’re willing to entertain the existence of a soul, this doesn’t solve the underlying problem of the unconscious roots of our influences and intentions, as Sam Harris notes in his little book Free Will: “If you don’t know what your soul is going to do next, you are not in control.” Harris writes elsewhere that most attempts to salvage the idea of free will begin with the premise that they want to prove, and that such efforts have more in common with theology than science or philosophy. And although Harris’s case is in some ways irrefutable, one is still tempted to respond to it in the same way that Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life, replied to the doctrine of idealism:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it—”I refute it thus.”

It might seem equally quaint to point to one’s subjective perception of free will and say: “I refute it thus.” But that’s really all most of the arguments in favor of free will can do—and make no mistake, it’s a powerful piece of evidence. What Daniel Dennett has called “our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions” is something we can’t easily dismiss. And although it’s far outside this scope of this blog to make a case one way or the other, I think it’s worthwhile to consider it through one particular lens: that of creative activity. At first glance, the act of writing a novel—or composing a symphony or executing a fresco—seems like a strong demonstration of willed, conscious activity: each book is a series of choices, executed over a long period of time and with a lot of reflection, constrained only by the artist’s ability. As much as any action in which human beings engage, the novel is an exercise in sustained consciousness that can take years to complete, and the result, however flawed it may be, can only be something that the author meant to do. Or can it? Tomorrow, I’ll be looking at the process of writing as an act of free will, and try to consider how much, or how little, it really explains.