Unpredictable Patterns #30: Borges and the compass
On truth, Babel, gibberish and underlying patterns in information spaces (Summer Note no 3).
Dear reader,
The nights are getting longer, but autumn is still waiting. Tonight there is a blood moon here in the small village of Storhogna in Northern Sweden, and I am just back from a long hike, some swimming in a mountain lake and a lovely dinner. I find that I needed recharging, more than I though — there is something about the monotony of the screen that silently has been wearing us down, I suspect. In this summer note we discuss Borges, the enigmatic and brilliant author of so many insightful pieces on the world we live in.
Our need for a compass
Let’s start with the poem, directly. Borges translated.
A Compass
All things are words belonging to that language
In which Someone or Something, night and day,
Writes down the infinite babble that is, per se,
The history of the world. And in that hodgepodge
Both Rome and Carthage, he and you and I,
My life that I don’t grasp, this painful load
Of being riddle, randomness, or code,
And all of Babel’s gibberish stream by.
Behind the name is that which has no name;
Today I have felt its shadow gravitate
In this blue needle, in its trembling sweep
Casting its influence toward the farthest strait,
With something of a clock glimpsed in a dream
And something of a bird that stirs in its sleep.
/Translated from the Spanish by Robert Mezey/
The interested reader can find, in Jorge Luis Borges works, meditations on not just our human condition in general, but on the human condition in a world to be constantly deciphered and re-interpreted through a haze of data. His famous short story about the library of Babel describes the narrative arch of the Internet well:
”When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist-somewhere in some hexagon. The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind’s hope […]That unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly disproportionate depression. The certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable.”
We are now in that ”disproportionate depression” - also called the techlash - that Borges refers to and our reaction to the loss of the hope that the Internet could not solve all of our problems has blinded us to the fact that it is a part of the solution to almost all of them.
At the heart of our challenges is the idea that the poem captures so well — that we live in ”infinite babble” and that ”all of Babel’s gibberish” is streaming by - but the poem also notes, quietly, that this is the history of the world and our own burden of being.
The intriguing part of Borges’ poem is the notion of the compass - of something behind, something that lacks name and still can cast its influence, a pattern, perhaps, that we merely sense, but cannot quite grasp. And the idea of a compass that captures it.
It opens a question for us - what is to the infosphere on the Internet as the magnetic field is to the earth? What is that underlying constancy and direction? What is to the Internet as magnetic north is to a compass?
One answer, and it is an unpopular one, would be the truth. But we have lost faith in the truth and for us it has, at best, become ”a clock glimpsed in a dream” or a ”bird that stirs in its sleep” - something with the regularity of the clock and the easy flight of the bird, the trustworthiness of the mechanics in the watch and the beauty of the bird lost forever.
What compass could we rely on to point us to the farthest strait of truth in the gibberish and babble that overwhelm us everyday? That is one of the remaining, open and most difficult issues of the Internet age - the question of how we build verisimilitude into our technology.
Do you believe in the truth?
The idea of truth, hidden, behind an infinity of words or a code, a riddle or in the deep randomness of the web is an intriguing one - and a provocative one. We have, perhaps, at least to some degree, lost our relationship with truth and no longer find it a valuable end in itself.
Think about it. Do you think that there is a truth to be discovered? Or do you think that truth is just negotiated? What does your landscape of truth look like? A lot of us live in an archipelago of opinion, with islands of truth appearing more as exceptions than regular features of that landscape. Sure - we may say - there are truths in physics, or in mathematics. But truth in social science? Truth in law or psychology? Surely not.
Is this how you view things? Is truth confined to the hard sciences, the natural science, and banned from the humanities? Why do you find this a reasonable stance? Because the humanities are subjective and the natural sciences objective? That seems far to facile and simplistic - doesn’t it? We know that even in physics the views of what is true have changed, and many physicists still find it difficult to reconcile the findings of quantum physics with the rough and heavy-handed distinction between subjective and objective.
Let’s speak about morals. Do we believe that there are such things as moral truths? That there is such a thing as wrong and right? If we feel deep within ourselves, do we sense the shadow of right pull us in one direction rather than another? Do we, indeed, have such a thing as a moral compass, attuned to the underlying ethical fields of existence?
These questions matter more in a society enjoying information abundance than one that suffers from information scarcity. Where there is little or no information, truth is simply what you can dig up and you treasure the knowledge you can acquire as the key to the universe. It is true, because it is what there is! Scarcity is much more accommodating to truth than abundance.
In a society characterized by Herbert Simon’s ”information wealth” we do not only suffer from attention poverty, we also suffer from truth deficiency. The reason is that the data can be combined into too many possible propositions for us to even know how we filter the truth from the possible universes we can construct. Dave Weinberger’s wry observation that there is, for every fact, a counter-fact is at the heart of this problem.
Borges compass is a reminder that there may be something underneath of all the data, and that it may cast its influence in our lives if we sensitize ourselves to its pull. We all have that compass - but it is not a cognitive function as much as an emotive one, and that is another reason we have messed up our view of truth. We believe it is found by reason alone.
Emotional truths
Is truth discovered or constructed? This insufficient dichotomy leaves us debating an impossible distinction - we end up dragging ourselves down either simplistic models of the universe with a truth that is revealed by reason or God, or we end up declaring all truth relative and merely a beautifully working machine amongst many possible designs.
But what of the emotional side of truth? Does it feel true? Western medieval logic confined us to propositional analysis and the syllogism, and we ended up thinking that it was only in the depths of logic that we could discover truth - yet we know that emotion plays a central role in the question of truth.
If something is declared true, but we don’t feel it - it seems to be lacking a certain quality.
This is dangerous territory, because it is so simple to just declare that feeling long determines what is true. I don’t like it so it cannot be true, declares the fanatic - and that is not what we are aiming for her. What we want to highlight is rather that something that is really true also resonates with us emotionally.
This is why truth and beauty are so closed aligned in the classical mind. Beauty clearly relies heavily on our emotional assessment, but the path from beauty to truth is not cut off at any point, leaving emotion behind. No, it is continuous, and truth is connected with beauty in a network of concepts, a set of language games, in a way that seems to recognize what the modern rational mind has chosen to suppress: that we know the feeling of truth when we perceive it.
It takes training, just as our aesthetics need training, but maybe, just as a musician can be trained to hear the key a piece is played in, we can also train ourselves to recognize beauty and truth?
Building compasses
Why should we care about whether we believe in the truth? Because if we believe that there is truth, that there is an analogue to magnetic north in the babble and gibberish that coalesces into our everyday, then we can also believe in Borges compass. An instrument that can help us orient ourselves.
And it doesn’t have to be a perfect tool. The beauty of Borges compass is that it is not described as machine, but first as a clock in a dream - a mechanical device but not perceived in the cause and effect of the day to day, the waking state - and then as a bird, asleep, stirring. It lives, in a sense, and requires that we use great caution when deploying it.
And with it we can perhaps make sense of Rome and Carthage - the great conflict between our societies - as well as the individual lives we live, even when they seem random riddles or codes.
I sometimes think that if Borges had learnt about neural networks with trillions of weights, and the ability they have to find something that could be the truth underneath all of our meandering thoughts, from time to time, he could have declared that he had found his compass.
Maybe this is the thing: that we need to design ways to glimpse the truth, the thing behind the names, behind the things that are words. But this seems to suggest another difficulty; if we rely on something so fleeting and mysterious as Borges compass (or modern machine learning models) to help us uncover truths, then we need to also readjust our expectations of how we uncover the truth.
The ancient oracles spoke only the truth, but in riddles - and those riddles needed to be deciphered and understood, integrated into the everyday life of the one seeking out their advice. If they failed to do so they would realize too late what the oracle’s truth was. Oracular truth requires that we, with Rilke’s admonition, must change our lives.
It is an intriguing aspect of the problem of truth. Asking if there is such a thing as truth is different than asking if we should choose to live as if there is. If we must change our lives to live them as if there is a truth out there waiting for us to discover it.
When we bemoan that there is no such thing as a common baseline of facts, maybe what we should be bemoaning is the unwillingness of any of us to live as if there were such a baseline? This is, in a sense, an echo of Dostoyevsky’s insight; if there is no God all is permissible - but we only need to assume, not prove, God to change permissions again. Nietzsche’s declaration that God was dead, was, in a sense, not a denial of the possibility of rules - but a shift of the burden of proof to us.
Nietzsche famously derided the nihilists by saying that he had them by their ”sittfliesch”, their fat behinds. They did half the job, declared that the previous anchor of truth had been unmoored and then sat back, on their hands, congratulating themselves on their cleverness. Nietzsche thought them charlatans for this - and declared that we had to do our own anchoring now.
Borges compass is not an anchor, but something more refined - it is the recognition of an underlying regularity - the shadow of something behind the names without a name - that can exert its influence on us. It is a much more human truth that then one imposed on us by old religion.
But it is still a truth.
The challenge
Web services often note that they do not wish to become the arbiters of truth. The rejoinder back to them is that, well, if not them - who? This may be unfair, because it places them in an old model - forces them to become anchors.
But what if we instead said that we do not wish for anchors, we do not wish for arbiters, but we do need a compass?
That seems to me to be an exciting challenge, as well as a reasonable expectation.
As always, thanks for reading. We have a few more week of summer notes before we go back to the more regular pace and content!
Nicklas