THE THIRD CULTURE
"A BIG THEORY OF CULTURE"
A Talk with Brian Eno
What is cultural value and how does that come about? Nearly
all of the history of art history is about trying to identify
the source of value in cultural objects. Color theories, and dimension
theories, golden means, all those sort of ideas, assume that some
objects are intrinsically more beautiful and meaningful than others.
New cultural thinking isn't like that. It says that we
confer value on things. We create the value in things.
It's the act of conferring that makes things valuable. Now this
is very important, because so many, in fact all fundamentalist
ideas rest on the assumption that some things have intrinsic value
and resonance and meaning. All pragmatists work from another assumption:
no, it's us. It's us who make those meanings.
THE REALITY CLUB
Richard Saul Wurman on John Perry Barlow
Stuart Hameroff, Philip Anderson, Murray Gell-Mann on Stuart
Kauffman & Lee Smolin
(Stuart Hameroff): The model which Roger Penrose and I have
put forth ("orchestrated objective reduction - Orch OR") for brain
microtubules predicts conscious events which are rearrangements
of fundamental spacetime geometry — for example at the level
of Planck scale quantum spin networks. If experience is a fundamental
property of the universe, like mass, spin, charge (as proposed
by Wheeler —"pre-geometry", Chalmers and others) then qualia,
or proto-conscious experience must be embedded at the most basic
level.
(Philip Anderson):I found the Smolin-Kauffman piece extraordinarily
"ironic". One needs only to substitute angels for the things they
are counting and we're back in the Middle Ages.
Lee Smolin responds to Gell-Mann, Barbour, Hameroff, Anderson
On Murray Gell-Mann:
I certainly appreciate that there is a history of worrying
about both problems of constructibility in physics and about the
problem of time in path integral formalisms that I would like
to know more about. When I was an undergraduate Harold Morowitz
gave me some very good advice, which was to always follow the
scientific questions and be prepared to invent or adopt new techniques
whenever called for, rather than to stick with one approach because
one knows it.
On Julian Barbour:
However, Julian's argument that time disappears in a theory
of quantum cosmology is pretty strong. I think it can only be
defeated in two ways: by attacking the assumptions of the standard
approach and by constructing an alternative. In the work connected
with the paper with Stu we are trying to do both. One can also
understand the work of Gell-Mann, Hartle and others as an attempt
to formulate a version of quantum cosmology in which time plays
a role.
On Stuart Hameroff:
Whooosh, consciousness.... Let me say two things before anything
else: 1) there is no scientist I admire and respect more than
Roger Penrose and 2) I am far from convinced that science has
advanced to the point that consciousness is a scientific problem.
On Philip Anderson:
I have the impression Phil is complaining a bit too much.
I am sure I am not doing "ironic science", and would ask Phil
to look a little at the actual work and reconsider his comment.
I take it that Phil refers to John Horgan notion of ironic science,
which is science that has no hope of being tested experimentally.
I would like to explain that the paper with Stu comes out of a
line of work that has aimed at, and succeeded in, making definite
experimental predictions.
(10,347 words)
THE REALITY CLUB
Richard Saul Wurman on John Perry Barlow
From: Richard Saul Wurman
To: John Perry Barlow
Submitted: 3/28/97
JPB
ELEGANT/HUMAN/CLEAR/USEFUL BACK&FORTH DISCOURSE THOUGHT PREVOKING
FOR ME.
RICHARD SAUL WURMAN is the chairman and creative director of
the TED conferences (Technology, Entertainment, Design). He is
also an architect, a cartographer, the creator of the Access Travel
Guide Series, and the author and designer of more than sixty books,
including Information Architects, Follow the Yellow Brick Road,
and Information Anxiety.
Stuart Hameroff, Philip Anderson, Murray Gell-Mann on Stuart
Kauffman & Lee Smolin
From: Stuart Hameroff
To: Stuart Kauffman and Lee Smolin
Submitted: 3/28/97
REPLY TO KAUFFMAN AND SMOLIN'S SOLUTION FOR THE PROBLEM OF TIME
I congratulate Stuart Kauffman and Lee Smolin for some bold
thinking. In the context of my collaboration with Roger Penrose,
I offer the following comments:
The flow of time is a feature of consciousness. Outside of consciousness,
there may not be a flow of time. Consciousness provides the clock.
Consider Julian Barbour's time capsules. "Each experienced instant
of time is really a completely self contained entity, a time capsule....The
instant is not in time. Time is in the instant. There are just
lots of different nows..."
This is beautiful, but requires consciousness to *experience*
the instant. What is consciousness?
The model which Roger Penrose and I have put forth ("orchestrated
objective reduction - Orch OR") for brain microtubules predicts
conscious events which are rearrangements of fundamental spacetime
geometry — for example at the level of Planck scale quantum
spin networks. If experience is a fundamental property of the
universe, like mass, spin, charge (as proposed by Wheeler —"pre-geometry",
Chalmers and others) then qualia, or proto-conscious experience
must be embedded at the most basic level. Quantum spin networks
(first described by Penrose in 1971, and elaborated e.g. by Rovelli
and Smolin in 1995) are a representation of the most basic level
of reality, and therefore provide a possible "site" for proto-conscious
experience. If proto-conscious experience is indeed a "funda-mental"
property, where else but the Planck scale could it be embedded?
So consciousness, it is proposed, is a self-organizing process
at the level of quantum spin networks.
The particular self-organizing process is Penrose's "objective
reduction — OR" — Roger's quantum gravity solution to
the problem of the collapse of the wave function.
Basically, a quantum superposition which is isolated from environment
and avoids decoherence will continue to evolve according to the
Schrodinger equation, but only until reaching a threshold imposed
by quantum gravity. It then reduces, or collapses to discrete,
classical states.
The time until threshold is inversely related to the degree
of superposition — the amount of superposed mass and separated
spacetime— by E-h/T. E relates to the superposed mass, h
(actually hbar) is Planck's constant over 2pi, and T is the time
until reduction, or collapse. A large superposed system therefore
collapses quickly, a small system only after a long time (assuming
isolation in both cases). For example a one kilogram superposed
Schrodinger's cat — if isolated — would self-collapse
after only 10^-37 seconds. A single superposed atom — if
isolated — would self collapse only after 10^6 years !! Somewhere
in between these extremes are physiological brain processes in
the range of tens to hundreds of milliseconds. An OR brain process
in this range would require superposition of mass in the range
of nanograms.
The quantum gravity threshold is the "objective" criterion for
self-collapse. According to Roger it comes into play for the following
reason. In quantum superposition, mass (curvature in spacetime)
apparently exists simultaneously in two location, or states. Roger
takes this separation seriously, and observes that the underlying
spacetime geometry down to the Planck scale of spin networks also
separates — i.e. simultaneous curvatures in opposite directions.
A critical degree of spacetime separation becomes unstable, and
reduces, or collapses to a single geometry, or universe state.
Roger claims the separation reduces ("chooses") non-computably,
but only if it occurs by the OR quantum gravity process. If reduction
occurs by environmental decoherence — loss of isolation —
the classical states are chosen computably, as would generally
be the case in a technological quantum computer. (The "non-constructible"
process Stu and Lee mention may be Penrose's OR.)
Non-computable OR events are irreversible. A sequence of irreversible
events "ratchet forward in time", creating a direction in spacetime,
a subjective "flow" of time. Thus consciousness is a sequence
of conscious events.
Our model proposes that OR events are coupled to neurophysiological
processes, specifically at the level of microtubules in the brain's
neurons and glia. Microtubule-associated proteins "tune" the quantum
states, so we refer to the proposed process as "orchestrated objective
reduction — Orch OR". We have suggested that isolation and
coherence are maintained by cycles of actin gelation (for example
in concert with 40 Hz neural activity) and that macroscopic quantum
coherence among microtubules in widely distributed neurons and
glia occurs via gap junctions.
The proposed Orch OR conscious events resemble Barbour's "time
capsules", and both seem similar to events which the philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead described as "occasions of experience".
(Abner Shimony has observed that Whitehead "occasions" are suitable
descriptions of quantum events.) Discreteness in consciousness
may also account for reports by meditators of "flickerings" in
their consciousness, and relate to what Rodolfo Llinas has characterized
as 40 Hz "cognitive quanta".
If consciousness is a sequence of discrete events, apparent
aberrations in the subjective flow of time may be explained. The
basketball superstar Michael Jordan, when asked to account for
his astounding number of "moves" replied that when he is playing
well, time (or at least the other players) seem to slow down.
Accident victims often recount how time slowed down. In these
cases, the number of conscious events may be increased compared
to some standard frame of reference. Patients under general anesthesia
have no concept as to how long they were unconscious — or
them, time did not flow.
The two main points I'd like to make:
1) The flow of time is a feature of consciousness. Outside of
consciousness, there may not be a flow of time. Consciousness
provides the clock.
2) The Orch OR model suggests consciousness is a sequence of
self-organizing rearrangements of spacetime geometry at the level
of quantum spin networks.
In closing, I wonder if Stu Kauffman would comment on the possible
role of consciousness in evolution, and particularly the suggestion
that the appearance of primitive consciousness at the level of
small worms and urchins precipitated the Cambrian evolutionary
explosion 540 million years ago.
Stuart Hameroff
Relevant papers and references may be found at through this
link.
STUART HAMEROFF, MD is Professor, Departments of Anesthesiology
and Psychology, University of Arizona, and a collaborator with
Roger Penrose in proposing a specific model (orchestrated objective
reduction) in which quantum coherent superposition in brain microtubules
distorts space-time (via quantum gravity) to cause wave function
self-collapse, and instantaneous "now" events comprising a stream
of consciousness.
In addition to his research in consciousness, in 1994 he coorganized
an international, multidisciplinary conference "Toward a Scientific
Basis for Consciousness" held at the University of Arizona. He
is coeditor of Toward a Science of Consciousness - The First
Tucson Discussions and Debates, S. Hameroff, A. Kaszniak,
A Scott, Eds.
From: Philip Anderson
To: John Brockman
Submitted: 3/31/97
John,
I was a little disturbed that Murray did not object a little
to the introduction you gave the SFI. We have been trying very
hard to get the message out that we are primarily an institution
which does not indulge in "ironic science", in horgperson's phrase.
You made us sound a little less flaky than some journalists do,
but the aspect of postmodernism does hover over the examples of
our faculty you chose.
I also did want to comment that I found the Smolin-Kauffman
piece extraordinarily "ironic". One needs only to substitute angels
for the things they are counting and we're back in the Middle
Ages. I firmly believe that science is only what is subject to
empirical test, at least in some foreseeable future. Lee and Stu
are very bright people but they do not seem to understand this
objection to what they do, nor do they have much sesitivity to
the real concerns that lead many of us to be a little ambiguous
about Horgan's thesis.
PHILIP ANDERSON is a Nobel laureate physicist at Princeton and
one of the leading theorists on superconductivity.
From: Murray Gell-Mann
Submitted: 3/31/97
I didn't see the "introduction" to SFI to which Phil refers.
If it presents our institute as flaky, I object very strongly.
Please convey that message to Phil. We do have one or two flakes,
but generally speaking our work is quite respectable as well as
refreshing.
Murray
MURRAY GELL-MANN is a theoretical physicist; winner of the 1969
Nobel Prize in physics; a cofounder of the Santa Fe Institute,
where he is a professor and cochairman of the science board; a
director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation; author of
The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the
Complex.
From: Lee Smolin
Submitted: 4/1/97
Here are my comments to the responses:
First, to Murray's Gell-Mann's comment:
Of course I am aware of the work Jim Hartle, Murray and others
have done on decoherence as well as its possible applications
to the problem of time. At the same time, the approach we have
been taking recently has some new features, that offer a different
perspective on the basic interpretational issues in quantum gravity,
including the problem of time.
It is true that Jim and Murray may have a right to say "I told
you so" as I, as well as several others like Mike Reisenberger
and Carlo Rovelli, are now using path integral methods in quantum
gravity, which they have been doing for years. This puts our work,
which grew out of a line of work using the more traditional canonical
approach, in closer touch with theirs, which is good.
(I should explain to the readers that there are two approaches
to quantum mechanics, the first based on the canonical or hamiltonian
formalism, the second based on Feynman's path integral formalism.
So there are correspondingly two classes of approaches to quantum
gravity.)
However, our work is rather different the previous path integral
work, as it has grown out of a set of results that came from canonical
quantization. Of course, if all we were saying in this paper is
that path integral approaches offer some way out of the problem
of time in quantum cosmology that would not be available in a
canonical approach we would be repeating things they wrote many
years ago. But we are saying some new things, that I would hope
that they pay attention to. To repeat them briefly:
1) The kind of path integral we are contemplating has a special
form, which came out of work by and with Fotini Markopoulou, in
which each state goes in a finite time to a finite number of other
states. This makes it possible to apply certain analogies to statistical
mechanics problems like directed percolation and boolean networks,
which are not available for general path integral formalisms.
The particular point of the paper with Stu is that this gives
us new possibilities for the construction and interpretation of
the theory that were not available before.
2) The states that are propagated by the path integral are related
to those that came out of the canonical approach (these are the
spin network states). We know how to measure certain observables
in these states such as area and volume, thus the proposal is
much more specific then before. In particular, as we know the
state space, we can raise in detail problems of about the constructibility
of the state space, inner product and so forth. Such problems
may have been raised before in a general setting, now they are
being found in a particular approach to quantum gravity based
on quantization of general relativity on which many people are
working.
3) There are close connections between all the new proposals
for path integrals in quantum gravity made by Reisenberger, Rovelli,
Markopoulou and myself, Baez etc and an important mathematical
structure, which is topological quantum field theory in four dimensions.
As Louis Crane has been saying for some years (and he is the person
who has been leading that field) this opens up a new approach
to the interpretational issues in quantum cosmology, based on
the fact that in topological quantum field theory states are assigned
not to the whole of a closed universe, but to boundaries splitting
the universe into parts.
I certainly appreciate that there is a history of worrying about
both problems of constructibility in physics and about the problem
of time in path integral formalisms that I would like to know
more about. When I was an undergraduate Harold Morowitz gave me
some very good advice, which was to always follow the scientific
questions and be prepared to invent or adopt new techniques whenever
called for, rather than to stick with one approach because one
knows it. He forgot to tell me that when one does this one often
finds oneself working with some ideas that are new to you, but
have been the concern of other people for some time. I hope that
Murray, Jim and others who have been working on path integrals
for many years will see that we do have something new to contribute
to this direction, both technically and in terms of the various
interpretational problems. In turn I look forward to learning
more from them about things I certainly missed in their work.
To Julian Barbour's comment:
Julian's influence has been extremely important for myself and
others in figuring out how to think clearly about the hard issues
in quantum gravity. I certainly take his point of view very seriously,
and I agree with him about a great many things. But in the end
I can't accept his idea that the notion that there is a flow of
time is an illusion. My intuition is that a good theory of cosmology
should have time and causality in it as an essential element,
for reasons that I go into at length in my book. As a result,
I was very interested in Fotini Markopoulou's proposal that an
evolution rule be constructed for quantum gravity that has causality
built in at the fundamental level, which is how this work started.
However, Julian's argument that time disappears in a theory
of quantum cosmology is pretty strong. I think it can only be
defeated in two ways: by attacking the assumptions of the standard
approach and by constructing an alternative. In the work connected
with the paper with Stu we are trying to do both. One can also
understand the work of Gell-Mann, Hartle and others as an attempt
to formulate a version of quantum cosmology in which time plays
a role.
About the details of what Julian says: I think there may very
well be a problem with constructing the whole configuration space
of general relativity, because of the necessity of identifying
structures which are identical under diffeomorphisms. This may
very well give rise to a recognition problem for which there is
no finite procedure or which is at least NP complete. But as this
is a technical issue I won't go further into this here.
Certainly I agree with Julian that in the future we will know
more and that getting there will be a lot of fun. That's one reason
I believe in time.
To Stuart Hameroff's comments:
Whooosh, consciousness.... Let me say two things before anything
else: 1) there is no scientist I admire and respect more than
Roger Penrose and 2) I am far from convinced that science has
advanced to the point that consciousness is a scientific problem.
I think it very well may be the case that sometime in the future,
after we have solved some of the problems we seem to be able to
make progress on, we may very well have a language and conceptual
framework adequate to address the question of consciousness. But
I don't think we do now. So my attitude to the problem of consciousness
is to postpone it for future scientists. I think the problems
we are just now able to make progress with, such as the origin
of life or quantum gravity are hard enough. I also suspect that
their solution will change the way we understand the world so
much that questions that are presently out of bounds like consciousness
will look rather different.
I also believe strongly that we can solve problems like quantum
gravity and the origin of life without having to worry about consciousness.
I doubt very much that whatever consciousness is it has anything
to do with the basic quantum transitions between quantum states
of spacetime geometry. We seem to be able to do quite well without
any such notions.
Of course this does not mean that very smart and brave people
like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, or Daniel C. Dennett,
or others, may not be able to say provocative things about consciousness,
which may effect what they try to do in physics and mathematics.
And it certainly doesn't mean that neurobiologists may not make
a lot of progress understanding in detail what are the biological
processes associated with consciousness. But the deep philosophical
problems of "qualia" and so forth remain as far as I can tell,
beyond what we can discuss scientifically.
To Phil Anderson's comment:
I have the impression Phil is complaining a bit too much. I
am sure I am not doing "ironic science", and would ask Phil to
look a little at the actual work and reconsider his comment. I
take it that Phil refers to John Horgan notion of ironic science,
which is science that has no hope of being tested experimentally.
I would like to explain that the paper with Stu comes out of a
line of work that has aimed at, and succeeded in, making definite
experimental predictions. That paper by itself makes no predictions,
I would agree, but it is aimed at providing the context within
which further experimental predictions may be couched. I would
ask Phil to look at the whole body of work that this paper comes
from before making a judgement as to its "irony". I think I am
sufficiently "sensitive" to the need to connect theory to possible
experiment that I have spent much of the last ten years trying
to invent ways that ideas about quantum gravity could be subject
to test. I would like then to respond to Phil by explaining something
about what people have been able to do to connect ideas in quantum
gravity with experiment.
It is true that in quantum gravity we are dealing with questions
that are both ambitious and difficult. They are ambitious because
their solution may very well require modifying or replacing the
basic principles of quantum theory and/or relativity. They are
difficult because we cannot now do experiments at the Planck scale
and one must be inventive to do things that can in principle be
tested experimentally. But it is very possible to do work in quantum
gravity that makes experimental predictions. I would point to
several:
1) With Carlo Rovelli and others we have predictions of discrete
spectra for areas and volumes in quantum gravity. These are specific
predictions of the spectra; when it will be possible to measure
geometrical quantities to the accuracy of the Planck scale the
theory (which rests on very generic assumptions) will be easily
refutable. It should also be mentioned that the results of Rovelli
and myself on the discreteness of quantum geometry have been reproduced
as theorems in a mathematically rigorous formulation of quantum
gravity, so they have the same status as the CPT theorem and the
connection between spin and statistics in ordinary quantum field
theory.
2) In string theory there are detailed predictions as to the
behavior of high energy scattering, that would easily confirm
or disconfirm the theory.
3) String theory now makes detailed predictions about scattering
of radiation from certain classes of black holes, beyond the regime
where previous theory was reliable. Disconfirmation of any of
these would refute the theory.
4) There are detailed predictions of violations of CPT in scattering
of neutrinos in one version of quantum gravity, due to Chang and
Soo.
5) Given simple and widely discussed conjectures about what
happens at the singularities of a black hole, one can make detailed
predictions about astrophysical consequences of varying the parameters
of low energy physics. As these are discussed in detail in my
book I will not dwell on them, except to say that there are testable
consequences, for example, for the upper mass limit of neutron
stars. This is to say there are hypotheses about quantum gravity
that would be refuted by the discovery of a 3 solar mass neutron
star. Some versions of this theory are already refuted.
These are not the only examples, but I think they are enough.
(for more details I have a paper on "Experimental predictions
from quantum gravity"which can be found on the lanl.gov archive
at gr-qc/9503027.) It is true that many (but by no means all)
of these experiments must await improvements of technology, so
that we can do experiments at the Planck scale. But to be ironic
there must be no reasonable hope of ever doing such experiments
and I don't think this would be a reasonable position. There are
now proposals to build a satellite that will improve the resolution
of measurements of the cosmic black body radiation to the point
that details of inflationary models can be tested; this involves
the physics of the grand unified scale which is only four or so
orders of magnitude away from the Planck scale. We also now have
detected cosmic rays with 10 to the 19 electron volts energy.
These are both much closer to the Planck scale than one may have
guessed. I don't think it is at all impossible that clever people
will invent ways to deduce information about Planck scale physics
from observation; there are always new ideas about how to push
the limits on the testability of theory. A recent paper of Coleman
and Glashow about how to use cosmic rays to test special relativity
to much higher precision than previously thought is an example.
I think it is reasonable to go ahead and work on quantum gravity
with the expectation that some time in the next century people
will be doing experiments that test predictions about Planck scale
physics.
A reasonable person might wonder whether it might not be better
to wait till then before attacking quantum gravity seriously.
In principle they might have been right, but some of us have been
going ahead any way, and what we have found is that the problem
of combining the principles of general relativity and quantum
field theory is constrained enough that one gets definite experimental
predictions out. Thus, it seems it is possible to do good science
now in quantum gravity, and collect a set of predictions that
we hope will stimulate experimental physicists and observational
astronomers to develop methods to check them. This is good old
old fashioned science, as I understand it, nothing ironic or postmodern
about it.
I can't say very much on Phil's other comments. I don't understand
why people at SFI seem so worried about its image, it is clear
to me, and I would think to most scientists, that it is a very
impressive and exciting place. I know of a lot of good science
going on there, and I've found it a very stimulating place to
visit. I've learned a lot there that has helped my work in astrophysics,
stimulated thoughts about directions in quantum gravity and given
me a way to talk and collaborate with people about problems in
theoretical biology and statistical physics. I highly approve
of the place, if there are a few journalists who don't I suspect
it is because they misunderstood what the place is about to begin
with.
LEE SMOLIN is a theoretical physicist; professor of physics
and member of the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry
at Pennsylvania State University; author of The Life of The
Cosmos (Oxford, forthcoming).
THE THIRD CULTURE
"A BIG THEORY OF CULTURE"
A Talk With Brian Eno
Introduction By Stewart Brand
Here's what I greatly appreciate about Brian Eno, apart from
the pleasure I take from his friendship and from the pure delight
of his music and art...
Like all significant artists, Brian works from a deep and complex
and evolving frame of reference. Unlike most artists, and like
most scientists, he talks about that frame of reference. He's
not worried that your experience of his art might be sullied by
your understanding something about what he's up to — rather
the opposite: he would like to include you in the process.
This is risky, but valuable. It's risky because once viewers
or listeners know what the artist is attempting, they have criteria
for judging when he has failed.
Brian's approach is valuable because it is so inviting. The
informed viewer or listener is invited to think like an artist
and therefore in a sense to become an artist. This is good for
art and good for civilization.
I think that's what makes Brian's book, A Year With Swollen
Appendices, so appealing. Brian is famous, and that makes
us interested, and he's charming in print as well as in person,
so we engage him comfortably. But what gets us about the book
is how revealing it is. We see what a good artist does with his
mind all day. It's inspiring.
There's a further benefit to telling all, this time to the artist.
By not keeping his frame of reference secret, Brian is freed from
binding allegiance to whatever he was thinking when he first became
successful. You don't cling to secrets you've told. You move on,
and your work keeps being surprising as a result. Maybe this approach
works best with artists who are easily bored. Brian is, after
all, the author/composer/performer of the tune (now a well-known
meme), "Been there, done that."
Stewart Brand
BRIAN ENO studied art prior to moving to London in 1969 to join
Roxy records where he began making and producing records.In the
late 1970s he picked up his visual art activities again and began
making installations with light, video, slides, and sound.
He has produced U2, Talking Heads and Devo and collaborated
with David Bowie, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson. Over the past
10 years he has had 10 group shows and 33 individual shows of
his audio/video installations in cities throughout the world.
He is the author of A Year With Swollen Appendices (Faber
& Faber).-
"A BIG THEORY OF CULTURE"
A Talk With Brian Eno
JB: Let's talk about your theory of culture.
ENO: I guess the question I've always been really interested
in, the one that underlies all the others, is alluded to somewhat
in my book and I've written about it more since, which is to try
to find a big theory about culture: why people do culture, what
it does for us, what we actually call culture, which things do
we include in that category, and which things do we leave out.
I have two intentions in thinking about this. One is that I want
to find a single language within which one can talk about fashion,
cake decoration, Cezanne, abstract paintings, architecture —
within which one can discuss any what one might call nonfunctional,
stylistic behavior — which is what humans actually spend
more and more of their time doing. The better off humans are,
the more time they spend engaged in issues of style, essentially
— making choices between one look of things and another look
of things. The first question is to say "is there one language
within which we can talk about all of those things?" There doesn't
have to be a separate language for fine art, so-called, separate
from anything else we talk about. There should be one language
that fits these things together.
The second question is to try to say "is there a way of understanding
why humans continuously and constantly and without exception engage
in cultural activity?" We don't know of human groups that don't
produce something that we would call art. It seems to be something
that we are biologically inclined to do. If we are, then what
is the nature of that drive? What is it doing for us? When people
say, well surely this has been written about, what I say is, actually
it hasn't, really. The number of books on this subject is vanishingly
small. They occupy a shelf about 18" long. What has been done
is a huge sort of taxonomy of cultural artifacts; people sort
of listing things and saying that looks a bit like that, and these
seem to belong together, and so on and so on. But I always say
that this is a little bit like natural history before Darwin came
along. Before Darwin there were lots of observations, there were
people noticing all of these things existed, making careful notes
about them, talking about them, saying that this related to this,
this was higher than that or lower than that, and making all the
sorts of judgments and observations that people now make about
cultural behavior. When Darwin came along, what he said was very
simple, very easy for anyone to understand, — and extremely
profound, because it gave one language — the language of
survival and the drive to survival and selection and so on. He
gave one language in which one could frame all of the things called
living organisms. By doing that, it made that subject not just
a way of collecting heaps of material, but of actually making
theories about that material. In a way he brought to an end the
sort of gathering stage of natural history, the stage where the
job of a natural historian was just to go out and make observations,
and he brought into being the next phase, which was the task of
somehow relating things together and making extrapolations and
predictions, and saying if this happens, we might expect that
this would happen. That's the job of science.
JB: But you're an artist. Why are we talking about Darwin?
ENO: Most of the questions I'm interested in about art and culture
really are based on trying to look at them with some kind of big
theory of that kind, which is not oblique, not mysterious, is
quite easily graspable, and would allow a real discussion about
culture. It's partly because I think most art writing is absolutely
appallingly bad.
My first mother-in-law, that's to say the mother of my first
wife, was a very interesting woman who lived in Cambridge, and
had a salon, at which quite a lot of very good scientists would
appear, Francis Crick, John Kendrew, Herman Bondi, among others.
Her name was Joan Harvey and she ran a thing called the Cambridge
Humanists. She's a very bright and interesting woman. I met her
daughter, and was taken home, and got along very well with Joan.
I was 17 at the time. One day Joan said to me, it's all very well
what you do, but I just don't understand why someone with a brain
as good as yours wants to waste it being an artist. This question
cut me to the quick in a way. I came from was working-class where
nobody particularly cared what you did. It was the first time
that anyone had ever cared. Then I fell in with a lot of arty
people, who of course assumed that being an artist was a wonderful
thing, and never bothered to ask the question about why —
about what the point of it might be, or what it actually did for
anybody. Joan asked that question, and I never stopped thinking
about it. That was the beginning of an interesting double life,
because part of my life of course is being an artist, but the
other part, and just as interesting to me, is wondering what it
is I'm doing, or what everybody else is doing asking what
it's for.
JB: How do you think the arts and the sciences differ?
ENO: If you asked 20 scientists what they thought they were
doing, or what they thought the point of science was, I would
think that most of them would come up with an answer something
like, we want to understand the world, we want to see how the
world works. If you asked 20 artists the same question —
what are you doing it for, what does art do for us — I guarantee
you'll get about 15 different answers, and the other five will
tell you to mind your own business. There is no consensus whatsoever
about what art is there for although some people will say, well,
it's to make life more beautiful.
Here I am, an artist — who reads mostly science books —
like most other artists. I know very few artists who read books
about art. Why, I ask myself, is there not a conversation of that
quality in the arts? Many artists normally are talking about science,
they're not talking about art — there is not a developed
language, for having a conversation about the arts.
I'm gradually arriving at some sort of a theory of culture that
is getting a few adherents now. I've been talking about it awhile,
and I've slimmed it down enough that it is communicable in less
than two days.
The first assumption is that all human groups engage in something
that we would call artistic behavior — if they are at all
capable of it, that is if they are beyond the most basic problems
of survival — and even when they aren't, they will engage
in decorative, ornamental, and often very complex stylistic behavior.
This takes a big chunk of their resources — it takes a lot
of energy. So the first question is, why would that be the case?
If it is the case, one would assume that it's doing something
more than just mildly entertaining — it's doing something
important for us.
The second assumption is this thing I mentioned earlier about
assuming that culture is in some sense a unified field, in the
same sense that life is a unified field. So that one wants to
come up with a language, just as biologists want to come up with
a language within which you can discuss whales and amoebas without
having to invent a whole new set of terms for them each of them.
You want to have some structure underneath that would say, yes,
we can locate those things within the same pantheon of possibilities.
JB: So is this an artistic analogue to a unified field theory?
ENO: I want to find a way of talking about culture, so therefore
if I talk about it, I have to be able to include everything from
what's considered the most ephemeral, menial, and unimportant
version of culture — haircuts, shoe designs — to what
are considered the most hallowed and eternal examples of it. Now
when I try to think about what it does for us, I try to think
what happens to you in certain specific situations. For example,
let's take this pair of designer sunglasses that happen to be
on the table in front of me. They're very styled. They don't have
to be like that. Glasses don't have to be funny, oval, weird-shaped
looking glasses, space-age type glasses. As I put those glasses
on, I'm not only keeping sun out of my eyes. I'm also engaging
in some kind of game with myself and the rest of the world. What
I'm doing is I'm entering into some kind of simulator. I'm saying,
"what would it be like to be the kind of person that wears these
kinds of glasses?" What I mean by that is, I'm not actually abandoning
who I am and becoming somebody else; I'm for a while entering
into a game where I suddenly become this person that's a different
person from the person you've just been talking to.
With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else.
We play at inhabiting another kind of world. If I decide to cut
my hair short and dress like a tank commander, I play with the
resonances of kitsch, militaria, dominance, and surrender , and
control, and strength and weakness and all those sorts of things
— I'm role-playing effectively, when I'm making fashion choices.
If I go to a cinema and I look at a film, what I do is take
part in another kind of role-playing. I first of all watch a world
being constructed, and if the film is any good I understand what
the conditions and rules of that world are, and then I watch a
few people who represent certain sets and bundles of characteristics,
and I see what they do and how they relate to that world. Essentially
what I'm watching is a kind of experiment that's been set up.
I'm watching what would it be like if the world was like this,
and what would it be like if this kind of person met that kind
of person in that kind of context?
JB: Is this something one does consciously?
ENO: This kind of playing with other worlds, this ability to
move from the world in my head to the possible world in your head,
and all the other millions of possible worlds that we can imagine,
is something that humans do with such fluency, and such ease,
that we don't notice ourselves doing it. We only notice how powerful
that process is when we meet people who can't do it — severely
autistic children, for instance, who are incapable of switching
worlds — who in many senses can appear completely intelligent,
but they are incapable of seeing that there is any world other
than the one that they perceive at this moment. This makes them
incapable of two very important things: they can't cooperate easily,
because to cooperate you have to understand not only your world,
but the world of the person with whom you're cooperating, because
you're trying to make a new common world, so you have to see where
the other two worlds are. And they can't deceive. Autistic children
also are incapable of deception, because they could not understand
how they could create a situation in which you could see a different
world from the one that they believe exists.
To a very large degree, cooperation and deception are the two
things that distinguish human beings from the other animals. We
have noticed now that some of the higher primates have the rudiments
of cooperation and deception, but compared to ours they really
are very rudimentary. My argument is that what the constant engagement
in culture does for us, is that it enables us to continually rehearse
this ability we have — the use of this big part of our brain
that is involved in postulating, imagining, exploring, extrapolating
other worlds, either individually or cooperatively.
This is the point at which there is a deep connection between
art and science: each is a highly organized form of pretending;
of saying "let's see what would happoen if the world was like
this."
JB: Let's move on to your ideas about metaphors.
ENO: "The other worlds theory" you might say, is one part of
my idea. The other part is what I call "the metaphors theory."
Humans actually codify most of their knowledge not in terms of
mathematical tables, sets of statistics and scientific laws, but
in terms of metaphors. Most of the things we normally have to
deal with understanding are complex, fuzzy, messy, changing, and
in fact poorly delineated. We don't actually know where the boundaries
of them are, let alone being able to make clear questions about
them. We spend a lot of our time as ordinary humans navigating
through complicated situations with one another, that require
constant negotiation, and constant new attempts to understand.
Science is, of course, one extreme version of this process.
Science works by trying to say, okay, I can separate off this
piece of the world from the rest. Effectively we can say, I've
separated that off, and then I can make some theories and predictions
about it. Science therefore enables us to come up with a structure
upon which we can build useful metaphors. This is why artists
are interested in science — it's because science keeps coming
up with big ideas, like chaos, like complexity, that we then think,
ah yes, perhaps that's how a lot of things work. Then we have
a new metaphor. We don't have to fully understand the science
that made that metaphor.
A lot of those kinds of metaphors derive from science, but a
lot of them derive from literature, poetry, music. We live in
a big construction of metaphors —nearly all of our knowledge
is rather fuzzy in that sense. One of the things that artists
do is invent metaphors, break up metaphors, challenge them, pull
them apart, put them together in new order and so on. One of the
things art does also is to remind you constantly of this process
that you're most of the time engaged in — the process of
metaphor-making. I am interested in the work of George Lakoff.
I thought that Metaphors We Live By was a very interesting
book, because it pulls you away from the old model of the mind
having two departments, the rational department and the kind of
intuitive department. It says, no, it's not quite like that, it
says there's a continuum, that there are places where we can be
strictly rational, such as when I'm doing my accounts with my
calculator, when I'm making precise estimates of how I'll make
something and what it'll be like. I can use all of the purely
rational tools for that. But then there's a whole continuum, which
is actually unbroken as far as I can see, where at the one end
I can be entirely rational, then I can be pretty logical but I
have to make a few guesses, right down to another end here where
it's pure hunch. It's absolutely pure hunch.
JB: How does it all come together. Or, does it come together
at all?
ENO: Mostly we're given the impression that there are just these
two separate ways of doing things. However, I believe that one
is constantly navigating along that whole spectrum. And that process
of navigation is a process of donning different kinds of metaphor,
accepting the usefulness of different kinds of metaphor. Once
again this hasn't been really worked on by art writers.
Again, any of the interesting work on this has been done from
the position of science, and has therefore tended to want to address
that end of the spectrum of things. If I drew that spectrum of
the highly rational to the highly intuitive, what I would have
to say is that we don't spend much of our time at either of those
extremes. We spend most of our time negotiating somewhere along
the middle.
You have art writers who constantly celebrate the "intuition"
extreme, and think that this is the sort of apex of human existence,
and you have scientists who by default almost dignify the other
one. That's where they live, or that's where they'd like to live.
They want to be able to make the kind of statements that push
that boundary. What I would like to see is a conversation that
admits that we spend most of our time somewhere in the middle,
and we ought to find a way of thinking about it.
I suppose at the root of all this is the feeling that possibly
the only way that humans can remain cooperative is by those of
us who are artists or who are interested in the arts realizing
that we have some kind of a job to do. It's no good any more as
far as I'm concerned for artists to just take the Bohemian attitude
of, oh, it just comes out of me, and I don't know what I'm doing,
etc. I just can't stand that, I don't want this romantic attitude
that says artists shouldn't be part of this planet. This is a
real job, and it has to do something.
JB: How do you do this job?
ENO: I wrote to Richard Dawkins recently who had just given
The Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC1 (/......) in which he said
that England always celebrates the arts, and doesn't celebrate
the sciences. In fact he's right; there is a sort of liberal humanistic
culture here which acts like art is wonderful and science is something
that people should just get on with, and tell us when you've come
up with a new washing machine or something. He gave the impression
in his lecture that there was therefore a much better understanding
of the arts than of the sciences, and I said I felt exactly the
reverse was true, that people had a very poor understanding of
the arts, and the reason they could happily waffle on about it
was because their waffle was unchallengeable. There's such a poor
conversation about it that you can say whatever crap you want
to, and nobody's going to call you on it. The other thing is that
everybody recognizes the power of science. We recognize the power
of cloning technologies, of nuclear weapons and so on. Everybody
knows that science is powerful and could be dangerous, therefore
there's a whole lot of criticism on that basis. What people don't
realize is that culture is powerful and could be dangerous too.
As long as culture is talked about as though it's a kind of nice
little add-on to make things look a bit better in this sort of
brutal life we all lead, as long as it's just seen as the icing
on the cake, then people won't realize that it's the medium in
which we're immersed, and which is forming us, which is making
us what we are and what we think.
Dawkins wrote back saying my letter came at a good time because
what he's thinking about more and more is memes, rather than genes,
and of course memes is what culture is about. Culture is the landscape
of memes.
JB: What prompted you to contact him?
ENO: I had written a short letter. I'm sure he gets loads of
mail, I didn't want to burden him, especially after a television
lecture. But the appalling thing is that when you find out how
much mail people do get, it's virtually zero. One of the things
that changed my life a few years ago was listening to a radio
program we have on Sunday evening called "In Committee." It's
the reports of the parliamentary select committees, which like
your American committees have the task of addressing particular
issues and then making a recommendation. There had been one very
hot issue which was about whether there should be a third nuclear
power station in a particular area. It had been a big media thing
for months and months. Finally the report came, and the chairman
of the committee read the report, and he said that well, in the
six months that the committee has been sitting we've had a tremendous
public response on this issue. We've received almost 150 letters.
I was amazed! — this constitutes a terrific response? You
suddenly realize actually that a letter can make a difference.
What makes a difference is knowing that somebody's listening,
and paying attention. I've written a few things for papers and
so on, and what counts is knowing that the conversation has gotten
through. I don't care about the figures, that the piece reached
500,000 readers — for it doesn't make any difference if they
didn't read it. But if you know that it reached two or three,
and you then enter into a conversation with them, then that's
made a difference. I'm sure you know that.
JB: Where do you see yourself going with these ideas?
ENO: One of the understandings I look for is anything that starts
to take seriously the culture that ordinary people make. I find
this in books such as Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
and How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. It's important
to seek to dignify and take seriously what people who don't consider
themselves experts and professionals do with their time. I would
want to see the same thing done culturally, that we start to recognize
that people are cultural beings. They can't help themselves. It's
not a question of making a decision to become an artist. You can't
help yourself, to some extent. That's an important psychological
step, because it says to people: you do it.
There's another level at which I would like to say that much
more profoundly; it's something I didn't talk about at all because
it's a difficult issue to explain. What is cultural value and
how does that come about? Nearly all of the history of art history
is about trying to identify the source of value in cultural objects.
Color theories, and dimension theories, golden means, all those
sort of ideas, assume that some objects are intrinsically more
beautiful and meaningful than others. New cultural thinking isn't
like that. It says that we confer value on things. We
create the value in things. It's the act of conferring that makes
things valuable. Now this is very important, because so many,
in fact all fundamentalist ideas rest on the assumption that some
things have intrinsic value and resonance and meaning. All pragmatists
work from another assumption: no, it's us. It's us who make those
meanings.
Culture is a way of getting people to that point of understanding.
The work of a lot of modern culture is to say to people: you're
making value. When Marcel Duchamp exhibited a lavatory, in what
he called an act of deliberate aesthetic indifference, what he
was saying was, "look, I can put anything in an art gallery, and
I can get you to engage with that thing in a way which makes it
valuable." He was quite clearly saying that it's the transaction
between you and it, and this context, which creates the value.
This is something that anyone who deals with world finances
would probably understand; value is conferred and the result of
a system of confidences among people. But it is not something
that religions generally understand. It is certainly not something
that fundamentalists understand. For me, so many of the really
critical bottleneck type problems of our time come from that difficulty
of understanding — that it's humans that make the value in
things. It didn't get there, it wasn't in there, it isn't there
all the time, it wasn't made by somebody else and it's left there
for us to find it. We made it. We put it there.
The engagement with culture is a way of understanding that.
Of course, art history of the past has always used it to buttress
that old idea — ah yes, Michelangelo's Pieta is beautiful
because these proportions have some kind of divine golden mean
type resonance, and it communicates through to us — the value
is in the thing and we're like a radio receiver. That transmitter/receiver
model is an old picture which I don't accept any more. The value
is in the transaction. The object itself can be almost irrelevant
— as was Duchamp's lavatory. He could have chosen a spade,
or a bicycle wheel, in fact. What he did was create the situation
where he said, here, viewer, come in and make some value. And
a lot of 20th century art has been about that — about reminding
us that we make things valuable — that they don't preexist
in a valuable state.
