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fractals and information; language and consciousness
I brought Rudy Rucker's Seek!: Selected Nonfiction with me on my Milwaukee trip and, as I said over there in the sidebar, I found it a pretty good "geek vacation book": heady enough to be interesting, breezy enough to be fun.
At times, though, Rucker seems to fail to fully think through his arguments before setting them down on the page. This is most notable in the book's final section, "Art," where he makes a few attempts to talk about literature by viewing it through the lens of information theory or chaos theory. This might be a promising approach, if handled with intellectual rigor, and so it's especially disappointing to find the arguments here particularly flimsy.
For example:
"In [both paintings and novels], the information has a kind of fractal structure. I would define a fractal as something that has this property: when you look twice as hard at a fractal, you see three times as much. Language is fractal with words suggesting words suggesting words, while paintings are fractal with their details within details within details. A basic problem is that in either case only a limited amount of information is really being given. Fractal nature has an essentially infinite precision, but a novel or a painting is radically finite. ... The seeming reality of a novel or a painting is an artful construct that only pops into focus at a certain distance. It is only the cosmic fractal of real life that allows for endless zooming."
I think that the point that Rucker's making here is that the "reality" in a novel isn't truly fractal, that you can't immerse yourself in deeper and deeper layers of that world. You can't "endlessly zoom in" on it. Fair enough—but initially, when he's describing why he thinks of language as fractal in the first place, he says that the key piece are those "words suggesting words suggesting words." By this I take him to mean the chains of association and allusion that language triggers in the head of the reader: if this is in fact what he means then a novel is, essentially, infinite, by the way that it engages symbiotically with (fractal) human consciousness. The depth of the novel's world is almost irrelevant, what matters is the resonance and complexity of the triggered associations. One could argue that Finnegans Wake is the perfect example of a fractal novel and simultaneously argue that the book makes little or no effort to establish the "artful construct" of "seeming reality."
Then there's his re-working of information theory into an aesthetic philosophy:
"What is information? [Claude] Shannon measured information in 'bits.' If someone answers a single yes-or-no question, they are giving you one bit of information. Two yes/no questions are two bits. ... He estimated written English as carrying about seven bits per word, meaning that if a random word is excised from a text, you can usually guess it by asking seven yes-or-no questions. ... In a crap genre books, generated by a low-complexity intelligence with a very short runtime, the information per word is going to be low, maybe as low as three or four bits. In a high-complexity work the information per word will be higher...
"The point of all this is that a pattern's information level is a quantity that is absolute and not relative. The pattern can be a book, a record album, or a person's conversation. If I say something is boring, it's not just my cruelty speaking. It's objective fact. It may be that the book really is stupid and boring, as can be witnessed by the fact that the book has a very low information-theoretic complexity."
Tempting, but I don't agree that boring/interesting is really a question of mathematics (much less stupid/intelligent). Again the piece that seems to be missing is the element of human consciousness and the way that art interfaces with it.
"Boredom + attention = becoming interested" —John Cage
"[W]hat some see as a single moment repeating, others see as a nonrepeating series of similar moments." —Matthew Goulish
"We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and are not." —Heraclitus
When we hear, say, a piece of music with a repeating motif, the second time we hear it is not the same as the first time we hear it. When dealing with an extremely repetitive form of music, such as a hypnotic drumbeat, a drone, or a raga, you can potentially say that the hundredth time you hear the motif is not the same as the first, or the ninety-ninth. The neat logic of information theory makes no allowance for the shifting perceptions of the receiver, and, by extension, neither does Rucker: this is an error. An information theorist might say that Cage's widely misunderstood "silent piano" piece 4'33 contains no information at all, but actually listening to 4'33 (which you can do right now, sitting right where you are) indicates that the piece is in fact teeming endlessly with information.
Given that Rucker is a mathematician, it makes sense that he would attempt to make this argument, but given that Rucker is also something of a mystic, who argues eloquently elsewhere in Seek! that the universe is suffused with consciousness and intelligence, it's disappointing to see him take an aesthetic stance that is so arid and lifeless. (It's worth noting that in a postscript he gives up on discussing a text's "algorithmic complexity" and instead moves to discussing the fuzzily-presented concept of its "logical depth," but, again, leaves consciousness filtered out of the equation.) Labels: art, information, language |
Monday, July 12, 2004
3:26 PM
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