The limits of imagination, scifi, art and UFOs -- or: the intrinsic mediocrity of art

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

“Truth is always strange — stranger than fiction” – Byron

It’s widely assumed that the arts are imaginative while the sciences are too constrained by reality, by formalisms, by math and by logic for flights of imagination. What if we’ve all got this backwards?

One look at the history of the arts tells us that the arts are more imitative than innovative, otherwise it would be impossible to identify historical periods in the arts, and styles in the arts might be their most obvious trait, so much so that it can sometimes be difficult for an observer to tell one artist from another. This should not surprise anyone. It has a structural reason that is all too often ignored. Art is usually made for an audience. It is a game theoretic activity in which the artist must entertain the audience, which entails that the art work not lose the audience’ attention but continually communicate and engage. If the art is too innovative for the audience, there will be no communication and no engagement. This limitation on artistic imagination might be called the mediocrity of art or its frame of mediocrity beyond the bounds of which art cannot succeed.

That’s not to say that artists are slavish imitators of one another all catering to the least common denominator of the audience. There be many audiences, some seeking mere entertainment, others seeking more arcane discernment. And obviously there are many incremental innovations in the arts, otherwise period styles would never change. Often the innovators are the ones most memorable and famous, becoming the most imitated. But overall I think it’s a myth of our culture that artists are the great imaginators. The myth seems to trade on an ambiguity of “imagination” between “made up stuff that’s like familiar stuff but isn’t really there or wasn’t there” versus “coming up with unprecedented ideas.”

The arts prioritize manipulating the audience’s emotions and opinions. Those are skills that do admit of innovation. But when has discovery ever been the goal of art? One finds a lot of idiosyncrasy which is a kind of originality, but it’s rarely at the expense of comprehensibility, and then only recently and very self-consciously and only for elite audiences. Most of the art that people enjoy — the music they listen to repeatedly, the movies they spend money to see, the graphic arts that attract them — may have something distinctive about them, but they are mostly crafty manipulations that can be learnt if not in art class then by imitating the models known to work best.

The arts are also limited by their materials. A drama requires a stage, so space ships populate scifi movies for no other reason. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing long ago observed that the distinctive material of each art determines its possible manipulations. That is to say, art is not, as we in our individualistic, narcissistic culture believe, about self-expression. It’s a skilled craftwork designed to affect the minds of others through some specific medium usually using illusions allowed by that medium. Crafty use of paint creates illusions of plausible places and more or less familiar things in them. Drama creates an illusion of a believable series of actions in the real world. Language symbolically represents illusions of plausible people, their minds, their actions and interactions, all not too far from our expectations. And skillful manipulation of sounds will directly manipulate emotions without even an illusionary stimulus, but music that strays too far from the organizing principles that manipulate the emotions, will lose its audience. Atonal music never caught on — audiences don’t feel manipulated emotionally by it, and it gives the composer too little power to manipulate. There’s just not enough mediocre content in it. 

Given a moment of thought, these two limitations, the audience and the material, become obvious — self-evident, even definitional. Every art is defined by a medium — paint, words, brick and stone or pitches in rhythm. And it’s all for the pleasure or entertainment of one audience or another.

The limitation to the audience’s expectation of the material to appeal readily to the ordinary imagination is familiarly expressed with “Truth is stranger than fiction” and the colloquial “You can’t make this shit up.” Art mustn’t be too strange otherwise it won’t be believed, and if not believed it can’t manipulate. It’d be just weird, not affective. Those familiar expressions also reflect our understanding that the sciences, based on reality, can be taken as true or accurate regardless how incredible. Believability plays no role in science and should play no such role. And can’t — if its conclusions depend on the audience, it’s not science anymore.

In the study of ancient texts, where two copies exist of a lost original, one that makes perfect sense and the other weird and unlikely, it is the rule of thumb that the common sense text is probably furthest from the original, and the weird one is likely a faithful copy. That’s for the obvious reason that reality can be utterly weird while copies tend to “correct” in the direction of common sense, the mediocre mind of limited imagination. If there is a goal of the arts, it might be characterized as correcting the unaccountable world to make sense of it. Good guys vs bad guys might be too simple for some artworks, but a sense of what is good and what is undesirable is almost always present. Excessive realism can leave us cold since there’s no interpretation of the subject. What’s the point of all that effort painting if it’s no more interpretable than the object being depicted. The artist is supposed to be a kind of bad, manipulative copyist, appealing to the audiences’ expectations, giving them a world that will satisfy them. 

Compare science with the “imaginative” fancies of religions. The deities look just like people or just like parts of people or parts of animals, or have moralities and intentions just like ours. There doesn’t seem to be any imagination at all in them. All mere distortions of the ordinary, mimicry, recreations of what’s all already in front of us. Even the mysteries are the familiar mysteries. The goal is to appeal to the audience and satisfy the audience. 

It’s even worse with science fiction. Why would anyone think that extraterrestrial beings would travel across planetary systems in hardware like so many buses or mobile homes, let alone the space ships of scifi movies that resemble giant flying commercial buildings? If an extraterrestrial intelligent species could travel across solar systems, its technology would have to be unimaginable to us, not only in their traveling but in every aspects of their behaviors and if their technology were so far more sophisticated than ours, surely they would not bother carrying hardware, including their own physical bodies, from place to place. That we could detect them or that they would crash into the earth and leave remnants is strictly for the unthinking gullible.

The inability to imagine the technology of the future is not alone to blame for beliefs in flying saucers. It’s that the drama in scifi movies requires a stage, and that’s the spaceship. There is just no other reason for such spaceships-of-the-future. Conspiracy theories of UFOs have proliferated solely because screen writers needed a stage. We will believe anything however stupid as long as it’s within our limited imaginations. Most likely space travel will be more some kind of informational exchange, not physical busing around. Information is faster, its baggage is lighter, and it interferes not at all. There won’t be any “grabby” aliens, as Hanson speculates based on his libertarian idee fixe. I see no reason why advanced aliens won’t be undetectable because, for one thing, they won’t need to travel at all, and information is a passive receiving, not a generating that consumes energy. 

Science is not such a game theoretic activity with an audience. Audiences play no role in the value of the sciences. Technology, of course, is for audiences, especially buying audiences, but the moment an audience pressures a science, that’s the end of the science almost by definition. That’s not the knowledge of science. That’s letting people believe what they want to believe — that’s art again. Many sciences are entirely opaque to the lay observer, some so arcane that they are beyond the capacity of even the tutored. Scientific discoveries are often far beyond what anyone would imagine. It’s the great draw of science that it is so full of weirdness, so contrary to the obvious and disruptive of all stability. What could be more unbelievable than that the earth could be spinning or that we all stand all over a globe without falling off, or that the sun doesn’t travel across the sky. In linguistics, the notion of the phoneme — an abstract object never heard or pronounced but still motivating the sounds and perceptions of language — is such a weirdness. It’s not what you hear. It’s what emerges when you analyse and categorize the data of what you hear. Grice’s principles of conversation — that speakers and addressees interpret utterances under the assumption that everything said is exactly relevant, that what we say is exactly the truth as we know it and say it in the most efficient way — completely counterintuitive principles, are another such weird surprise. Yet the power of that unbelievable contrary-to-fact-and-common-sense theory explains not just how we interpret conversation, but the existence of conversation itself, it’s the evolutionary explanation for language and the explanation for many of our cognitive limitations compared with our primate relatives, and our counterfactual beliefs like religions. 

In David Deutsch’s first book, he maintains that there are four essential theories of the universe: reductionist physics (quantum physics), natural selection, computational theory, and falsificationism. I’d add two more, semiology, the science of symbols, and game theory including Grice’s principles of conversational cooperation and the game-theoretic character of sexual selection and extended phenotype that can result in selection for altruism, for example.

Reality is interpreted through our symbols, and those symbols have a science of their own, distinct from all other sciences. Every other science holds to Aristotle’s causes, things being defined by their properties and individual interactions. Symbols have no such intrinsic properties, and their interactions depend not on themselves but on the structures they belong to.

And the interpretation of those symbols is not complete in their own structural code definitions or values. They are interpreted and reinterpreted through conversation, the equilibrium of meaning between conversants. 

These two — symbols and games — are necessary for understanding of the universe. Symbols interpret all of reality for us including our sciences of reality, and these symbols have a science of their own distinct from the essence-property science of all other knowledge. How could such a science and such a set of objects be omitted from a complete understanding of the universe? And game theory takes these interpretive symbols making them sharable between minds.  

There’s a seventh science, that of consciousness, but that’ll take a post all its own.