The role of the arts. Why did it evolve? Will AI kill it?

 As I mentioned in an earlier post this month, I’m currently reading Brian Greene’s book, Until the End of Time; Mind, Matter; and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, which covers just about everything from cosmology to evolution to consciousness, free will, mythology, religion and creativity. He spends a considerable amount of time on storytelling, compared to other art forms, partly because it allows an easy segue from language to mythology to religion.
 
One of his points of extended discussion was in trying to answer the question: why did our propensity for the arts evolve, when it has no obvious survival value? He cites people like Steven Pinker, Brian Boyd (whom I discuss at length in another post) and even Darwin, among others. I won’t elaborate on these, partly due to space, and partly because I want to put forward my own perspective, as someone who actually indulges in an artistic activity, and who could see clearly how I inherited artistic genes from one side of my family (my mother’s side). No one showed the slightest inclination towards artistic endeavour on my father’s side (including my sister). But they all excelled in sport (including my sister), and I was rubbish at sport. One can see how sporting prowess could be a side-benefit to physical survival skills like hunting, but also achieving success in combat, which humans have a propensity for, going back to antiquity.
 
Yet our artistic skills are evident going back at least 30-40,000 years, in the form of cave-art, and one can imagine that other art forms like music and storytelling have been active for a similar period. My own view is that it’s sexual selection, which Greene discusses at length, citing Darwin among others, as well as detractors, like Pinker. The thing is that other species also show sexual selection, especially among birds, which I’ve discussed before a couple of times. The best known example is the peacock’s tail, but I suspect that birdsong also plays a role, not to mention the bower bird and the lyre bird. The lyre bird is an interesting one, because they too have an extravagant tail (I’m talking about the male of the species) which surely would be a hindrance to survival, and they perform a dance and are extraordinary mimics. And the only reason one can think that this might have evolutionary value at all is because the sole purpose of those specific attributes is to attract a mate.
 
And one can see how this is analogous to behaviour in humans, where it is the male who tends to attract females with their talents in music, in particular. As Greene points out, along with others, artistic attributes are a by-product of our formidable brains, but I think these talents would be useless if we hadn’t evolved in unison a particular liking for the product of these endeavours (also discussed by Greene), which we see even in the modern world. I’m talking about the fact that music and stories both seem to be essential sources of entertainment, evident in the success of streaming services, not to mention a rich history in literature, theatre, ballet and more recently, cinema.
 
I’ve written before that there are 2 distinct forms of cognitive ability: creative and analytical; and there is neurological evidence to support this. The point is that having an analytical brain is just as important as having a creative one, otherwise scientific theories and engineering feats, for which humans seem uniquely equipped to provide, would never have happened, even going back to ancient artefacts like Stonehenge and both the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids. Note that these all happened on different continents.
 
But there are times when the analytical and creative seem to have a synergistic effect, and this is particularly evident when it comes to scientific breakthroughs – a point, unsurprisingly, not lost on Greene, who cites Einstein’s groundbreaking discoveries in relativity theory as a case-in-point.
 
One point that Greene doesn’t make is that there has been a cultural evolution that has effectively overtaken biological evolution in humans, and only in humans I would suggest. And this has been a direct consequence of our formidable brains and everything that goes along with that, but especially language.
 
I’ve made the point before that our special skill – our superpower, if you will – is the ability to nest concepts within concepts, which we do with everything, not just language, but it would have started with language, one would think. And this is significant because we all think in a language, including the ability to manipulate abstract concepts in our minds that don’t even exist in the real world. And no where is this more apparent than in the art of storytelling, where we create worlds that only exist in the imagination of someone’s mind.
 
But this cultural evolution has created civilisations and all that they entail, and survival of the fittest has nothing to do with eking out an existence in some hostile wilderness environment. These days, virtually everyone who is reading this has no idea where their food comes from. However, success is measured by different parameters than the ability to produce food, even though food production is essential. These days success is measured by one’s ability to earn money and activities that require brain-power have a higher status and higher reward than so-called low-skilled jobs. In fact, in Australia, there is a shortage of trades because, for the last 2 generations at least, the emphasis, vocationally, has been in getting kids into university courses, when it’s not necessarily the best fit for the child. This is why the professional class (including myself) are often called ‘elitist’ in the culture wars and being a tradie is sometimes seen as a stigma, even though our society is just as dependent on them as they are on professionals. I know, because I’ve spent a working lifetime in a specific environment where you need both: engineering/construction.
 
Like all my posts, I’ve gone off-track but it’s all relevant. Like Greene, I can’t be sure how or why evolution in humans was propelled, if not hi-jacked, by art, but art in all its forms is part of the human condition. A life without music, stories and visual art – often in combination – is unimaginable.
 
And this brings me to the last question in my heading. It so happens that while I was reading about this in Greene’s thought-provoking book, I was also listening to a programme on ABC Classic (an Australian radio station) called Legends, which is weekly and where the presenter, Mairi Nicolson, talks about a legend in the classical music world for an hour, providing details about their life as well as broadcasting examples of their work. In this case, she had the legend in the studio (a rare occurrence), who was Anna Goldsworthy. To quote from Wikipedia: Anna Louise Goldsworthy is an Australian classical pianist, writer, academic, playwright, and librettist, known for her 2009 memoir Piano Lessons.

But the reason I bring this up is because Anna mentioned that she attended a panel discussion on the role of AI in the arts. Anna’s own position is that she sees a role for AI, but in doing the things that humans find boring, which is what we are already seeing in manufacturing. In fact, I’ve witnessed this first-hand. Someone on the panel made the point that AI would effectively democratise art (my term, based on what I gleaned from Anna’s recall) in the sense that anyone would be able to produce a work of art and it would cease to be seen as elitist as it is now. He obviously saw this as a good thing, but I suspect many in the audience, including Anna, would have been somewhat unimpressed if not alarmed. Apparently, someone on the panel challenged that perspective but Anna seemed to think the discussion had somehow veered into a particularly dissonant aberration of the culture wars.
 
I’m one of those who would be alarmed by such a development, because it’s the ultimate portrayal of art as a consumer product, similar to the way we now perceive food. And like food, it would mean that its consumption would be completely disconnected from its production.
 
What worries me is that the person on the panel making this announcement (remember, I’m reporting this second-hand) apparently had no appreciation of the creative process and its importance in a functioning human society going back tens of thousands of years.
 
I like to quote from one of the world’s most successful and best known artists, Paul McCartney, in a talk he gave to schoolchildren (don’t know where):
 
“I don't know how to do this. You would think I do, but it's not one of these things you ever know how to do.” (my emphasis)
 
And that’s the thing: creative people can’t explain the creative process to people who have never experienced it. It feels like we have made contact with some ethereal realm. On another post, I cite Douglas Hofstadter (from his famous Pulitzer-prize winning tome, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) quoting Escher:
 
"While drawing I sometimes feel as if I were a spiritualist medium, controlled by the creatures I am conjuring up."
 
Many people writing a story can identify with this, including myself. But one suspects that this also happens to people exploring the abstract world of mathematics. Humans have developed a sense that there is more to the world than what we see and feel and touch, which we attempt to reveal in all art forms, and this, in turn, has led to religion. Of course, Greene spends another entire chapter on that subject, and he also recognises the connection between mind, art and the seeking of meaning beyond a mortal existence.

Insights into writing fiction

 This is a series of posts I published on Quora recently, virtually in one day, in response to specific questions, so I thought it worth posting them here.
 
 
What made you start writing science fiction?
 
I was late coming to science fiction as a reader, partly because I studied science and the suspension of disbelief was more difficult as a result. In my teens I read James Bond and Carter Brown novels that my father had, plus superhero comics, which I’d been addicted to from a young age. I think all of these influenced my later writing. Mind you, I liked innovative TV shows like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. The British TV show, The Avengers with Emma Peel and Steed was a favourite, which had sci-fi elements. So the seeds were there.
 
I came to sci-fi novels via fantasy, where the suspension of disbelief was mandatory. I remember 2 books which had a profound effect on me: The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien and Dune by Frank Herbert; and I read them in that order. I then started to read Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and Le Guin. What I liked about sci-fi was the alternative worlds and societies more than the space-travel and gizmos.
 
The first sci-fi I wrote was a screenplay for a teenage audience, called Kidnapped in Time, and it was liberating. I immediately realised that this was my genre. I combined a real-world scenario, based (very loosely*) on my own childhood with a complete fantasy world set in the future and on another planet, which included alien creatures. To be honest, I’ve never looked back.
 
Elvene was even more liberating, partly because I used a female protagonist. Not sure why that worked, but women love it, so I must have done something right. Since then, all my stories feature female protagonists, as well as males. Villains can be male or female or even robots.
 
Science fiction is essentially what-ifs. What if we genetically engineered humans? What if we had humanoid robots? What if we found life on another world? What if we colonised other worlds? What if we could travel intergalactic distances?
 
 
What unconventional writing techniques have you found most effective in crafting compelling characters?
 
How do you differentiate ‘unconventional’ from ‘conventional’? I don’t know if my techniques are one or the other. Characters come to me, similarly, I imagine, to the way melodies and tunes come to composers and songwriters. That wasn’t always the case. When I started out all the characters were different versions of me and not very believable.
 
It’s like acting, and so, in the beginning, I was a poor actor. Don’t ask me how I changed that, because I don’t know – just practice, I guess. To extend the analogy with composing, I compare writing dialogue to playing jazz, because they both require extemporisation. I don’t overthink it, to be honest. I somehow inhabit the character and they come alive. I imagine it’s the same as acting. I say, ‘imagine’, because I can’t act to save my life – I know, I’ve tried.
 
 
How do you balance originality and familiarity when creating characters and plots in your stories?
 
All fiction is a blend of fantasy and reality, and that blend is dependent on the genre and the author’s own proclivities. I like to cite the example of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, where the reality was the locations, but also details like what type of gun Bond used (Walther PPK) and the type of cigarettes he smoked (Turkish blend). The fantasy was in the plots, the larger-than-life villains and the femme-fatales with outlandish names.
 
My fiction is sci-fi, so the worlds and plots are total fantasy and the reality is all in the characters and the relationships they form.
 
 
*When I say ‘loosely’, the time and milieu is pretty much the same, but whereas the protagonist had a happy home life, despite having no memory of his mother (he lived with his father and older brother), I had a mother, a father and an older sister, but my home life was anything but happy. I make it a rule not to base characters on anyone I know.

Is Morality Objective or Subjective?

 This was a Question of the Month, answers to which appeared in the latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 167, April/May 2025). I didn’t submit an answer because I’d written a response to virtually the same question roughly 10 years ago, which was subsequently published. However, reading the answers made me want to write one of my own, effectively in response to those already written and published, without referencing anything specific.
 
At a very pragmatic level, morality is a direct consequence of communal living. Without rules, living harmoniously would be impossible, and that’s how morals become social norms, which for the most part, we don’t question. This means that morality, in practice, is subjective. In fact, in my previous response, I said that subjective morality and objective morality could be described as morality in practice and morality in theory respectively, where I argued morality in theory is about universal human rights, probably best exemplified by the golden rule: assume everyone has the same rights as you.  A number of philosophers have attempted to render a meta-morality or a set of universal rules and generally failed.
 
But there is another way of looking at this, which are the qualities we admire in others. And those qualities are selflessness, generosity, courage and honesty. Integrity is often a word used to describe someone we trust and admire. By the way, courage in this context, is not necessarily physical courage, but what’s known as moral courage: taking a stand on a principle even if it costs us something. I often cite Aristotle’s essay on friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics, where he distinguishes between utilitarian friendship and genuine friendship, and how it’s effectively the basis for living a moral life.
 
In our work, and even our friendships occasionally, we can find ourselves being compromised. Politicians find this almost daily when they have to toe the party line. Politicians in retirement are refreshingly honest and forthright in a way they could never be when in office, and this includes leaders of parties.
 
I’ve argued elsewhere that trust is the cornerstone to all relationships, whether professional or social. In fact, I like to think it’s my currency in my everyday life. Without trust, societies would function very badly and our interactions would be constantly guarded, which is the case in some parts of the world.
 
So an objective morality is dependent on how we live – our honesty to ourselves and others; our ability to forgive; to let go of grievances; and to live a good life in an Aristotlean sense. I’ve long contended that the measure of my life won’t be based on my achievements and failures, but my interactions with others, and whether they were beneficial or destructive (usually mutual).
 
I think our great failing as a communal species, is our ability to create ingroups and outgroups, which arguably is the cause of all our conflicts and the source of most evil: our demonisation of the other, which can lead even highly intelligent people to behave irrationally; no one is immune, from what I’ve witnessed. A person who can bridge division is arguably the best leader you will find, though you might not think that when you look around the world.

Noam Chomsky on free will

 Whatever you might think about Noam Chomsky’s political views, I’ve always found his philosophical views worth listening to, whether I agree with him or not. In the opening of this video - actually an interview by someone (name not given) on a YouTube channel titled, Mind-Body Solution – he presents a dichotomy that he thinks is obvious, but, as he points out, is generally not acknowledged.
 
Basically, he says that everyone, including anyone who presents an argument (on any topic), behaves as if they believe in free will, even if they claim they don’t. He reiterates this a number of times throughout the video. On the other hand, science cannot tell us anything about free will and many scientists therefore claim it must be an illusion. The contradiction is obvious. He’s not telling me anything I didn’t already know, but by stating it bluntly up-front, he makes you confront it, where more often than not, people simply ignore it.
 
My views on this are well known to anyone who regularly reads this blog, and I’ve challenged smarter minds than mine (not in person), like Sabine Hossenfelder, who claims that ‘free will needs to go in the rubbish bin’, as if it’s an idea that’s past its use-by-date. She claims:
 
...how ever you want to define the word [free will], we still cannot select among several possible different futures. This idea makes absolutely no sense if you know anything about physics.
 
I’ve addressed this elsewhere, so I won’t repeat myself. Chomsky makes the point that, while science acknowledges causal-determinism and randomness, neither of these rule out free will categorically. Chomsky makes it clear that he’s a ‘materialist’, though he discusses Descartes’ perspective in some depth. In my post where I critique Sabine, I conclude that ‘it [free will] defies a scientific explanation’, and I provide testimony from Gill Hicks following a dramatic near-death experience to make my point.
 
Where I most strongly agree with Chomsky is that we are not automatons, though I acknowledge that other members of the animal kingdom, like ants and bees, may be. This doesn’t mean that I think insects and arachnids don’t have consciousness, but I think a lot of their behaviours are effectively ‘programmed’ into their neural structures. It’s been demonstrated by experiments that bees must have an internal map of their local environment, otherwise the ‘dance’ they do to communicate locations to other bees in their colony would make no sense. Also, I think these creatures have feelings, like fear, attraction and hostility. Both of these aspects of their mental worlds distinguish them from AI, in my view, though others might disagree. I think these particular features of animal behaviour, even in these so-called ‘primitive’ creatures, provide the possibility of free will, if free will is the ability to act on the environment in a way that’s not determined solely by reflex actions.
 
Some might argue that acting on a ‘feeling’ is a ‘reflex action’, whereas I’m saying it’s a catalyst to act in a way that might be predictable but not predetermined. I think the ability to ‘feel’ is the evolutionary driver for consciousness. Surely, we could all be automatons without the requirement to be consciously aware. I’ve cited before, incidents where people have behaved like they are conscious, in situations of self-defence, but have no memory of it, because they were ‘knocked out’. It happened to my father in a boxing ring, and I know of other accounts, including a female security guard, who shot her assailant after he knocked her out. If one can defend oneself without being conscious of it, then why has evolution given us consciousness?
 
My contention is that consciousness and free will can’t be separated: it simply makes no sense to me to have the former without the latter. And I think it’s worth comparing this to AI, which might eventually develop to the point where it appears to have consciousness and therefore free will. I’ve made the argument before that there is a subtle difference between agency and free will, because AI certainly has agency. So, what’s the difference? The difference is what someone (Grant Bartley) called ‘conscious causality’ – the ability to turn a thought into an action. This is something we all experience all the time, and is arguably the core precept to Chomsky’s argument that we all believe in free will, because we all act on it.
 
Free will deniers (if I can coin that term) like Sabine Hossenfelder, argue that this is the key to the illusion we all suffer. To quote her again:
 
Your brain is running a calculation, and while it is going on you do not know the outcome of that calculation. So the impression of free will comes from our ‘awareness’ that we think about what we do, along with our inability to predict the result of what we are thinking.
 
In the same video (from which this quote is extracted) she uses the term ‘software’ in describing the activity of one’s brain’s processes, and in combination with the word, ‘calculation’, she clearly sees the brain as a wetware computer. So, while Chomsky argues that we all ‘believe’ in free will because we act like we do, Sabine argues that we act like we do, because the brain is ‘calculating’ the outcome without our cognisance. In effect, she argues that once it becomes conscious, the brain has made the ‘decision’ for you, but gives you the delusion that you have. Curiously, Chomsky uses the word, ‘delusion’, to describe the belief that you don’t have free will.
 
If Sabine is correct and your brain has already made the ‘decision’, then I go back to my previous argument concerning unconscious self-defence. If our ‘awareness’ is an unnecessary by-product of the brain’s activity (because any decision is independent of it), then why did we evolve to have it?
 
Chomsky raises a point I’ve discussed before, which is that, in the same way there are things we can comprehend that no other creature can, there is the possibility that there are things in the Universe that we can’t comprehend either. And I have specifically referenced consciousness as potentially one of those things. And this takes us back to the dichotomy that started the entire discussion – we experience free will, yet it’s thus far scientifically inexplicable. This leads to another dichotomy – it’s an illusion or it’s beyond human comprehension. There is a non-stated belief among many in the scientific community that eventually all unsolved problems in the Universe will eventually be solved by science – one only has to look at the historical record.
 
But I’m one of those who thinks the ‘hard problem’ (coined by David Chalmers) of consciousness may never be solved. Basically, the hard problem is that the experience of consciousness may remain forever a mystery. My argument, partly taken from Raymond Tallis, is that it won’t fall to science because it can’t be measured. We can only measure neuron-activity correlates, which some argue already resolves the problem. Actually, I don’t think it does, and again I turn to AI. If that’s correct, then measuring analogous electrical activity by an AI would also supposedly measure consciousness. At this stage in AI development, I don’t think anyone believes that, though some people believe that measures of global connectivity or similar parameters in an AI neural network may prove otherwise.
 
Basically, I don’t think AI will ever have an inner world like we do – going back to the bees I cited – and if it does, we wouldn’t know. I don’t know what inner world you have, but I would infer you have one from your behaviour (assuming we met). On the other hand, I don’t know that anyone would infer that an AI would have one. I’ve made the comparison before of an AI-operated, autonomous drone navigating by GPS co-ordinates, which requires self-referencing algorithms. Notice that we don’t navigate that way, unless we use a computer interface (like your smart phone). AI can simulate what we do: like write sentences, play chess, drive cars; but doing them in a completely different fashion.
 
In response to a question from his interlocutor, Chomsky argues that our concept of justice is dependent on a belief in free will, even if it’s unstated. It’s hard to imagine anyone disagreeing, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to hold anyone accountable for their actions.

As I’ve argued previously, it’s our ability to mental time-travel that underpins free will, because, without an imagined future, there is no future to actualise, which is the whole point of having free will. And I would extend this to other creatures, who may be trying to catch food or escape being eaten – either way, they imagine a future they want to actualise.

 

Addendum: I’m currently reading Brian Greene’s Until The End Of Time (2020), who devoted an entire chapter to consciousness and, not surprisingly, has something to say about free will. He’s a materialist, and he says in his intro to the topic:
 
This question has inspired more pages in the philosophical literature than just about any other conundrum.  

Basically, he argues, like Sabine Hossenfelder, that it’s in conflict with the laws of physics, but given he’s writing in a book, and not presenting a time-limited YouTube video (though he does those too), he goes into more detail.
 
To sum up: We are physical beings made of large collections of particles governed by nature’s laws. Everything we do and everything we think amounts to motions of those particles.
 
He then provides numerous everyday examples that we can all identify with.
 
And since all observations, experiments, and valid theories confirm that particle motion is fully controlled by mathematical rules, we can no more intercede in this lawful progresson of particles than we can change the value of pi.
 
Interesting analogy, because I agree that even God can’t change the value of pi, but that’s another argument. And I’m not convinced that consciousness can be modelled mathematically, which, if true, undermines his entire argument regarding mathematical rules.
 
My immediate internal response to his entire thesis was that he’s writing a book, yet effectively arguing that he has no control over it. However, as if he anticipated this response, he addresses that very point at the end of the next section, titled Rocks, Humans and Freedom.

What matters to me is… my collection of particles is enabled to execute an enormously diverse set of behaviours. Indeed, my particles just composed this very sentence and I’m glad they did… I am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organisation has emancipated my behavioural responses.
 
In other words, the particles in his body and his brain, in particular, (unlike the particles in inert objects, like rocks, tables, chairs etc) possess degrees of freedom that others don’t. But here’s the thing: I and others, including you, read these words and form our own ideas and responses, which we intellectualise and even emote about. In fact, we all form an opinion that either agrees or disagrees with his point. But whether there are diverse possibilities, he’s effectively saying that we are all complex automatons, which means there is no necessity for us to be consciously aware of what we are doing. And I argue that this is what separates us from AI.
 
Just be aware that Albert Einstein would have agreed with him.

 

Writing and philosophy

 I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos of Alan Moore, who’s probably best known for his graphic novels, Watchmen and V for Vendetta, both of which were turned into movies. He also wrote a Batman graphic novel, The Killing Joke, which was turned into an R rated animated movie (due to Batman having sex with Batgirl) with Mark Hamill voicing the Joker. I’m unsure if it has any fidelity to Moore’s work, which was critically acclaimed, whereas the movie received mixed reviews. I haven’t read the graphic novel, so I can’t comment.
 
On the other hand, I read Watchmen and saw the movie, which I reviewed on this blog, and thought they were both very good. I also saw V for Vendetta, starring Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving, without having read Moore’s original. Moore also wrote a novel, Jerusalem, which I haven’t read, but is referenced frequently by Robin Ince in a video I cite below.
 
All that aside, it’s hard to know where to start with Alan Moore’s philosophy on writing, but the 8 Alan Moore quotes video is as good a place as any if you want a quick overview. For a more elaborate dialogue, there is a 3-way interview, obviously done over a video link, between Moore and Brian Catling, hosted by Robin Ince, with the online YouTube channel, How to Academy. They start off talking about imagination, but get into philosophy when all 3 of them start questioning what reality is, or if there is an objective reality at all.
 
My views on this are well known, and it’s a side-issue in the context of writing or creating imaginary worlds. Nevertheless, had I been party to the discussion, I would have simply mentioned Kant, and how he distinguishes between the ‘thing-in-itself’ and our perception of it. Implicit in that concept is the belief that there is an independent reality to our internal model of it, which is mostly created by a visual representation, but other senses, like hearing, touch and smell, also play a role. This is actually important when one gets into a discussion on fiction, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I just wish to make the point that we know there is an external objective reality because it can kill you. Note that a dream can’t kill you, which is a fundamental distinction between reality and a dreamscape. I make this point because I think a story, which takes place in your imagination, is like a dreamscape; so that difference carries over into fiction.
 
And on the subject of life-and-death, Moore references something he’d read on how evolution selects for ‘survivability’ not ‘truth’, though he couldn’t remember the source or the authors. However, I can, because I wrote about that too. He’s obviously referring to the joint paper written by Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash called Objects of Consciousness (Frontiers of Psychology, 2014). This depends on what one means by ‘truth’. If you’re talking about mathematical truths then yes, it has little to do with survivability (our modern-day dependence on technical infrastructure notwithstanding). On the other hand, if you’re talking about the accuracy of the internal model in your mind matching the objective reality external to your body, then your survivability is very much dependent on it.
 
Speaking of mathematics, Ince mentions Bertrand Russell giving up on mathematics and embracing philosophy because he failed to find a foundation that ensured its truth (my wording interpretating his interpretation). Basically, that’s correct, but it was Godel who put the spanner in the works with his famous Incompleteness Theorem, which effectively tells us that there will always exist mathematical truths that can’t be proven true. In other words, he concretely demonstrated (proved, in fact) that there is a distinction between truth and proof in mathematics. Proofs rely on axioms and all axioms have limitations in what they can prove, so you need to keep finding new axioms, and this infers that mathematics is a neverending endeavour. So it’s not the end of mathematics as we know it, but the exact opposite.
 
All of this has nothing to do with writing per se, but since they raised these issues, I felt compelled to deal with them.
 
At the core of this part of their discussion, is the unstated tenet that fiction and non-fiction are distinct, even if the boundary sometimes becomes blurred. A lot of fiction, if not all, contains factual elements. I like to cite Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels containing details like the gun Bond used (a Walther PPK) and the Bentley he drove, which had an Amherst Villiers supercharger. Bizarrely, I remember these trivial facts from a teenage obsession with all things Bond.
 
And this allows me to segue into something that Moore says towards the end of this 3-way discussion, when he talks specifically about fantasy. He says it needs to be rooted in some form of reality (my words), otherwise the reader won’t be able to imagine it at all. I’ve made this point myself, and give the example of my own novel, Elvene, which contains numerous fantasy elements, including both creatures that don’t exist on our world and technology that’s yet to be invented, if ever.
 
I’ve written about imagination before, because I argue it’s essential to free will, which is not limited to humans, though others may disagree. Imagination is a form of time travel, into the past, but more significantly, into the future. Episodic memories and imagination use the same part of the brain (so we are told); but only humans seem to have the facility to time travel into realms that don’t exist anywhere else other than the imagination. And this is why storytelling is a uniquely human activity.
 
I mentioned earlier how we create an internal world that’s effectively a simulation of the external world we interact with. In fact, my entire philosophy is rooted in the idea that we each of us have an internal and external world, which is how I can separate religion from science, because one is completely internal and the other is an epistemology of the physical universe from the cosmic scale to the infinitesimal. Mathematics is a medium that bridges them, and contributes to the Kantian notion that our perception may never completely match the objective reality. Mathematics provides models that increase our understanding while never quite completing it. Godel’s incompleteness theorem (referenced earlier) effectively limits physics as well. Totally off-topic, but philosophically important.
 
Its relevance to storytelling is that it’s a visual medium even when there are no visuals presented, which is why I contend that if we didn’t dream, stories wouldn’t work. In response to a question, Moore pointed out that, because he worked on graphic novels, he had to think about the story visually. I’ve made the point before that the best thing I ever did for my own writing was to take some screenwriting courses, because one is forced to think visually and imagine the story being projected onto a screen. In a screenplay, you can only write down what is seen and heard. In other words, you can’t write what a character is thinking. On the other hand, you can write an entire novel from inside a character’s head, and usually more than one. But if you tell a story from a character’s POV (point-of-view) you axiomatically feel what they’re feeling and see what they’re witnessing. This is the whole secret to novel-writing. It’s intrinsically visual, because we automatically create images even if the writer doesn’t provide them. So my method is to provide cues, knowing that the reader will fill in the blanks. No one specifically mentions this in the video, so it’s my contribution.
 
Something else that Moore, Catling and Ince discuss is how writing something down effectively changes the way they think. This is something I can identify with, both in fiction and non-fiction, but fiction specifically. It’s hard to explain this if you haven’t experienced it, but they spend a lot of time on it, so it’s obviously significant to them. In fiction, there needs to be a spontaneity – I’ve often compared it to playing jazz, even though I’m not a musician. So most of the time, you don’t know what you’re going to write until it appears on the screen or on paper, depending which medium you’re using. Moore says it’s like it’s in your hands instead of your head, which is certainly not true. But the act of writing, as opposed to speaking, is a different process, at least for Moore, and also for me.
 
I remember many years ago (decades) when I told someone (a dentist, actually) that I was writing a book. He said he assumed that novelists must dictate it, because he couldn’t imagine someone writing down thousands upon thousands of words. At the time, I thought his suggestion just as weird as he thought mine to be. I suspect some writers do. Philip Adams (Australian broadcaster and columnist) once confessed that he dictated everything he wrote. In my professional life, I have written reports for lawyers in contractual disputes, both in Australia and the US, for which I’ve received the odd kudos. In one instance, someone I was working with was using a cassette-like dictaphone and insisted I do the same, believing it would save time. So I did, in spite of my better judgement, and it was just terrible. Based on that one example, you’d be forgiven for thinking that I had no talent or expertise in that role. Of course, I re-wrote the whole thing, and was never asked to do it again.
 
I originally became interested in Moore’s YouTube videos because he talked about how writing affects you as a person and can also affect the world. I think to be a good writer of fiction you need to know yourself very well, and I suspect that is what he meant without actually saying it. The paradox with this is that you are always creating characters who are not you. I’ve said many times that the best fiction you write is where you’re completely detached – in a Zen state – sometimes called ‘flow’. Virtuoso musicians and top sportspersons will often make the same admission.
 
I believe having an existential philosophical approach to life is an important aspect to my writing, because it requires an authenticity that’s hard to explain. To be true to your characters you need to leave yourself out of it. Virtually all writers, including Moore, talk about treating their characters like real people, and you need to extend that to your villains if you want them to be realistic and believable, not stereotypes. Moore talks about giving multiple dimensions to his characters, which I won’t go into. Not because I don’t agree, but because I don’t over-analyse it. Characters just come to me and reveal themselves as the story unfolds; the same as they do for the reader.
 
What I’ve learned from writing fiction (which I’d self-describe as sci-fi/fantasy) – as opposed to what I didn’t know – is that, at the end of the day (or story), it’s all about relationships. Not just intimate relationships, but relationships between family members, between colleagues, between protagonists and AI, and between protagonists and antagonists. This is the fundamental grist for all stories.
 
Philosophy is arguably more closely related to writing than any other artform: there is a crossover and interdependency; because fiction deals with issues relevant to living and being.

Time again

 This is a topic I’ve written about before, many times, but I’m returning to it on this occasion because of a video I watched by Curt Jaimungal, whom I can recommend. He’s smart and interviews people who are even smarter, and he has a particular penchant for interviewing people with unorthodox ideas, but with the knowledge to support them. He also has the good sense to let them do nearly all of the talking. He rarely interjects and when he does, it’s pertinent and tends to not interrupt the flow. I’ve sometimes been annoyed by interviewers cutting someone off when they were about to say something that I was interested in hearing. I could never accuse Curt of that.
 
In this case he’s interviewing Avshalom Elitzur, whom I’ve also referenced before. He’s a bit of an iconoclast – my favourite type of person, even if I disagree with them. If I’m to be fair, I’d have to include Donald Hoffman in that category, though I’ve been a harsh critic in the past. Having said that, I’ve noticed that Donald has changed his approach over the 8 or so years I’ve been following him. As I’ve said before, it’s important to follow the people you disagree with as well as those you agree with, especially when they have knowledge or expertise that you don’t.
 
Elitzur discusses three or more topics, all related to Einstein’s theories of relativity, but mostly the special theory. He starts off by calling out (my phrase) what he considers a fundamental problem that most physicists, if not all (his phraseology) ignore, which is that time is fundamentally different to space, because time changes in a way that space does not. What’s more we all experience this, with or without a scientific theory to explain it. He gives the example of how another country (say, Japan) still exists even though you don’t experience it (assuming you’re not Japanese). If you are in Japan, make it Australia. On the other hand, another time does not exist in the same way (be it past or present), yet many physicists talk about it as if it does. I discussed this in some depth, when I tackled Sabine Hoffenfelder’s book, Existential Physics; A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.
 
Elitzur raises this at both the start and towards the end of the video, because he thinks it’s distorting how physicists perceive the world. Specifically, Einstein’s block-universe, where all directions in time exist simultaneously in the same way that all directions in space exist all at once. He mentions that Penrose challenges this and so did Paul Davies once, but not now. In fact, I challenge Davies’ position in another post I wrote after reading his book, The Demon in the Machine. Elitzur makes the point that challenging this is considered naïve but he also makes another point much more dramatically. He says that for Einstein, the ‘future cut’ in time is ‘already there’ (10.50) and consequently said, ‘…has the same degree of reality as the present cut and the past cut. Are you okay with that?’ His exact words.
 
He recounts the famous letter that Einstein wrote to the family of a good friend who had just passed away, and only 4 weeks before Einstein himself passed away (I didn’t know that before Elitzur told me), from which we have this much quoted extract: ‘The past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ Davies also used this quote in his abovementioned book.
 
I’m going to talk about last what Elitzur talked about early, if not quite first, which is the famous pole-in-the-barn thought experiment. Elitzur gives a good explanation, if you haven’t come across it before, but I’ll try because I think it’s key to understanding the inherent paradox of special relativity, and also providing an explanation that reconciles with our perception of reality.
 
It's to do with Lorenz-contraction, which is that, for an observer, an object travelling transversely to their field of vision (say horizontally) shortens in the direction of travel. This is one of those Alice and Bob paradoxes, not unlike the twin paradox. Let us assume that Alice is in a space ship who goes through a tunnel with doors at both ends, so that her ship fits snugly inside with no bits hanging out (like when both are stationary). And Bob operates the doors, so that they open when Alice arrives, close when she is inside and open to allow her to leave. From Bob’s perspective, Alice’s spaceship is shorter than the tunnel, so she fits inside, no problem. Also, and this is the key point (highlighted by Elitzur): according to Bob, both doors open and close together – there is no lag.
 
The paradox is resolved by relativity theory (and the associated mathematics), because, from Alice’s perspective, the doors don’t open together but sequentially. The first door opens and then closes after she’s passed through it, and the second door opens slightly later and remains open slightly longer so that the first door closes behind her before she leaves the tunnel. In other words, both doors are closed while she’s in the tunnel, but in such a way that they’re not closed at the same time, therefore her spaceship doesn’t hit either of them. This is a direct consequence of simultaneity being different for Alice. If you find that difficult to follow, watch the video
 
I have my own unorthodox way of resolving this, because, contrary to what everyone says, I think there is a preferred frame of reference, which is provided by ‘absolute spacetime’. You can even calculate the Earth’s velocity relative to the overall spacetime of the entire universe by measuring the Doppler shift of the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation). This is not contentious – Penrose and Davies both give good accounts of this. It’s also related to what Tim Maudlin called, the most important experiment in physics, which is Newton spinning a bucket of water and observing the concave surface of the water due to the centrifugal force, and then asking: what is it spinning in reference to? Answer: the entire universe.
 
You might notice that when someone describes or explains the famous twin paradox, they only ever talk about the time difference – they rarely, if ever, talk about the space contraction. Personally, I don’t think space contracts in reality, but time duration does. If you take an extreme example, you could hypothetically travel across the entire galaxy in your lifetime, which means, from your perspective, the distance travelled would be whole orders of magnitude shorter. This can be resolved if it’s the ruler measuring the distance that changes and not the distance. In this case, the clock acts as a ruler. Kip Thorne has commented on this without drawing any conclusions.
 
This same logic could be applied to the spaceship and the tunnel. For Alice, it appears shorter, but she’s the one ‘measuring’ it. If one extends this logic, then I would argue that there is a ‘true simultaneity’, experienced by Bob in this case, because he is in the same frame of reference as the tunnel and the doors. I need to point out that, as far as I know, no one else agrees with me, including Elitzur. However, it’s consistent with my thought experiment about traversing the galaxy: time contracts but space doesn't.
 
I’ve raised this before, but I believe that there is an independent reality to all observers, and this is consistent with Kant’s famous dictum that there is a ‘thing-in-itself’ that we may never perceive. In other words, relativity can only tell us about what we observe, which leaves open the possibility that there is a reality that one observer has a better perception of than another. It’s possible that while ‘time passed’ is observer-dependent, space is not, but only the observer’s perception of it.
 
This is also consistent with Elitzur’s overall thesis and core argument that space and time are different. It’s also consistent with the idea that there is a frame of reference for the entire universe, which I argue is what general relativity (GR) gives us. And in fact, we observe that local frames of reference can actually travel faster than light, which is why the observable universe has a horizon: there are parts of the Universe receding from us faster than light.
 
There is another aspect of this that Elitzur doesn’t bring up, and that is that there is an edge in time for the Universe, but no boundary in space. I find it curious that, if physicists bring this up at all, they tend to gloss over it and not provide a satisfactory resolution. You see, it conflicts with the idea, inherent in the block-universe model, that there is no ‘now’.
 
Curt introduces ‘now’ towards the end of the video, but only in reference to the ‘flow’ of time that we all experience. Again, I’m a heretic in that I believe there is a universal now for the entire universe.
 
And while I don’t think it explains entanglement and non-locality in QM, it’s consistent with it. Entanglement works across space and time independently of relativistic causality, without breaking the relativistic rule that you can’t send information faster than light.
 
As it happens, there is another video by Curt with Tim Maudlin, an American philosopher of science, whom Curt introduces as ‘bringing some sober reality to this realm of quantum confusion and mysticism.’ In particular, Maudlin gives an excellent exposition of Bell’s famous theorem, and debunks the claim that it questions whether there is ‘reality’. In other words, it’s often formulated as: you can accept non-locality or you can accept reality, but you can’t have both. Just to clarify, ‘locality’ means local phenomena that obey SR (special relativity) as I’ve discussed above.
 
Maudlin argues quite cogently that you only need 2 assumptions for Bell’s theorem to make sense and neither of them break reality. The main assumption is that there is ‘statistical independence’, which he explains by giving examples of medical controlled experiments (for example, to test if tobacco causes lung cancer). It just means that random really does mean random, which gives true independence.
 
The only other assumption is that we can have non-locality, which means you can have a connection or relationship between events that is not dependent on special relativity. Numerous experiments have proven this true.
 
Maudlin challenges Sabine’s contention that Bell’s Theorem can only be explained by ‘superdeterminism’, which is another name for Einstein’s block-universe, which started this whole discussion. Sabine is so convinced by superdeterminism, she has argued that one day everyone will agree with her. This of course has implications for free will and is central to Elitzur’s argument that the future does not exist in the same way as the present or even the past, which is fixed. And that’s his point. Sabine’s and most physicist’s view on all this is that what we experience must be an illusion: there is no now, no flow of time, and no free will.

Addendum 1: I came across another video by Curt with Jacob Barandes, that came out after I posted this. Jacob is a Harvard scientist, who has done a series of videos with Curt. It's relevance to this topic is that he talks about space-time in GR and how, unlike Newtonian physics, and even SR, you can't tell which direction time and space have. And this axiomatically creates problems when you try to quantumise it (to coin a term). I think the superposition of a gravitational field creates its own problems (not discussed). He then goes on to conjecture that there should be an intermediate step in trying to derive a quantum field theory of gravity, and that is to do probabilities on gravity. He acknowledges this is a highly speculative idea.

He then goes on to talk about 'expectation values', which is the standard way physicists have tried to model QFT (quantum field theory) on to spacetime, and is called 'semi-classical gravity'. Viktor T Toth (on Quora) says about this: …it is hideously inelegant, essentially an ad-hoc averaging of the equation that is really, really ugly and is not derived from any basic principle that we know. Nevertheless, Toth argues that it 'works'. Barandes goes further and says it's based on a fallacy (watch the video if you want an elaboration). To quote Toth again: We can do quantum field theory just fine on the curved spacetime background of general relativity. What we have so far been unable to do in a convincing manner is turn gravity itself into a quantum field theory.

I tend to agree with Freeman Dyson, who contends that they are not compatible in theory or in nature. In other words, he argues that quantum gravity is a chimera. Dyson also argues that QM can't describe past events; so, if that's true, quantum gravity is attempting to describe spacetime in its future. Arguably, this is what happens the other side of the event horizon of a black hole, where space itself only exists in one's future, which leads to the singularity. 

Addendum 2: Since posting this I've watched a lot of other videos, many of them by Curt, which may become the subject of a future post. But I just wanted to reference this one with Emily Adlam, who has a view completely opposite to the one expressed in my post above. She's developed what she calls the 'Sudoku universe', or the 'all at once' universe. The analogy with Sudoku is that the outcome is already 'known' and you can start anywhere at all - there is no progression from a fixed starting point to a fixed end point. This video is 1hr 19m, and I need to point out that she knows a lot more about this subject than I do, and so does Curt. Curt had obviously read all her papers relevant to this and knew exactly what to ask her. I know that if I was to go one-on-one with her, I could never argue at her level. I intend, at some point, to write another post where I discuss points-of-view of various physicists that are all driven more by philosophy than science.