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merely an imperfect simulation
Sunday, July 14 2002
There aren't many web designers who still have jobs, but those who do are probably terribly overworked and angry most of the time. I wonder if the web designers who have the job of putting together the new fully-non-ironic USAonwatch.org site are deliberately choosing pictures of George W. Bush that make him look especially stupid. Given his pisshole-in-the-snow eyes and the vacantly drooping Dow Jones Industrial Average lines of his face, I know it's difficult to find a picture of our president where he looks intelligent. Nonetheless, the fact that USAonwatch.org uses pictures featuring Bush with his mouth open seems to me a dead giveaway of the subtle culture jam happening behind the scenes. On USAonwatch.org Bush looks even more stupid than he does on the anti-Bush SmirkingChimp.com.
I slept in late with the fan running loudly and John and Julie left before I woke up. Suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly I was alone again, just me, the keeyads, and the computer that serves as the environment in which I dwell.
Yesterday I started listening to Pedro the Lion, another band I discovered entirely through Kazaa. Pedro the Lion is mostly just one guy, a born again Christian named David Bazan. Unlike other born again Christians who make the mistake of letting their pod-person evangelical zeal taint day-to-day aspects of their professional life (John Ashcroft and George W. Bush immediately spring to mind), it's difficult to find much specifically Christian content in Bazan's work. He makes concept albums containing bleak allegories reflecting a morbidly-fascinated despair from such human frailties as addiction, cruelty, and promiscuity. In the process he also makes clear his disgust with such downsides of conventional civil society as corporate greed, environmental abuse, and photo-op sanctimony. The points Bazan makes are complicated ones, and the frankness of his language has a tendency to shock the conformist Christians who turn up at his shows under the delusion that he is a "Christian musician," a sort of Emo cousin of Creed.
One would think that the music of a born again Christian would have some fundamental theme of hope and redemption, but the bleakness of Bazan's music makes atheism seem sunny by comparison. Many of his songs are slow, quiet singer-songwriter ditties, though the ones I like are the songs that rock. In these Bazan's voice is somewhere between the empathic warmth of Lou Barlou and the cynical detachment of Stephen Malkmus. When they rock, the guitars pound along with the monster power of Bob Mould. The metaphors can sometimes veer into the ridiculous and on rare occasions Bazan is not above lapsing into brief flourishes of Christian jargon, but more often his lyrics are both clever and original. Take "Penetration," for example, a song from the latest album Control (April, 2002).
Have you ever seen an idealist
With grey hairs on his head
Or successful men who keep in touch
With unsuccessful friends?
You only think you did
And I could have sworn I saw it too
But as it turns out,
It was just a clever ad for cigarettes
Cause if it isn't making dollars
Then it isn't making sense
If you aren't moving units
Then you're not worth the expense
If you really want to make it
You had best remember this
If it isn't penetration
Then it isn't worth a kiss
And we're so sorry, sir,
But you did not quite make the cut this time
And we'd appreciate it if you cleared
Your stuff all out by five
Don't take it personal
Everyone knows you did your best
If it makes it easier,
You should look at it from our perspective
Cause if it isn't making dollars
Then it isn't making sense
If you aren't moving units
Then you're not worth the expense
If you really want to make it
You had best remember this
If it isn't penetration
Then it isn't worth a kiss.
Every time I hear that song, I'm immediately transported back to 1999 and the soul-crushing creepiness that was my job at CollegeClub.com. The mood of the lyrics is perfectly accented by the existential sadness expressed by the wall-of-sound minor guitar chords that beat like a cold three-chambered heart along with every despairing syllable.
It's all good stuff, but one can only take so much of that kind of gloom. I'm the sort of person who can happily listen to Sisters of Mercy all day long and not feel my emotions tugged downward in the slightest. But Pedro the Lion, in combination with recent events and Gretchen's absence, actually drove me to drink. I decided to escape the glum isolation of the apartment by walking down 7th Avenue to the Barnes and Noble.
I sat down in the computer books section and thumbed through the much-celebrated new hardcover, A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. There they were, page after page of printouts of the behaviors of various cellular automata, sometimes compared to photographs of real phenomena from nature. I flipped over to the front of the book and started reading how Wolfram's grandiose "new science" stood to revolutionize all other sciences. The text had such an off-putting arrogance to it that my nascent skepticism was immediately deepened. Wait a minute here, Wolfram, you seem to be advancing three irreconcilable notions:
- That the universe is deterministic based on the outcome of a program that started running at the beginning of time.
- That certain outcomes are "computationally irreducible" (you must run the program to get the results - there is no shortcut).
- That we can model complicated things using simple programs, coming into the process half-way.
My point is that I agree with Wolfram on possibly 1 and 2, but not 3. The universe may well be the unfolding of a very simple algorithm. But to claim this algorithm has something to tell us about anything that actually needs explaining is ludicrous. The connection is "computationally irreducible" - to establish the connection we have to start another universe and wait billions of years. A theory that offers no hope of explaining things isn't a theory at all. Perhaps Wolfram can explain a zebra's stripes with one of his algorithms, but he'll never find the simple algorithm that underlies the origin of species or even the behavior of stock markets; the complexities of evolution and the stock market are layer cakes of algorithms running on top of other algorithms. And even if Wolfram should unearth the algorithm underlying the stock market, it will not have any computationally-determinable connection to his hypothesized "Ultimate Algorithm of the Universe," Wolfram's new Holy Grail to supplant Einstein's Grand Unified Theory.
Nonetheless, Wolfram's book did nothing to temper the bleakness of my evening. The people I passed on 7th Avenue had now been transformed into whirling storms of cellular automata boiling out of the concrete, no better or worse or more deserving than their substrate. All these bodies, all these brains, in such numbers, and all of their thoughts were locked away from me, computationally irretrievable. Any empathy I could ever have with anyone was merely an imperfect simulation running on the flawed algorithms of my particular mind.
For some reason I noticed a large number of strolling lesbian couples during my walk back home. Normally I'm completely obvious to Park Slope's lesbians; they just don't stand out among the legions of stroller-pushers and ladies not dressed in blue jeans.
This evening I was walking Sally through the tunnel of the Meadowport Arch and I came upon a couple guys along one of the long benches that line both sides. One of these guys was standing there facing the wall while pulling down his zipper. I thought maybe he was going to piss (though he was only a dozen feet from the other guy, who was stretched out and appeared to be asleep). But after I passed them, I heard a horrendous fusillade of farts, amplified hideously by the tunnel's acoustics. It sounded as if somebody was giving birth to the Hindenburg. I didn't want to imagine what this about. Humanity and its seamy yellowed undergarments seemed just a little too disgusting to be contemplated just then. I walked Sally past several other creepy people doing creepy things in and around the Long Meadow, and as I returned home, I avoided the tunnel. I didn't want to discover what had happened there.
I realized tonight that I never once defecated at school during any of my thirteen years of public education. To do so would have been too much of a humiliation, particularly during high school (when the Riverheads authorities removed the doors from the stalls to prevent - um - privacy). Not only that, but I never defecated before school either. It seems I must have done the old number two at some point after coming home from school every day, but I really don't remember. I remember suffering from stomachaches a lot back then. I wonder if this had anything to do with my defecatory hangups.
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