Machines + Society #16: Mass Sleeping; Musical arrhythmia; Mearsheimer
machines + society
by Mako Shen | Nov 30, 2020
‘Am I Dreaming, Or is Everyone Asleep?’: On the Analogy of Sleep in Modern Culture
The Knight’s Dream, by Antonio de Pareda
Questions from last month:
What, precisely, is the problem with using utility functions to make decisions?
What are some alternatives to expected utility for deciding between alternatives?
Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies Which busy care draws in the brains of men; Therefore thou sleep’st so sound.
I.
In My Dinner with Andre, a movie where two New Yorkers in the theatre industry talk about learning to play as adults and being buried alive in a rural Scottish commune, Andre Gregory, the storyteller, says to Wallace Shawn at one point:
“Has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? and it's not just a question of individual survival Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say no?”
II.
In a letter from the philosopher Freidrich Engels to the communist historian Franz Mehring, Engels uses the phrase ‘false consciousness’ to describe when a subordinate class voluntarily embodies the ideology of the ruling class.
The great Noam Chomsky once remarked, "you cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption."
One might say, then, that middle class families going to spend their hard-earned money at the mall (or online) on things they neither really want or need is an example of false consciousness.
The executives declare 'new is good and more is better'. The masses lap it up, caught in a fugue state.
III.
The Wide Awakes were a paramilitary youth group who strongly supported Abraham Lincoln during the 1860 presidential election. They escorted Lincoln to and from political events and fought for the abolition of slavery. During Lincoln's presidency there were as many as 500,000 members.
IV.
A lot of people use this language around wakefulness and consciousness. Most of the time, it is used to distinguish between the in-group, who have taken the red pill/have true consciousness/are woke, and the out-group, who have taken the blue pill/have false consciousness/are not woke.
The examples I've given have been from the last two centuries, but this trope — the questioning of who is and isn't awake — is far older. In Plato's famous allegory of the cave (~300 BCE), a group of prisoners sit in a cave watching the shadows of the outside world. Socrates explains that people who live unexamined lives are like these prisoners, and only philosophers are able to free themselves and step out of the cave. Plato doesn't explicitly evoke language of waking, but the analogy is close enough.
Across the world, at a similar time in what is now the Anhui province, a poet named Zhuangzi wrote a passage known as 'The Butterfly Dream'. In it, he dreams of being a butterfly, and wakes up in confusion: was he a man dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man?
What does it mean when a person wonders if she is dreaming or when one group of humans calls another 'asleep'? It feels like there are two natural distinctions to make when thinking about the analogies of waking. The first, which I'll call the ‘Everyone is Asleep’ accusation, draws the line between people who are 'awake' or 'conscious', and the rest. The second, which I'll call the ‘Am I Dreaming?’ question, is about trying to figure out when one person's experience is a dream/true reality.
What are the common motivations behind the use of this type of language? There are a few interpretations I'm toying with.
Loneliness and the frustration of private residue
On one level, the ‘Everyone is Asleep’ accusation feels like an expression of frustration and loneliness.
When I first saw Hikaru Koreeda's Shoplifters, I was blown away by the beauty of the film. To me, it epitomized the struggle to do and be good when one is dealt a horrible lot in life. My friend Nic conceded that the film was nice, but ‘nothing to write home about’. At the time, I couldn't believe he was blind to just how poignant, how True this movie was to me. I tried for a good while to show him why it moved me, but I ran out of words.
The philosopher of psychology Eugene Gendlin has a phrase, the ‘felt sense’, that is quite apt in this case. The felt sense refers to what a moment or set of situations 'feels like'. This is useful because it provides a term for indicating that you have a consistent set of feelings without having to specifically describe the feeling itself. Shoplifters gave me a felt sense of beauty and meaning that I couldn't convey to my friend.
Another way that I think about the felt sense is in terms of 'private residue',a term borrowed from an old English teacher of mine. I can spend two hours telling Nic about how great this movie is, but there will always be this gap between my experience of it and his. Private residue refers to that gap. I can never show Nic what it is to be me, to have the felt senses that I have. In a way, this is one of the central tragedies of human life.
I imagine that absorbing a new ideology, whether it be seeing the world through suffering (Buddhists) or environmental sustainability (ecologists), is gaining a new felt sense. The new perspective leads to a larger feeling of distance between the believers and non-believers (more shared private residue).
To not be heard or understood by others is lonely and frustrating. It is natural, then, to use the collective-waking distinction to map the world. "Everyone around me has been lulled into a daze by the comforts of materialism. They need to wake up."
Personal dreamlike experiences
Sometimes, I'll wake up from a vivid dream in an unfamiliar environment and be completely disoriented for a half hour. This usually happens when I'm traveling to a new place. I'll sit up and have no idea where I am. I'll still feel the cold sweat on my body and the metallic taste of fear after running away from this dark force, and seriously wonder, did that just happen?
Other times, I'll be walking home along my familiar route and suddenly be struck by a strong feeling of déjà vu. The hairs stand up on the nape of my neck. This has all happened before, and I'm repeating myself. This confusion is a lot like the uncertainty upon just waking from a dream.
These experiences are common across cultures and time periods, as far as I can tell. It feels obvious that these sensations are what lead to the 'Am I Dreaming?' question in movies like Bladerunner, Inception, and The Matrix.
Group disenchantment
Another way that individuals may be led to the 'Am I Dreaming?' question is by becoming disgruntled with society. This applies similarly to the ‘Everyone is Asleep’ accusation.
As machines were invented during the Industrial Revolution, it became much more common to cluster people in factories. To maximize output of each factory, jobs were standardized and reduced in scope. Someone who might have woven an entire sweater by hand would now only fold the sleeves within the assembly line.
This has been carried over, if not exacerbated, by newer technology. Warehouse workers are given very little autonomy and are heavily tracked. "We don't think for ourselves", "We are machines," an Amazon warehouse 'picker' declared.
Working among groups of people who have little autonomy conceivably produces the type of dissociation that leads one to question his or her reality, and also the accusation that everyone around him or her is ‘asleep’.
Signaling Knowledge/Wisdom
Members of a movement need some way to distinguish their insight (whether real or imagined) from others. A quick and easy way to do this is to use an analogy that everyone understands.
If I say "we followers of the great Osho have seen the Truth and are Awake. We invite the sleeping masses to join us and wake up", then I am sending a quick signal that I have knowledge that others do not, and that they should listen to me.
Trying to help other people
The last option that I should mention is the possibility that the people declaring that ‘Everyone is Asleep’ are just genuinely trying to help. The simple analogy of waking and sleeping is a quick way to explain to someone that there is an alternative to the world that he or she knows.
I realize that the reasons I’ve proposed are quite messy. They are not at all mutually exclusive, and far from exhaustive. Yet I haven’t come across an attempt to interpret the motivation behind analogies of sleep like the ‘Everyone is Asleep’ accusation, or the ‘Am I Dreaming?’ question. This is my amateurish attempt at cultural analysis.
What have I missed?
Questions:
In 1984, Orwell wrote “until they have become conscious, they will not rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious”. What are some plausible reasons behind the psychology of this analogy of the ‘sleeping masses’?
What is the ‘felt sense’ and why does it matter?
📰 Assorted Links 📰
What I'm Reading
Books
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
Besides the beautiful hardcover, the book is important because it provides a detailed overview of a neglected topic: open source software. So much of the software ecosystem is dependent on the maintenance of a few important package developers. As the thinking around fostering software innovation matures, it feels inevitable that open source becomes a much larger part of the discussion.
Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of my Years at Lockheed
A behind-the-scenes look at one of the world’s greatest engineering teams. It’s worth is alone for anecdote behind the SR-71 ‘Blackbird’, which was built in the 1960s and which still holds the record for fastest absolute speed of any aircraft. The book weaves management advice with reflection on changes within the U.S. Department of Defense with aerospace engineering. This book taught me a lot.
Around the world
The Warfare State: on John Mearsheimer and David Hendrickson, two “outcasts from the American right, [who] both have opposed every US military intervention since the end of the Cold War.”
“Mearsheimer mourned the Cold War’s passing. ‘The West,’ he wrote in the Atlantic in 1990, ‘has an interest in maintaining the Cold War order, and hence has an interest in continuing the Cold War confrontation.’ He thought some Soviet-US tensions could be reduced, but predicted, correctly enough, that there would be more violence in Europe in the ten years following the Soviet withdrawal than in the ten years preceding it. His advice to Washington was to step up nuclear proliferation on the continent and force any newly unified Germany to adopt weapons of mass destruction.” [London Review of Books] (Italics mine, H/t ML)
On civil resistance: "Chenoweth rattled off a few cases of civil-resistance campaigns that had managed to reverse post-election power grabs—Thailand in 1992, Serbia in 2000, Gambia in 2016—and said that such successful campaigns generally did four things: “They mobilized mass popular participation. They encouraged defection by people in positions of authority, like economic and business élites, security forces, even members of the opposition party. They tended not to rely solely on mass demonstrations but instead used methods of dispersal and noncoöperation, like boycotts and strikes. And, finally, they stayed disciplined, even when repression escalated.” [New Yorker]
The fall from grace of Myanmar's buddhist leader. [NYTimes]
Decision Theory
Normative Uncertainty as a Voting Problem— a really insightful paper by Will MacAskill. The title says it all: why don’t we borrow methods from voting theory when trying to resolve conflicts between ethical theories? His colleague Christian Tarsney nicely points out some problems with MacAskill’s proposition and proposes a rule of his own in Normative Uncertainty and Social Choice.
Miscellaneous
Adrianne Lenker’s Radical Honesty
“I never really think of her, like, fucking around and playing riffs or something. It’s always this instrument of witchcraft. It’s always holy. She writes music from this place that’s very intuitive and fearless, and she has confidence that there’s some kind of spirit or force that she can listen to.” [New Yorker]
The can opener wasn't invented until 48 years after the first can. (H/t Jason Crawford)
Interpreting heart arrhythmias as music. Some little etudes and an accompanying paper. This is all by the amazing Elaine Chew. See also her spiral array model for conceptualizing tonal movements.
Poem of the month
The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
-Theodore Roethke
Music
Angelo de Augustine — Blue. “Between my eyes/ Is an ocean, you can feel it if you try”.
Galt MacDermot — Coffee Cold . A great beat to freestyle over. You heard it here.
Townes Van Zandt — Lungs. Great folk lyrics.
.BY_ALEXANDER — Trumpets . Contemporary jazz fusion, autotune mumbling. It works for me.