Nolan's Odyssey

 So, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is coming in a few days, and a  lot of the publicity and brouhaha has focused on the sheer scale of the production, the casting choices and visual authenticity. For me, what will be more interesting to see is whether the film will attempt to capture what lies beneath the swashbuckling adventures: an ancient civilization reflecting on what it means to be human. I don't expect that much of that philosophical layer to survive the journey to film, though I reserve the right to be pleasantly surprised. I do like Nolan.

For the ancient Greeks, the Iliad and the Odyssey were part of an education. Children encountered courage, cunning, loyalty, betrayal, hubris and mortality through these tales. They learned that even the best of their gods and heroes were flawed and imperfect. That whatever civilizational order comes, it is borne through human acts, not some divine order. That they cannot count on the Gods to be fair or just, and that any attempt to make the world a bit fairer was a human undertaking, with no guarantee of success.

Homer does not begin the epics with “God said”. He asks the Muse to sing. The poet does not claim to be delivering a final revelation. He gives form to inherited stories and offers them to human judgment. The only authority he has is poetic, rather than absolute. The myths could therefore be retold, across the ages, contradicted and turned against themselves. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides could accuse the gods, dismantle heroes and offer different versions of the same stories, and it was all done without violating some fixed divine canon. Challenging the story was not only acceptable, it was part of the fabric of the story. Human beings listened and still had to judge for themselves.

Take the episode of the Cyclops, for instance. If you've ever had some passing interest in mythology, perhaps you still remember the story between Ulysses and his unfortunate crew and Polyphemus the Cyclops. In one of his lectures in the 1980s, speaking at EHESS in Paris, philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, asks his students to notice what Homer points out before the killing in the cave begins. The Cyclopes have no laws, no assemblies and no common deliberation. Each of them rules his own household and cares nothing for the others. The Cyclops is monstrous, yes, but not only because of his size and demeanour. How he appears visually can also be interpreted as a metaphor for the fact that he inhabits a brutal, lawless world, a pre-human collective. He sees things only from one absolute perspective. He recognizes no law above his own appetite and power. 

Ulysses tries to appeal to hospitality and to Zeus, protector of strangers. Polyphemus replies that the Cyclopes are stronger than the gods and need not care about such trifles. His cave is a household despotism sealed inside stone. For Castoriadis, this is evidence of an early intuition of the political order. He proposes that a collection of human-like beings does not yet constitute a society. Society begins when people create something beyond themselves and between themselves: common laws, obligations and a public space in which decisions can be discussed. The opposite he says is Cyclopean existence, each household enclosed within the absolute authority of its master.

Another philosopher, Dimitris Liantinis, offers another interpretation of that same episode. Ulysses, Liantinis writes, introduces himself as Nobody. It is only when he escapes the ordeal that he reveals his true name. Liantinis reads this in a rather Nietzschean fashion, as the movement from anonymous existence to a realized self. He says this is actually the story of each and every one of us. We all begin our lives as “nobody” in a deeper sense, existentially untested and only partly awake. It is only through overcoming challenges, through dealing with our own life’s Odyssey, with attention, effort, and the recognition of our own mortality, that we may become someone with a name. But he notes that most of us will most likely remain anonymous and be lost in history, like the crew of Ulysses. So, for him, the episode with the Cyclops, this seemingly inescapable natural force, is also about our own personal confrontation with our own death.

Castoriadis sees the emergence of the political person. Liantinis sees the emergence of the existential person. Both perspectives can be made to meet at the point where a free individual cannot develop without a common world, and a common world worth living in cannot exist without individuals capable of sound judgment. Of course neither Castoriadis nor Liantinis are uncovering some secret code hidden in Homer’s writings. They are merely using the poem as food for thought, as was intended. 

As for Ulysses himself, he is far from perfect. He is both a hero and an anti-hero. His desire for recognition, his vanity, allows Poseidon to identify him and prolongs the suffering of his journey. The man clever enough to become Nobody when need arises, does not understand when it would perhaps have been wiser to remain silent for a little longer. Ulysses is clever, but not wise.

Almost all homeric heroes are admirable and deeply flawed in roughly equal measure. Achilles is magnificent and catastrophic. Agamemnon is kingly and contemptible. Ulysses is ingenious, resilient, deceitful and vain. The listeners are not given a perfect hero to imitate. They are required to judge for themselves, and to think about how to be better.

And this may be one of the deepest differences between myth and propaganda. Propaganda supplies pure friends and irredeemable enemies. Homer gives us mixed creatures acting imperfectly under pressure, ignorance and necessity. Nobody escapes this contradiction, not even the gods.

These were the stories that encapsulated the shared values of ancient Greek civilization. Values that were contestable, mutable, subject to human judgement. The stories were told as poems, they were not delivered as catechism. Hospitality becomes clearly visible when the Cyclops violates it. Measure becomes visible when our heroes exceed it. Political community becomes visible when we encounter beings without an assembly. The stories were educational because they presented moral dilemmas and refused to make life simple. And this is why they persisted through the ages. Because every age can see its own reflection in them.

Perhaps Nolan will understand these aspects and carry part of them in his retelling of this very old story. Perhaps his Cyclops will be more than just a formidable monster on the screen. Whatever he makes of it, the story will endure.

(For a quick, expert refresher before the lights go down, Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins' Instant Classics podcast has just the primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMJj0SUREkk )

Life, the Universe, and Everything (3)

 

Part 3: World-Binding

This is the third in a series of essays exploring a chain of questions about complexity, life, consciousness, intelligence, and ethics. Together, they form a rough map of the journey, hopefully with not too many imaginary dragons along the way.

At the end of the previous essay, we proposed that life can be understood as organized complexity that maintains itself through time. It processes energy, preserves information, responds to local conditions, and belongs to lineages shaped by variation, inheritance, and selection. A bacterium moving toward nutrients and away from toxins is already using information from the world in ways tied to its own continuation.

But would it be appropriate to call this awareness?

We should be careful here, because words like responsiveness, awareness, sentience, consciousness, and self-consciousness are often thrown into the same conceptual drawer. At the simplest level, we are considering whether and how a system can respond to the world. Response, by itself, does not imply intention, life, experience, or consciousness.

A living system responds in ways tied to its own maintenance. A bacterium swims along a chemical gradient, and a plant bends toward light. Cells react to chemical signals, temperature, pressure, acidity, and other local conditions. These are not conscious decisions, but they are not random drift either. The organism uses differences in the world to regulate its own activity. Still, it would be too quick to call this awareness in the usual sense.

For these simple systems, the world becomes relevant, but not yet meaningful in the conscious sense. Some conditions help the organism persist, others threaten it, and the organism uses information about those differences to maintain itself. There is no need to invoke thought or feeling. The simple point here is that the surrounding world contains differences that matter to the system’s own continuation.

This is already beyond ordinary physical reaction, but it is not experience yet.

A nervous system is one way of binding information into a coordinated relation between a system and its world. It links what is happening outside with what is happening inside. It relates present signals to memory, possible action, and internal condition. This is the more general idea of world-binding.

World-binding is the integration of information across time into some kind of organized perspective. A system capable of experience, whatever it is made of, would need at least some way to bind information into a world from within.

On Earth, nervous systems are the clearest known implementation of this. But they may not be the only possible one in principle. A distributed alien organism might bind information through chemical gradients, electrical fields, pressure waves, or some other physical medium we have not yet imagined. A vast cloud-like intelligence might integrate information across enormous distances and think at a pace that would make us mistake it for weather. A fungal or colonial system, if sufficiently integrated, might not have one central brain, but something slower, looser, and more distributed. Even an artificial agent might bind memory, perception, goals, and action through complex non-biological architecture.

The material is not the essence; it is the organization that matters. The important question is whether information is merely being processed, or whether it is being integrated into something that has an inner side.

This brings us a step closer to consciousness and sentience.

Consciousness, in the sense used here, means integrated experience. There is something “it is like” for the system, however simple, strange, slow, distributed, or unlike us that experience may be. Sentience means valenced experience. Some states are not merely experienced, but experienced as better or worse from within.

Of course, these concepts are not perfectly separate boxes. They are more like neighbouring colours in a spectrum. We use different words because we need useful handles, not because nature implies any sharp borders here.

A conscious system, at least in principle, might experience the world in a neutral way: relations, changes, structures, patterns, perhaps something like pure observation. Whether such neutrality could remain stable over time is another question. Once memory accumulates, once some states recur, once some patterns are preserved and others disrupted, preferences may begin to emerge. Perhaps valence grows naturally wherever experience becomes historical. We should leave room for forms of mind that are not built around mammalian emotion.

But in the living animals we understand best, from studying how life manifests itself on this planet, experience is deeply valenced. Pain, pleasure, distress, and comfort are states that matter from within. Harm becomes more than damage. Damaging life is not morally empty simply because we cannot establish whether a particular living system feels pain. Within the framework we are building, life already has value as rare organized complexity, as history-bearing chemistry, and as part of the very few known instances of living fabric in the universe. Sentience introduces yet another kind of concern.

Each of us knows personal experience directly in our own case. We do not infer pain when we are in pain, nor do we infer the warmth of sunlight or the taste of coffee. Experience is the given thing. The problem is that we can only infer it in others, and so we look for signs. We look for integration, memory, learning, flexible action, internal relevance, attention, self-regulation, and the capacity to bring many signals together into one ongoing process. In animals, we also look at nervous systems, behaviour, avoidance, recovery, play, fear, social bonds, and the whole pattern of life. Each of these signs is an indication, but taken together, they form a compelling case for something extraordinary happening.

Plants and fungi, although quite far removed from our own mammalian experience, are also biologically responsive in rich and fascinating ways. They sense, signal, repair, defend, grow, exchange, and adapt. Some of this behaviour is astonishingly sophisticated, even though we cannot say whether they “feel” anything. In any case, there is no need to smuggle experience into the story before the evidence requires it, and complex responsiveness is already impressive enough.

Many animals, however, almost certainly cross into sentience. Mammals and birds give us strong evidence. Other forms of life may belong somewhere along that evidence gradient too. Octopuses are especially inconvenient for anyone who wants a tidy order of mind. These are highly intelligent creatures, curious, flexible, and radically unlike us. Nature, even on one planet, has tried more than one way of making an inner world. So we should be epistemically humble when we consider the possibilities.

It also means that we should be careful not to define consciousness by familiarity alone. On Earth, nervous systems are the clearest known path toward sentience and consciousness. But the deeper issue here is not whether a system is made of neurons, carbon, water, silicon, or anything else familiar. What concerns us is whether information is organized in such a way that there is a point of view from within. Any system, biological or artificial, would need some way to bind information into such a point of view before we could responsibly speak of experience.

Let’s try to summarize all of this. Responsiveness is the broadest layer: systems are affected by ambient conditions. A living system goes further, using information from the world to regulate itself. World-binding begins when information from different sources is integrated across time into some kind of organized perspective. Consciousness, in the sense used here, means that there is something it is like for that system, however simple, strange, slow, or distributed that experience may be. Sentience adds valence: some experiences are not neutral, but better or worse from within. And when experience begins to fold back on itself repeatedly, when the system models itself consistently as the one having the experience, then we can start talking about self-consciousness. That ushers in memory, self-other distinction, social identity, anticipation, regret, pride, shame, mortality, and the whole magnificent nuisance of being a self.

For now, the important thing to take away is the move from life that responds, to systems that bind the world, to experience that may eventually feel like something. This is where ethical questions begin to deepen, though we should leave the full argument for later. That does not make all sentient beings morally identical. A shrimp, a cat, a whale, and a human do not have the same memory capacity, social depth, emotional range, or possibilities of flourishing. But, whatever the case, once sentience enters the picture, it becomes clear that moral concern can no longer be restricted only to creatures that resemble us.

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Further reading

Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained for the idea that consciousness need not be a single inner theatre, but may arise from distributed processes competing, revising, and becoming available across the system; Sam Harris’ Waking Up for the distinction between consciousness and the self, and for approaching experience directly without importing religion; Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0 for thinking about consciousness, information, artificial minds, and the possibility that substrate is not the essence. 

Related lighter and fun fiction

Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud imagines intelligence in a form so unlike animal life that humans almost fail to recognize it; Stanisław Lem’s Solaris explores the difficulty of understanding a vast alien mind that does not fit human categories; Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the natural companion for thinking about artificial beings, empathy, experience, and moral recognition.