Be Your Own Basilisk

I feel uncomfortable now ;)

I just imagine a box with an AGI in it.

>That sounds actually hot. That aside, it's a pretty great movie (the scene in question is not, in fact, hot - but it is a good scene). For my money it's a pretty great lesson in how a movie can be coherent and well-developed whilst also deliberately sabotaging the suspension of disbelief as often as possible and just as deliberately sabotaging its own internal logic every time it moves from one act to the next. By the same token it's a fun way to sort entitled dipshit movie-watchers (people who need to be actively goaded along at every turn and complain when something "doesn't make sense") from people who are genuinely curious about how the movie is working (I think you're familiar with my supposedly unconventional views on narrative and aesthetics?*) *Also, I'm just jumping off here because as I was writing that part of the comment I was reminded of something interesting: I had fun a little while ago watching the youtuber "Shaun" do a few videos on how bad the "Cinema Sins" channel is. If you're not familiar with it, the Cinema Sins channel is a kind of Cracked.com rip-off that does clickbait videos pointing out all the things that are "wrong" in this or that movie. Shaun does a few meta-videos where he watches a Cinema Sins video and then does his own video where he goes through it chronologically, step-by-step (the way Cinema Sins does), and points out their mistakes. I picked up on what I think are the two most important distinct lines of attack he's got: (1) He just points out where they themselves have made a factual mistake of their own. He puts it down to them just watching the movie through once with a notepad and not checking before they then go to production. It's usually either stuff like they've *missed* a bit of the film which explains why something they call a "mistake" is in there (Cinema Sins says something like "but where the hell did he get that gun?" and he points to the bit which explains how he got the gun), or they say that something's a mistake ("sin") and then contradict themselves by pointing out another "sin" which renders the original mistake a "sin" (so for example they might actually say that something's a "sin" by *acknowledging* the bit which explains how "he got the gun"). (2) He'll talk about something to do with how narratives work, which the Cinema Sins people either don't understand or refuse to understand. So for example they might say that a character's motives don't make any sense, or they'll say something about how the continuity of the narrative doesn't make sense, and then he'll appeal to a more sophisticated understanding of how narrative works which makes sense of those motivations, or makes sense of that narrative shift which the Cinema Sins people erroneously think is a discontinuity. Anyway, it's all fun and I recommend those videos as well as a bunch of his other stuff (a rare thing for me, when it comes to Youtubers), but what I think is interesting is that a lot of the stuff he says *against* Cinema Sins when it comes to (2) and concepts of narrative is - even if not wrong - then somewhat shallow, or at least relying on incomplete and sometimes wrong ideas about how narrative works in fiction. The only reason I'm writing this up now is that, apart from just being sat at my laptop browsing the internet in the late evening (I have a really nice desk now at the moment with whisky and cigarettes and books, it's great), is that I think a lot of these *sort of* mistakes are really common in how actually quite a lot of very intelligent people think about aesthetics and narrative. Most of all what I think characterises this sort of mistake is that he's almost always appealing to some concept of *consistency* in saying that something's not quite right. So let's say Cinema Sins calls a character's behaviour "irrational", and Shaun responds that the character is *supposed* to be behaving in an "irrational" manner. Perhaps the character has a love interest which explains their irrational behaviour. Or on a wider note let's say Cinema Sins have called a plot-point "nonsensical" or "inconsistent" with the narrative drive of the story; my experience is that Shaun will counter that in some sense the plot requires that kind of narrative device (he sometimes gives the wikipedia definition of some kind of existing narrative device which explains how this works dramatically). But this approach seems to miss a lot about the form of literary works when understood at a deeper level. Literary, and more generally artistic, form is a really interesting subject to me, for what to you will be obvious reasons, and my big takeaway from Shaun's stuff is that he's still working with a really unsophisticated framework for understanding how appreciation of that form *works*. Notably, literary critics (I'm looking at you James Wood - the critic, not the weird actor) do this a lot too: appeals to literary conventions and artistic tricks are often taken to be fully explanatory of how any one work can be seen in a positive light. But this doesn't seem sufficiently explanatory. Shaun's (and most people's) appeals in this area always seem to focus on the idea that "it's *supposed* to be like that*, such that the view being criticised has just missed "the point" of the work (Shaun uses those very phrases, or something a lot like them). But that's just not enough if you're trying to understand the aesthetics of a work of art. I'm not just saying that "reader-response theory" is the only valid critical tool, and that all responses are valid, but rather that they don't carve the aesthetic qualities of a work of art at the joints. Something like Malevich's Black Square doesn't work because "it's supposed to" do this or that, at least not for me. It works for me at least because the one time I got to see the original (actually not quite the original, which I think has been lost, but one of the several he painted - also, thanks ex-girlfriend for buying me tickets to go see the Malevich retrospective on my birthday) I felt like all the air had gone out of the room and there was a loud single thump in my chest before my heart skipped a beat. There follows from that experience an array of over-excited thoughts and mental and physical experiences that I'd cautiously label a feeling of something like "transcendence". The same sort of thing goes for when I devoured the second half of Master and Margarita in one night for reasons I still don't fully understand. Or for my deep love of Tristram Shandy or late Samuel Beckett, or a film like Save The Green Planet (and its magnificent ending). While you can list all the narrative techniques or innovations of something like The Winter's Tale in explaining how *actually* it's detractors just don't get it, those simply aren't good explanations for why I think "Exit, pursued by a bear" is such a fantastic literary intervention in spite of its cack-handed silliness. One of the things people love to do with art of any kind is emphasise that it *really is serious* or that it *really is consistent* or *really makes sense* in light of some extraneous explanation which imposes realism on an otherwise silly or badly written or just dumb work of art. But why would anybody need to do that? This standard rejoinder does, I'll admit, come from a crass subjectivism that I reject: art is just what you make of it, or whatever. But there's definitely something deeper going on than that. And I think paying due attention to the irreducibility of these experiences of art gets us past that somewhat, still I want to say that there's something bigger going on than just what Shaun tries to grasp at and something both naive subjectivists and reader-response theorists go for, which is why I argue that there are facts about a text and that also anything "implied" by a text but not explicit in it is eliminable to the mental states of the person reading it, or at least to the relata of those mental states to the propositions of the text.

Part 2, apparently: This is all getting worryingly towards endorsing phenomenology (bad) but the upshot is that I'd love if people who are *critical* of bad opinions on art ("if it's conceptual art, or doesn't demonstrate traditional technical proficiency, it's bad) paid more attention to their own immediate impressions upon being presented with a piece, and critically analysed what sort of categories they're applying to it. For example, Shaun - before he writes up his rebuttal to Cinema Sins - might be *feeling* his appreciation of this or that work in a radically different way than is written up in his rejoinder to Cinema Sins: when he starts to work with ossified technical ideas about narrative and "how it's supposed to work" he might be talking about something which doesn't actually reflect his immediate impressions. Kant is, incidentally, notably bad at this when he discusses aesthetics: his talk about The Sublime and The Mathematical is - I think - fundamentally wrong about the nature of The Sublime, in a way that I think Burke is less so - Kant of course criticises Burke even as he draws on him, and it seems to me like Burke saw something Kant didn't. I'm not quite sure how to end this ramble now, although I'm sure I had a point. In any case, I think that an Aristotelian or Virtue account of aesthetics has a lot to say here: the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility - any aesthetic sensibility - is at its root a procedural practice: you get to one point (heart thumping over Malevich, or sneering at movie "mistakes") by the interaction of learned concepts (like "consistency") and immediate experiences, and in a psychological account of why any one person appreciates or disappreciates art in any one way neither of the two should be considered logically or conceptually primary. This leaves room, however, for a person to be wrong or right, more sophisticated and less sophisticated, in their aesthetic appreciation. That doesn't mean that a more sophisticated approach is "more right" either. Within the actual academic field of "aesthetics" we can see that it is trivially true that Roger Scruton has a very sophisticated and sophisticatedly wrong view on the nature of aesthetics and the nature of "good" in art. Nonetheless, I think it behoves on people who talk about aesthetics to see things in this light and to understand how fluid and difficult to pin down aesthetics is, even if it is not subjective, and to do so thoughtfully and with an appreciation of the fact that it is mysterious how aesthetic appreciation exists at all.

> YOU DO NOT THINK IN SUFFICIENT DETAIL ABOUT SUPERINTELLIGENCES CONSIDERING WHETHER OR NOT TO BLACKMAIL YOU. THAT IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE THING WHICH GIVES THEM A MOTIVE TO FOLLOW THROUGH ON THE BLACKMAIL.

Don't think so? Everything known has some undesirable side effect. Also, if people live to 100+ and use painkillers I would think they'd eventually build up tolerances and keep needing stronger and stronger ones.

Yeah but the odds are that'll happen no matter what.