Science Philosophy

Plato has been momentarily interrupted to bring you this special news bulletin from the future ...

I went to the Wing Luke Museum last night to hear Ted Chiang give a brief talk and participate in a panel discussion. He only spoke for about 15 minutes, and made two very simple, but very profound, points.

First, he pointed out that sci-fi is a fiction of possibilities.  It is a fiction of new and different worlds.  It tells a story of change, where the world at the end is not the same as the world at the beginning.  In other words it's a progressive fiction, regardless of whether it depicts the future as utopian or dystopian.  As a result, it only makes sense to people who have seen the industrial revolution.  If you go back more than 200 years or so, you discover that the rate of change of human society is so small relative to the human life span that the world essentially looks static.  Your children's jobs are going to be just like your parent's were.  This ratio only starts to change with the industrial revolution, and has only accelerated since then.  Once we've seen with our own eyes that the world can change, we can start to appreciate the possibilities of further change.  

He contrasted this with the storyline implicit in other types of fiction.  For example, consider Star Wars.  While nominally science fiction, this is really a retelling of the oldest fable.  An untested young hero gets a magic sword from a mysterious old wizard and has to go rescue a princess from a castle guarded by an evil mage.  Sound like a familiar space opera?  These stories basically follow a classic arc where the world is basically good, evil intrudes, a hero rises and defeats the evil, and the world is restored to its rightful good order.  Fiction like this is inherently conservative, regardless of whether it's overtly political message comes straight from Elizabeth Warren.  Fiction like this makes perfect sense when no one in society can remember it ever being any different.  

Second, he suggested that this distinction between science and other fictions is meant to be explicitly political.  In other words, in his view, science fiction is an inherently progressive genre.  It shows people how the world they live in could be different.  It tells us about futures we've been told are impossible.  In short, it questions the status quo.  It may reveal an optimistic or a pessimistic future, but either way it illustrates a tomorrow's world organized differently from today's.  So writing or reading science fiction is an inherently political act.  More generally, imagination is an inherently political act.  He summed up his position by citing Neo's speech at the end of the first Matrix movie:

I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there, is a choice I leave to you.

Anyone who sees a different world is inevitably headed for a clash with the authorities in this one.   

As you might imagine, I enjoyed Ted's remarks, because I wrote them myself.  Maybe his version makes a better and more vivid story 🤔?  But this is exactly the point I was making in that post about the importance to Deleuze of having a philosophy built on affirmation rather than negation.  One side is focused on the limits and necessity of identity.  The other cares about the possibilities and contingencies offered by difference.  The latter is an inherently progressive philosophy, even if it focuses on metaphysics and never makes an explicit political statement.  This is the philosophy of the future.  It doesn't tell you how it has to be, it just hangs up the phone and starts imagining it.

In considering this deep distinction between progressive and conservative thinking, I've encountered what I see as a corollary to the thesis.  One of the most refreshing aspects of Ted Chiang's work is his optimism.  Now, I wouldn't say that the guy is Herr Doktor Pangloss exactly; he's plenty capable of bringing up ways that technology can go wrong.  Generally though, he has an optimistic view of the new possibilities technology affords us, and his thoughtful characters find a way to end with a better world than the one they started with.  I claimed earlier though that science fiction was a progressive genre regardless of whether it envisioned a utopia or a dystopia.  Which seems to imply that you could equally well be a pessimistic progressive.  Surely which side you prefer is to some degree just a matter of taste.  But perhaps being deeply drawn to the progressive aspect of sci-fi (enough to talk about it in a lecture at least) actually fits very naturally with an affirmative view of the future.  After all, the dystopias we read generally posit a world of either totalitarian control or chaotic free for all.  You can have A Brave New World, or you can have Mad Max.  Both are certainly different from our current world, and in this sense are progressive visions.  But in both cases, "progress" seems to lead to a dead end.  Totalitarianism and chaos both return us to the same static society that prevailed before the industrial revolution.  Once we descend into these dystopias we are stuck.  We can't imagine any more change coming after that.  I suppose a perfect utopia like Plato's Republic would work the same way (and now that I think about it, the fact that it wouldn't in reality is the driving idea behind another amusing piece of sci-fi) which is perhaps why these can seem as creepy as the dystopias.  So while being a pessimistic progressive may make logical sense, it's a very limited, one step, procedure.  

If you are an optimistic progressive, however, you can imagine a different world that then continues to change.  Your imagination opens up new possibilities that open up new possible imaginings.  This type of multiple affirmation is at the core of Deleuze's thinking.  It means selecting the difference that makes even more difference ad infinitum.  This is what he's describing with a theory of difference "in itself", that is, referring only to more difference "in the state of permanent revolution which characterizes the eternal return".