When the MeToo movement took off across the globe in 2017, it changed how we think about artists and their art.
As victims of sexual harassment and assault spoke out, the public became more aware of the behaviour of well-known people, including successful artists. Audiences immediately began to view these artists’ work through the lens of their actions.
As a result, many of our favourite books, songs and art works became irrevocably tainted by the transgressions of their creators.
Admiring the work of Pablo Picasso — the cubist artist who burned his partner Françoise Gilot’s face with a cigarette (and painted it) — or Alfred Hitchcock — the film director who tried to destroy actress Tippi Hedren’s career when she rebuffed his advances — became a less straightforward proposition.
“In the aftermath [of MeToo], people were left wondering what to do about their heroes,” US critic Claire Dederer writes in her new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.
Genuinely curious about this; could you explain that train of thought to me?
I can explain the idea, but I’ll be honest, it took myself years of living in the dry world of maths, theoretical logic and computer science (+ likely autism) to truly get behind this one.
So, you probably know from maths that a function has inputs and outputs. You stick parameters into it and then it evaluates to a result.
With this model, the only way to change the output, is to change the inputs. A function cannot randomly decide that today, it’s going to output something different.
Well, it can, but then the date (or whatever makes that day special) needs to be an input to the function.
There is no random, there’s only pseudo-random, which is when it’s really difficult to work out which inputs lead to a given output.
And I don’t see a reason why our brain should magically be different from this. Our whole brain is a function. It’s an extremely complex function, with gazillions of inputs throughout our lifetimes.
It’s also not a pure function, as the outputs of future evaluations are influenced by the inputs of previous evaluations, a.k.a. we remember shit. And that remembering is fuzzy, too, as we only store certain statistical weights, like LLMs do.
So, there are a ton of sources for pseudo-randomness, meaning even for toddlers (who’ve experienced comparatively few inputs), it can already seem random why they are crying.
But I see no reason to believe that we’ve somehow acquired the only source of true randomness in the whole universe, let alone somehow a consciousness?/soul? which for whatever reason makes decisions not based on those inputs. That just sounds like terrible decision making to me.
I feel like people struggle to let go of this idea of free will, because so much of our philosophy, religion, laws, motivation etc. are based on it. Even for me, with my particular set of brain-weightings, I have to be quite aware of my thinking to not fall into traditional patterns.
Maybe the whole artificial intelligence shenanigans will make us realize that our own intelligence isn’t that special.
Maybe you got stuck in the purism of math, in physics there seems to be lots of randomness in the universe, like everywhere all the time.*
But you do have a point in that as biological machines we don’t have much say in how our hardware (wetware? meatware?) is built or the programming that goes in, at least initially which could set us in a path to acquire or not a particular software or another. So how much free will can we really have? I think certainly not 100% absolute fee will, but maybe there’s some degree of freedom and therefore responsibility for one’s actions.
*Yes this could be a lack of understanding of how things really work in a underlying level, but for some reasons physicist believe it is true random.
Edit: grammar
Yeah, I hate the field of quantum physics, because it sounds like a fucking religion, trying to convince itself that these things are truly random, when, as far as I can tell, there is no evidence for that.
What is the case, is that this is the first time in human history that we cannot measure without significant impact on the real world.
Like, imagine a dark room and you’re wearing earplugs and somewhere in the room is a medicine ball. You can throw tennis balls around and observe whether they bounce back to figure out where in the room the medicine ball is.
That’s classical physics. Those tennis balls are photons.
But do the same experiment, except replace the medicine ball with a baseball, and obviously, you’ll have a problem. Your tennis ball will still half-bounce away from the baseball, but the baseball will half-bounce away, too. Your measurement has significant impact on the thing being measured.
The traditional physics method of measure→change→measure collapses. Everyone panic! We have to refer to this as quantum physics, because it’s obviously a completely different field! And let’s convince ourselves that this one is truly random, because can’t measure it, so it obviously has to be throwing dice at all times.
Alright, rant over. That is maybe taking the shit out a bit too much. Me hating the field means I’m not actually deep enough into it, to make most of these claims.
Especially e.g. quantum entanglement and wave-particle-duality, I don’t know enough about, to truly claim that they’re not new.
Also, to be fair, much like with computer science’s pseudo-random, in many cases, quantum physics might as well be truly random. Unless we find smaller balls to throw around, it is physically impossible to predict.