Recently I was thinking about long-term goals; it turns out that this is an extremely difficult problem.
One might say that long-term goal-setting is a human-complete problem: one of a subcategory of problems that all recursively include each other, and all other human problems, in a spiralled tangle.
Other archetypical human-complete problems include art, relationships, self-knowledge, culture, history, politics, and sex.
You can't truly understand art without deep relationships, can't deeply relate to people without self-knowledge, can't gain self-knowledge without a clear perspective on your own culture, can't clearly perceive your own culture without a thorough grounding in history, can't ground yourself in history without an intuitive sense of politics, can't gain an intuitive sense of politics without an intuitive grasp of sex (ask Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Trump), and can't intuitively grasp sex without truly understanding art (ask any musician).
There are some nuances here, but examining the nuances reveals the fractal, recursively self-similar nature of the problem at hand.
Try to break down any human-complete problem, and you discover that it consists of many smaller versions of itself — indeed, of the entire set of human-complete problems.
Take, for example, art. It is easy to see that Hamlet is all about relationships — perhaps fractured relationships — fractured relationships, between fragmented people, in a deteriorating labyrinth of a situation — but what about, say, Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night?
The answer is that when you study the art you end up studying the artist, and eventually you realise that in some sense the artist was studying you. Even if you and he are separated in time and space, the artist knew that anyone who took the time to study his paintings would have to be a certain kind of person — and this mutual knowledge opens up a communication channel.
To understand The Starry Night you have to understand why Van Gogh painted the way that he did — and so you have to realise that Van Gogh knew that you would ask that question.
Similar questions might spring up around the messy entanglements between politics and sex. How sexy were (Bill) Clinton, Obama and Trump, really? They were certainly all seductive: any attentive observer would have to acknowledge that all three had many followers who found them very sexy indeed. Non-followers may not have seen the appeal.
Source: Joanbanjo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Art, politics, sex, and other human-complete problems — from the inside all can resemble a kind of house of mirrors, revolving, as they do, around the entangled perceptions that arise when people start perceiving other's people's perceptions, other people's perceptions of other people's perceptions, and so on, endlessly.
Source: Apanych, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Indeed, recursive, reflexive, self-referential patterns of mutual interpretation are typical of human-complete problems. Such patterns can occur within a single human being, or can be distributed amongst multiple humans. A whole cast of battling personas can be found within one personality; earnestly open roleplaying within a group can mask covertly exploitative theatrics. At times, a tangled fractal of proxy wars, culture wars and cold civil wars can allow the entire species to avoid thinking too clearly about the fractally tangled futures on the periphery of awareness.
These patterns of self-referential awareness are themselves fed into other people's perceptions, and so on, endlessly amplifying each other — what happens when you hold a microphone next to a loudspeaker that the microphone was already plugged into? What happens when you point a video camera at a television screen that displays a live feed of what the camera records? What happens when a living, breathing, fractal nest of loudspeakers and microphones, cameras and screens, begin feeding into each other’s entanglements and disentanglements, recurrently, endlessly?
To apply this perspective to the question of art, there's a subtle sense in which it's easier to understand, say, Leonardo da Vinci's private notebooks than his public works: common sense would conclude that trying to unravel a man's unpublished notes-to-self might be harder, as he wasn't composing or arranging them for any audience — but, paradoxically, this makes them easier, as there's no sense of any creator:audience interface getting in the way.
Trying to understand the Mona Lisa, on the other hand, presents a problem that is near-impossible, because it is so simple. All you really have to do is look at the painting, but this is virtually impossible without discarding the junk heap of other people's opinions that have accumulated over the years. When you look at the painting, do you see the woman, the painting, the volumes of cultural commentary, or the omnipresent image that appears on coffee mugs and tourist tchotchkes all over the world?
(I wasn’t sure where I could find a non-copyright photo of a Mona Lisa souvenir — ironically, though the Mona Lisa itself was painted long before copyright laws, photos of items with the painting on them are still under copyright. I thought it’d be funnier just to link to this mug on Amazon and hope the seller doesn’t mind the free traffic.)
Trying to directly connect with Leonardo's original vision by meeting the Joconde (as Parisians call her) in person is certainly very difficult nowadays. Surrounded by a mob of tourists trying to steal photos on smartphone cameras, and Louvre security guards trying to stop them, sociological dynamics would easily overpower most people's individual cultural reflections.
Source: Bramfab, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Speaking for myself, I find the Joconde easiest to understand through the lens of history: the painting was in fact not widely appreciated outside of the art world for most of her existence, and for most of the nineteenth century she dwelt in a dark, rarely-trodden corridor of the Louvre — a kind of cultural Gollum — and only through various twists of fate did she sprang from the shadows to become a twentieth-century icon: a self-made, world-historical image of all-conquering, all-powerful CULTURE!!!
The full story of the Mona Lisa is both stupid and interesting, which makes it funny, which perhaps makes it easier to decipher (humour is another human-complete problem).
A Cultural Borderline
The stupid backstory of the Mona Lisa — the somewhat-arbitrary nature of her anointment as a two-dimensional goddess of world culture — made her ideal for inclusion in some of Dan Brown's stupid thrillers (The Da Vinci Code and so on). Which is an interesting thread to pull on, as Dan Brown's books appear to stand right on top of a noteworthy borderline in the universe of literary works — the fractured faultline that lies between human-complete and non-human-complete writing.
On one side are writers who have something to say. In this category I include "non-literary" writers like Stephen King and G. R. R. Martin, who (I maintain) nevertheless do indeed explore human-complete problems. (To defend this point, I point the culture snobs to King’s psychological novel Misery, and to the good parts of A Song of Ice and Fire.)
On the other side of the line is dreck, including crappy genre fiction, most fanfiction, pretentious "literary" fiction cranked out by low-ranking members of the People's Department of Words, and other elaborate forms of monkey/typewriter output. Such works are very frequently some combination of repetitive, formulaic, derivative, trashy, and boring.
Where does, say, The Da Vinci Code fall?
Most "serious" critics would put it on the dreck side, but many of them also put Stephen King on the dreck side, and so I don't entirely trust them.
My personal ranking would look something like this:
Dostoevsky >>>>>>>>>>
Stephen King >
GRRM, JKR >>>>
Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer >>>>
Dreck
Don't take the number of > symbols to signify anything especially rigorous, the list above is simply an intuitive ordering for the sake of illustration.
The takeaway is that there are human-complete books and non-human-complete books; you can find both bestsellers and "literary" works on either side of the divide.
Why do I place Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer (author of the Twilight books*) where they are?
*(Best-selling romance novels with emo vampires, for any silly kids reading this.)
Both authors write books that are:
a. best-sellers
b. quite crappy by most literary standards, and
c. quite hard to actually pull off.
There's a kind of artistry to plotting out a book like The Da Vinci Code, or to creating the romantic atmosphere in Twilight, that most copycats fail to properly emulate.
Observe how carefully Dan Brown times plot beats, for example, or how intentionally Stephenie Meyer dabs her narrative paintbrush — making the female lead a blank cypher, for example, ensures that the (mostly-female) readers of Twilight can project themselves onto her. These are (subtly) human-complete problems buried in (seemingly) non-human-complete works.
Twilight-the-story might not seem especially hard to understand, but Twilight-the-cultural-phenomenon cannot be understood without grasping that underlying the narrative is a kind of veiled contract between writer and readers; the books are really all about the horniness of Meyer's audience, who prefer their sexuality sublimated into vegetarian vampires and (totally chaste!!!) appreciation for Robert Pattinson's cheekbones, than in the more overtly-sexual forms of adult-adult — as opposed to young-adult — romantic novels.
A Digression
Even the act of writing the last paragraph involved a human-complete problem — no male writer who is plugged into the twenty-first century cultural zeitgeist can write in such a manner without experiencing a slight paranoia that he might trigger a tripwire of contemporary sexual politics. (You might snigger, but I want to avoid culture warriors, or at least the stupid ones.)
Am I being sexist if I make cheeky comments about the female readers of Twilight, and not the horny male consumers of whatever? I honestly tried to think of a cultural product aimed at males that is analogous to Twilight, and couldn't think of any major cultural works that haven't already been dissected to death. Everyone knows that video games and comic books are sold to horny males, and — partly as a result — those genres have already been through several recent cycles of cultural criticism and self-renewal.
But, seriously now, when a woman writes a story about a (sexy, dashing, heartthrob) vampire — who has forsaken the taste of blood — and is therefore safe, but could relapse at any time — thereby becoming extremely dangerous — if he cannot control his continually-suppressed but constantly-burning desire for the female heroine — and the books sell over 100 million copies, with a largely female audience — you can safely guess that the author has tapped into a powerful concealed vein of human passions.
I include this digression to remark on a point I made at the beginning of the article: the space of human-complete problems is fractal. I sought to identify the precise nature of the borderline within one literary product — in this case, a series of books that conceal a human-complete feel for the audience’s latent passions beneath apparently non-human-complete recycled tropes and clichés; I discovered that this cannot be easily accomplished without gauging the borders of the contemporary culture war, and all of the associated sexual-cultural-political fractal chaos — yet another human-complete, and all-too-human, problem.
The fact that Stephanie Meyer is a Mormon, and that her books contain plenty of traditional romance and almost no overt sexuality, adds several tangles and makes clear that Twilight does indeed touch on several other human-complete problems. As I said above, the Twilight cultural phenomenon is human-complete, even if the books themselves are not.
You could spend all day pulling apart works such as the above, and many others, into their human-complete (HC) and non-human-complete (NHC) elements.
For the record, I’d say that books like The Da Vinci Code and the Twilight series should, on-the-whole, be categorised on the NHC side of the divide, though I maintain that in many ways they straddle the line in an interesting way. Still, such works ultimately end up feeling more-than-slightly-rigid, and stereotyped, over time devolving into nothing more than the continual rearrangement of a fixed set of patterns that never really develops or evolves.
In such works there is no sense of going meta, no act of feeding a problem into itself, no thesis/antithesis/synthesis cycle of creative destruction and self-rejuvenation — in short, none of the hallmarks of the cultural works that do indeed seek to directly take on the tangled fractal spiral that is the human-complete problematic — the interlinked and interwoven set of human-complete problems that I have explored above.
The real takeaway, then, is this: defining the boundary between the HC and the NHC, is itself a HC problem. This holds both between works, and within works — whether in the universe of culture as a whole, or within an individual cultural product, the borderline is fractal, complex, and self-referential, shaped by human-complete problems all the way down.
This was a very long post: part 2 will tackle some human-complete problems that are more purely cerebral and more STEM-focused.
Man-as-engineer is just as much a human being as man-as-artist; but engineers (and scientists) also spend significant time submerged in the nonhuman — I want to explore this. Similarly, design, philosophy and the social sciences — especially economics — all straddle the borderline between HC and NHC, and each does so in a unique way. I would also like to tackle HC vs NHC relationships at some point (this might give you a taster, as it explores ideas that overlap with my own).
Oh, and eventually I hope to tie everything back to my original question of goal-setting. I don’t mind giving away the conclusion before we get there: human-complete problems are unsolvable in the absence of god-like powers. Remember that each particular problem contains all of the others, so to solve one problem you’d have to solve the entire totality all at once — mathematicians would say that every element of HC contains the entirety of HC — but it is still possible to make meaningful progress at hacking through the tangled fractal jungle I have presented above.