Neil Gaiman and Me
Or, Why I Love Fiction and It Has Given Me So Much
I spend most of my time trying to simulate belief systems in silico with arbitrary mathematical precision. But, Gaiman’s work articulates how the pieces fit together with greater clarity than formula, algorithm, and computers-as-instruments allow. I’ve never met him. Nevertheless, he’s my mentor.
There is this really insidious modern idea that some objective human reality exists. It doesn’t. It never has. And, if in the future our descendants achieve something like an objective humanism, they’ll no longer be human.
People communicate ideas in lots of ways. Some obvious ones: stories, art, music, math, comics, documentaries, and dance. But, it’s easy to forget that, implicit in communication is time. I’ll focus on stories, because that’s what Gaiman taught me about.
Stories propagate forward through time (and fit backwards over it). So, it’s worth thinking about the context of the story’s author. Usually, it’s some mixture of idiosyncratic biography and history. In the mad scramble to make sense and lay lines of order over our experiences, we seek regularity and try to delineate the true from that which is not, or at least what is worth knowing. Given enough time, we’re pretty good at it.
But, usually we’re not given enough time.
The end result is we integrate then communicate things which are true, things which are sometimes true, and things which were never true. It’s all congealed. But, when we tell those stories, some of those never true things become true, because society retells the same story. Beliefs beget actions, and actions create the opportunity for the creation of more.
We all live in the story stuff.
Mathematically-inclined folks like me feel frustrated by our inability to see myths and stories head on. Very often, they feel like sparking embers dancing just out of our peripheral vision. So, we use math and come up with math-y theories that afford us mathematical manipulation. But, they’re all postmortems. And, stories are very big, dynamic things. Compressed into a novel then decompressed and processed by the reader’s imagination are several lives.
Facts and figures don’t change minds. Stories do — they’re bulk belief updates. And, remarkably, the update per word for stories is stupendously high. A person can be shown facts and figures which empirically or logically refute one of their beliefs, yet remain steadfast without feeling the fool. Why? Because they can always traverse the graph of what they “know” and find some reassuring reinforcement nearby. “Okay, fine, but it doesn’t change anything because.”
…that pesky ‘because’.
Often, stories subversively whittle away at our objections. The most patient of friends, they answer our ‘because’ questions, over and over and over again. They let us see around the corners our personal perspectives create over time. They construct and deconstruct meaning. And, they offer us the opportunity to tell new stories — ones that would have remained otherwise inaccessible.
These are some of the things Gaiman taught me. Things that, way back when, I didn’t know I needed and desperately wanted to know. A place I’ll probably spend my life exploring.
Thanks, Dreamlord.
