Not Loving Liking What You See
I am a great fan of Ted Chiang. Many see Understand as his weakest story. I love it, as it is the finest work of intelligence porn ever written. And one of the funniest things I have ever seen on the internet involved it.
When I was young I used to read a nootropics message board, a mostly male folly of a forum whose members would have Chinese labs synthesize drugs with some claimed positive effect on IQ. As a rule, they didn’t do much of anything. But every time someone tried a new one, there was an excitement. One prankster claimed to have gotten a hold of some synaptogenic drug that was currently in clinical trials and then began posting excerpts from Understand, such as the following:
With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.
Some seemed to believe he had achieved our collective dream. And I have never laughed harder at any other internet prank. Given I love Understand, what is my least favorite Ted Chiang story? That would be Liking What You See: A Documentary.
Its central conceit is a technology that induces a condition called calliagnosia, which eliminates a person’s ability to feel the valence associated with perceiving physical beauty. He describes the condition as follows:
The condition is what we call an associative agnosia, rather than an apperceptive one. That means it doesn’t interfere with one’s visual perception, only with the ability to recognize what one sees. A calliagnosic perceives faces perfectly well; he or she can tell the difference between a pointed chin and a receding one, a straight nose and a crooked one, clear skin and blemished skin. He or she simply doesn’t experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences.
He then meditates on “lookism” through various lenses. But I feel he never quite gives beauty its due, nor discusses the truly horrible consequences of discarding it.
Let’s start with the horrible consequences. What is beauty? I can’t quite answer that in full. But much of beauty is a collection of health and youth markers that signal fertility. The long-term equilibrium of a society of calliagnosics is one of ill-health and retarded fecundity. Though Chiang’s calliagnosics see markers of ill health and age, they are not motivated by them. Physical attraction is eliminated in favor of personality. In the short term, things would be “fine.” In the long term, we would drift into ugly places. We would lose beauty not just in perception but in actuality.
Human beauty is a grab-bag of proxies for youth and genetic fitness. If we were to become unmoved by it, we would make choices less aligned to the pursuit of these correlates. Absent compensating technology, it’s hard to see how a society of calliagnosics could avoid becoming something that would disgust even the sort of person who would agree to such a procedure.
One might argue that Chiang states the calliagnosic can comprehend all these features. And could then select on these traits consciously. But I doubt any would argue this was Chiang’s intention. His calliagnosic lovers care for the mind not the body. This being so, in the long term the body would drift away from beauty. And most departures from the beautiful are going to be unhealthy, infertile, and (redundantly) ugly.
The fact that none in his story makes such an argument, strikes me as a sort of cowardice. It surely occurred to him. In his meditation on human beauty, he leaves as a lacuna the very reason beauty evolved in the first place. Having lobotomized oneself to this degree, why meditate at all? There is some fascination, I suppose, in watching someone think around his ice pick wound.
If the naive calliagnosic subculture is dysfunctional and so self-limiting, you can imagine, of course, compensating technologies. One could create some high-level centralized system to do what beauty does today in its decentralized form, inventing a grotesque dictator of sexual appeal. A standard dating market with such a thing would look much the same in terms of who couples with who. But their qualia would be diminished from our perspective. Their inner lives would be less rich. Sacrificing fairness for fairness, they lose the former and gain nothing of the latter.
Another thing he under-explores is sex. We get hints of it here:
For me, one of the things that attracts me to a guy is if he seems interested in me. It’s like a feedback loop; you notice him looking at you, then he sees you looking at him, and things snowball from there. Calli doesn’t change that. Plus there’s that whole pheromone chemistry going on too; obviously calli doesn’t affect that.
But there should have been more. And what of recollection? What happens to one who has the procedure reversed and now is disgusted by recollections that once enchanted them? And the opposite circumstance is just as tragic. Memories, once precious, stripped of their lustre. To gloss over such things is to ignore another huge dimension of beauty.
There is also a more embodied critique of the technology which Chiang does mention but again doesn’t give its full due:
Some people have been quick to dismiss the whole calliagnosia debate as superficial, an argument over makeup or who can and can’t get a date. But if you actually look at it, you’ll see it’s much deeper than that. It reflects a very old ambivalence about the body, one that’s been part of Western civilization since ancient times. You see, the foundations of our culture were laid in classical Greece, where physical beauty and the body were celebrated. But our culture is also thoroughly permeated by the monotheistic tradition, which devalues the body in favor of the soul. These old conflicting impulses are rearing their heads again, this time in the calliagnosia debate.
There is a bias, always, towards the chattering classes. And the chattering classes prize cleverness. A rich inner life. They disregard other virtues. They call physical beauty shallow. But how shallow is shallowness? Uncountable eons of sexual selection fine-tuned your “shallow” desires. N years of reading, conversation, and flirting created your rich inner lives. It is not really obvious one is less shallow than the other.
We are always biased to those aspects of ourselves that can articulate themselves. The chattering part of our mind thinks itself the only thing of value, thinks the world would be better if there was selection only for chattering. Here, it is talking its own book. And we should be suspicious.
One of the virtues of calliagnosia is its salutary effects on the ugly and the marred:
Saybrook has a higher than normal number of students with facial abnormalities, like bone cancer, burns, congenital conditions. Their parents moved here to keep them from being ostracized by other kids, and it works. I remember when I first visited, I saw a class of twelve-year-olds voting for class president, and they elected this girl who had burn scars on one side of her face. She was wonderfully at ease with herself, she was popular among kids who probably would have ostracized her in any other school. And I thought, this is the kind of environment I want my daughter to grow up in.
I have great sympathy here. But this would not outweigh the harm of its universal adoption. Still, it does seem like possibly a net win in the small. But it is just not very good compared to just making everyone beautiful and granting everyone complete morphological freedom.
And we see in the world Chiang limns that such a thing is near possible:
And these students, they might never even lose the beauty of youth. With the gene therapies coming out now, they’ll probably look young for decades, maybe even their entire lives. They might never have to make the adjustments I did, in which case adopting calli wouldn’t even save them from pain later on. So the idea that they might voluntarily give up one of the pleasures of youth is almost galling. Sometimes I want to shake them and say, “No! Don’t you realize what you have?”
I suspect Chiang, though obviously conflicted, has major sympathy for Students for Equality Everywhere (SEE). Towards them, I have almost none. And maybe this is my true objection. Regardless, I hope he would agree that the true solution is to make everyone beautiful. And his calliagnosia is, even in the most sympathetic reading, a very costly bandaid.
On re-reading the story for this whatever-this-is, I found it much more nuanced than it was in my memory. But it still misses much that is interesting and profound about human beauty. Chiang looks at beauty shallowly. He ignores its hidden depths. And for this reason, though not even close to a failure, it is my least favorite Ted Chiang story—the one narrated by a parrot is a close second.
“Liking what you see” is one of my favorite stories. I’m surprised by your take. Do you think it’s good that ugly people get bullied in school or passed over at work? The only case you can possibly make is that they ought to be disadvantaged for purposes of procreation, but come on, how many times per day do you procreate? An ugly person gets disadvantaged by other people quite many times a day. Calli adopted freely by most people most of the time would be pretty great.
We might not procreate many times per day, but much of what we do is in service of this goal. It might be many times per day that you meet a potential spouse. Or a person who might introduce you to their similarly-attractive friends, who could end up being your spouse. Or a person you might be seen with, and therefore judged by, when a potential spouse sees you and has to infer what hidden attractiveness you may posses. And so many times per day you have to decide whether to take step towards or away from these potential futures and whatever procreation they may or may not entail.
That’s not to say “it’s good that ugly people get bullied”, because there’s quite a lot of room between that and “it’s so bad, that it’s better to fully numb ourselves to appreciation of beauty”. Pain killers have their uses in specific cases, but congenital insensitivity to pain is no bueno. You don’t want to throw the non-ugly babies out with the bathwater.
(I like beauty, and I do lean towards Tomas’ take on Chiang’s story.)
Tangent:
I used to think so too. Then I learned about Jo Cameron:
If you step over enough disfigured corpses and look only at seemingly normal people, eventually you’ll find one who through some combination of luck and incomplete impairment seems to have made it work.
Some of this applies to me. The only time I’ve ever asked a doctor for “pain drugs” was to see if they could give me something to make injuries more painful so I was less likely to ignore the signs. The other day I noticed that I had cut myself because I saw bleeding, and I have no idea how or when it happened. If I play up this side of things, I could make a case for suffering being unnecessary and make some valid points.
At the same time, when I’ve faced similar loss/threat of loss, it hurt. And that hurt motivated quite significant changes to who I am as a person that definitely would not have happened if I were numb to it. On a brief overview like that, the difference isn’t gonna show up. Sure, my wife hasn’t killed herself, but that’s normal and I don’t have any reason to believe she would have otherwise. But if there were a missing corpse walking around living somewhere… who’d know?
There has to be some ability to detect harm, and motivation to correct it, or it won’t happen. At the same time, sensitive systems saturate easily, and saturated controllers don’t control well. Turning down the gain can be useful if you have reason to believe saturation is worse than insensitivity in the context in question, but avoiding one failure mode invites the other. It’s a discrimination problem, and not a trivial one. Ideally you train capacity and have both.
I sympathize with you having gone through all those experiences, and empathize with the hurt of loss since I’ve had no bigger motivation myself to make changes to my own life. That said, I don’t understand why you’re dismissing the example of Jo, who’s a clear counterexample to your last paragraph’s generalizations, and the reason I was bummed the Far Out Initiative didn’t pan out.
Because she’s not a counterexample at all. She’s a demonstration that you can get what superficially appears to be passable results while giving less fucks about things. The rule are the rules, and knowing the rules helps to highlight what’s really going on because you know where to look to find the “missing” downsides.
If I were as unmotivated as she was by the loss of her husband, there’s someone who might be dead right now. If she were as motivated as I was, her husband might be alive. The only reason “Her husband killed himself” doesn’t come off as completely damning to her way of going through life is because the narratives we tell about such things are designed to numb us of these things already. “She did what she could! It’s not her fault!”. Did she really? Do everything she could? Would he likely have killed himself if she grew up suffering more? Sure. Would it be bad to blame people too readily for their spouses’ suicides? Sure.
But what probability of saving your spouses life does it take to justify enduring suffering for a couple years as it tears you apart and allows you to rebuild into something that might have made the difference? Can you actually justify that the chance of making the difference is lower than this number? For her too? Confidently?
These are hard questions to answer affirmatively, and you don’t get the answer right except by luck if you’re running on defaults. And coming up with convincing answers to this does chip away at the suffering, to the extent that we actually find them convincing. The woman I know who lost her husband to suicide would probably say something similar to Jo, but I know it hurt. I know she cared. The reason she was able to get back on her feet relatively quickly and successfully is that she actively threaded that needle between the courage to change what she could and the serenity to accept what she can’t.
Jo’s story is of finding motivation to stop touching hot stoves somehow, leaving the “somehow” unspecified. And of failing big where it matters most. In a way that we give her a pass for because the rest of us are prone to fail there too. Potentially even more often, given how common and debilitating saturation can be around serious issues like that. Her story demonstrates that it’s possible to get by alright if we turn down our sensitivities a good bit, and blame luck for the bad things like her husband’s suicide more than we credit it with the good things like “not dying on the stove”.
It doesn’t demonstrate that it’s better, either in expectation or in her exact case. Or that the rules somehow don’t apply to her. Just that we generally have so little clue of what we’re doing that it’s easy to spin that way.
I like your essay. Its final, though, has a weakness.
You say, “the true solution is to make everyone beautiful”. This needs an addition: “while preserving the connection between reproductive health and beauty”.
You do need to fix health defects at the same time. Otherwise, your main critique of losing the fitness signal would apply.
I unabashedly love both Understand and Liking What You See.
Calli would probably be dysgenic long-term, but we humans do a lot of things that are dysgenic. Plastic surgery and makeup are likely dysgenic.
I value the story because transhumanism is strongly associated with the id, and the ego. Liking What You See is the rare work that competently sketches a transhumanism oriented towards Rawlsian compassion. And that is sorely needed, for both utilitarian and political reasons.
I am also extremely against this kind of egalitarianism. But there’s one line of argument that makes me somewhat sympathetic to SEE, which is that there’s a taboo around acknowledging ugliness and how bad it is to be ugly. And so there’s a kind of self-deception going on in most people, where they both think that ugly people should be treated better, but also don’t want to confront their own complicity in treating ugly people badly. I’m sympathetic to observing this kind of society-wide hypocrisy and guilt and wanting to make it go away.
Having said that, a lot of the guilt is induced by egalitarian intuitions in the first place, and so I think the SEE approach would make the problem significantly worse by creating more social coercion around beauty. I’m less compelled than you by the idea that the gene pool would drift towards ill-health, because:
much of the selection for beauty would be replaced by selection for intelligence, which is also a proxy for health
this is the kind of thing which could easily be fixed by rational policy on genetic engineering
But of course that rational policy wouldn’t happen if calli becomes a locus of strong guilt, coercion, and rigid identity.
I don’t think genetic fitness in mating is your true objection, because if so you’d react to the solution of “make everyone beautiful” with the same degree of horror as you do to calli.
Yeah. It’s more something I wanted him to contend with. It isn’t my true objection. I should have fixed the essay after inkhaven.
Arguably you should focus on your fiction, and leave mediocre literary criticism to the rest of us haha. :P
(I haven’t read the story, could be missing something)
Pretty prose, but I am confused as to why you didn’t mention how some beauty features have become somewhat uncoupled from fertily health due to make up, surgeries etc. This would only increase with better tech to the point where it would only very slightly correlate. Seems an important piece of the puzzle along with the fact that most of our drives are monotonic and not very intelligent, breast size being a prime example. So when you consider a society of calliagnosics inventing some compensating technology—I would expext this to be better in terms of health/fertility outcomes for society than the equivalent-tech world where people care about beauty due to the calliagnosic society optimising specifically for those things rather than a correlate.
Understand is my favorite short story of all time. It’s funny to see you call it intelligence porn, since I keep a list of stories titled “agency porn” where it is the first entry. Some others on the list are Crystal Nights by Egan and Dare by Charlie Fish. I also think ideal agency porn has an accelerating plot structure, where the scale and stakes get steadily higher throughout the story, and Understand is just a masterclass in creating that sense of building momentum.
Chiang is special because he can produce interesting ideas and tell a great story, and these skills seem to be in tension. Egan’s ideas are legendary, even better than Chiang’s, but his storytelling is pretty weak. The only author I know of who I would assert beats Chiang on both quality of ideas and storytelling is Susanna Clarke. (She isn’t categorized as sci-fi, but read Piranesi and tell me this woman wouldn’t be an excellent mathematician.)
I agree that Liking What You See was weak. I don’t remember much about it, and it was fairly long, so the ratio of memorable ideas per word must have been low. I do remember that it was disappointingly predictable. If you read the phrase “debate about equalizing beauty” and let the commentary you’ve absorbed from our culture wash over you for a few seconds, then you’ve already covered all of the angles raised in the story. There’s nothing original, and there’s basically no plot to salvage the boring ideas; it’s just an exploration of the ideas using the characters as props.
However, I think What’s Expected of Us is an even weaker Chiang story. That story describes a device called a “predictor” that has a button and an LED. Whenever the button is pressed, the LED blinks one second *before* the press. This results in widespread anguish as people grasp the consequences for free will.
For starters, the premise of the predictor is just logically impossible on its face. Set up an Arduino that checks the LED at 3:00:00 PM and pushes the button at 3:00:01 PM only if the LED was off. I don’t remember there being any consideration of the problem this creates for the predictor. But even worse, the story totally misses the mark on human psychology. There is zero chance society would go insane due to the emergence of a philosophical paradox like this. The laws of physics are full of mind-bending paradoxes in the real world, but they have no effect on the average person’s state of mind.
In general, “philosophical idea leads to insanity” is a common trope in fiction, but it very rarely matches reality. I guess it’s a way to shoehorn an interesting idea into a story, turning what should have been an essay into a piece of fiction. Incidentally, the one exception I’ve noticed to this rule is your own story The Maker of MIND, where a character is tormented by a fairly abstract philosophical concern, and the reader actually feels his anguish. I thought that was really difficult and impressive.
In fact, I think you are an exceptionally gifted storyteller and have what it takes to be in the conversation with Chiang and Egan. The Company Man was insanely good. I remember someone in the comments was questioning why that story was so well-received on this site, and I thought, when a story is this good, it doesn’t even matter what it’s about, because it’s interesting just as an example of storytelling. It gets you thinking about the ingredients of good stories. I’m not especially interested in rationalist culture or AI safety, and I still find myself thinking about The Company Man every now and then. In particular, I often recall this little excerpt (the final paragraph just kills me):
Random anecdote: About a decade ago, I was going through a period of depression that seriously slowed down my thinking and perception. Like, to the point of being worried I was having a stroke. At times I could literally feel my perceptions and thoughts slowly coalescing through distinct stages: from sounds to phonemes to words to sentences, or from shapes and colors to generic objects to more specific classifications of those objects. I understand (and have experienced) why this kind of capability can be useful (for example, in meditation practice). But in normal life, this version of it was counterproductive, unpleasant, and a hindrance.
You might want to edit the accidental “times dot you” link (which seems to be infested with some nasty stuff; the interplay of a missing space after the dot and an editor which creates links in such situations).
Thanks. Fixed.