More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Ultimately, the repertory operates on a celebrity logic. These happen to be celebrities of thundering genius, but we’re still giving in to a winner-takes-all mentality.
It’s difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters, and we settle on a few famous names.”
In Western culture, pretty much everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person—the “journey” of one particular “hero”—as a prism for understanding everything else.
“Most commercial music disappears when the generation that made it dies,”
A few artists succeed on both artistic and commercial rankings (for example, Bing Crosby), but for a reputation to last, the artistry needs to be at the highest rung. Record sales don’t matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.”
Gioia’s assertion was that twenty-first-century music writing has devolved into a form of lifestyle journalism that willfully ignores the technical details of the music itself.
Music critics have almost no impact on what music is popular at any given time, but they’re extraordinarily well positioned to dictate what music is reintroduced after its popularity has waned.
virtually all pop historiographers elevate the importance of the Sex Pistols above that of the Bee Gees.
But I’ve noticed—just in the last four or five years—that this consensus is shifting. Why? Because the definition of “transgressive” is shifting. It’s no longer appropriate to dismiss disco as superficial. More and more, we recognize how disco latently pushed gay, urban culture into white suburbia, which is a more meaningful transgression than going on a British TV talk show and saying “fuck.”
“Specific people made specific choices about what would endure. In this particular case, the people making those choices, the ones picking which records would literally survive, were the collectors of 78s.
In the broadest possible sense, merit does play a key role: The work has to be good enough to enter the critical conversation, whatever that conversation happens to be. But once something is safely inside the walls of that discussion, the relative merits of its content matters much less. The final analysis is mostly just a process of reverse engineering.
Frank Lloyd Wright is indisputably the greatest architect of the twentieth century, and the only people who’d potentially disagree with that assertion are those who legitimately understand the question. History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.
But I don’t believe subjective distinctions about quality transcend to anything close to objective truth—and every time somebody tries to prove otherwise, the results are inevitably galvanized by whatever it is they get wrong.
The forces shaping collective memory are so complicated and inconsistent that any belief system dogmatically married to the concept of “merit” ends up being a logical contention that misses the point entirely.
Shakespeare is better than Marlowe and Jonson because Shakespeare is more like Shakespeare, which is how we delineate greatness within playwriting.
To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don’t care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.
everyone concedes we have the potential to be subjectively wrong about anything, as long as we don’t explicitly name whatever that something is.
Dinosaurs were warm-blooded, and I didn’t care that I’d once thought otherwise.
You naturally grow to accept that you can’t really know certain things everyone considers absolute, since these are very hard things to know for sure.
In essence, we anchor our sense of objective reality in science itself—its laws and methods and sagacity. If certain ancillary details turn out to be specifically wrong, it just means the science got better.
“The only examples you can give of complete shifts in widely accepted beliefs—beliefs being completely thrown out the window—are from before 1600,” says superstar astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
in 1603 the microscope was invented, and in 1609 the telescope was invented. So these things gave us tools to replace our own senses, because our own senses are quite feeble when it comes to recording objective reality.
Yes, we are not the first society to conclude that our version of reality is objectively true. But we could be the first society to express that belief and is never contradicted,
We might be the last society, because—now—we translate absolutely everything into math. And math is an obdurate bitch.
In the ancient world, science was fundamentally connected to philosophy. Since the age of Newton, it’s become fundamentally connected to math. And in any situation where the math zeroes out, the possibility of overturning the idea becomes borderline impossible.
It’s easy to discover a new planet and then work up the math proving that it’s there; it’s quite another to mathematically insist a massive undiscovered planet should be precisely where it ends up being. This is a different level of correctness.
Kuhn’s take was that science does not advance through minor steps, but through major ones—basically, that everyone believes all the same things for long stretches of time, only to have the entire collective worldview altered by a paradigm shift36 transforming the entire system.
If we’re destined (as Kuhn would argue) for an inevitable paradigm shift, what would that shift feel like?
Here’s the thing with paradigm shifts: They tend to be less dramatic than cultural memory suggests.
the last monster shift in science—the Copernican Revolution—was a textbook example.
This revolution took over one hundred years, invisible to the vast majority of the planet. Granted, a revolution within our accelerated culture would happen far faster.
But that still doesn’t mean a transformative period would be transparent to the people actually experiencing it; this is why I ask how a modern paradigm shift would feel, as opposed to what it would look like or how it would operate.
I tend to think about two distinct varieties of potential shifts: the world beyond us, and the world around us.
What I classify as “the world beyond us” are notions like the aforementioned multiverse—the possibility of a cosmos that is way more complicated than the cosmos we conceive.
But what is the feeling that would accompany the validation of this hypothesis? Nothing.
I dig the simulation argument. It is, as far as I can tell, the most reasonable scientific proposition no one completely believes. I have yet to encounter anyone who totally buys it;
What we believe to be reality is actually a computer simulation, constructed in a future where artificial intelligence is so advanced that those living inside the simulation cannot tell the difference.
if it’s possible to create this level of computer simulation (and if it’s legally and socially acceptable to do so), there won’t just be one simulation. There will be an almost limitless number of competing simulations, all of which would be disconnected from each other.
And once those various simulated societies reach technological maturity, they would (assumedly) start creating simulations of their own—simulations inside of simulations.
Simple mathematical odds tell us that it’s far more likely our current reality would fall somewhere in the latter category.
Greene was discussing a collection of (roughly) twenty numbers that seem to dictate how the universe works.
These twenty numbers appear inconceivably fine-tuned—in fact, if these numbers didn’t have the exact value that they do, nothing in the universe would exist.
the simulation hypothesis presents a secular answer: that these numbers were set by the simulator.
Part of what makes the simulation argument so attractive is the way its insane logic solves so many deep, impossible problems.
Were I actually living inside the simulation hypothesis, I’d be a one-time avatar. So the boundaries I would try to break would not be physical.
The only problem is that anyone capable of building such a world would likely consider this possibility, too.
the discovery of the Higgs doesn’t prove we are necessarily right about the origin of life; it just means that we’re still not wrong.
It’s an indicator that we are not wrong, and that the current path might be the final path.
Philosophically, as a species, we are committed to this. In the same way that religion defined cultural existence in the pre-Copernican age, the edge of science defines the existence we occupy today.
It’s referred to as the Phantom Time Hypothesis, and the premise is as straightforward as it is insane: It suggests that the past (or at least the past as we know it) never happened at all.
