The Hunt for Originality
Bouncing around the Balinese museum scene, you’re bound to run into a large collection of the Keris ceremonial knives in Ubud. This is beautiful stuff: hundreds of them — the curved blades, the ornamental handles, the jewels, the near-identical features, the gold, the ivory, the the…what? All these works of art, each piece a hand-crafted original, follow basically the same design?
But after a while it clicks: originality is not the intent here. Tradition defines what a proper Keris looks like; only smaller tweaks remain to express the author’s style. Enter the (stereotype alert!) Western mindset, and you’re left wondering whether this has been worth the effort of so many talented artisans.
Mind you, this is not a story of East versus West. Too complex. Rather, this is a meandering scratch at the question “what does it mean to be original and why we care so much?”.
A small part of the story. More like an excerpt. You get the idea.
Get to the point
To start climbing on the shoulders of giants, take…Charles Bukowski. An iconoclast and rebel par excellence, Buk had a peculiar relationship with the concept of originality — in particular regarding his own creations.
People lack originality. — C Bukowski, Pulp
Well it seems he cared for it, but all the while, he’d occasionally just let others plagiarize his work, and destroy the only existing copies of his writings if they came back rejected.
What Bukowski cared about were the creations themselves, seeing the ideal author as a hard-working relay, channeling the energy of the environment (and the random haziness of intoxication) into a stream of words to be encoded by the typewriter. Creation is produced by life lived in the world.
He was much more enticed by the process of creation, the “carving”, than the end results itself. He held in contempt those big names who follow the very reversed principle: producing fancy writing without a proper process and experience to back it up. You know — posers, pardon my French.
As Bukowski argues, believing in trademarks can distort our value judgements about creative results — and that goes for sciences just as much as arts. The irony is dripping here. But perhaps he’d say that originality is a state of existence, a quality, not a personal compliment. Regardless, this is the view this article argues for.
(Note: Buk was also an unadulterated and utter egoist. Although unlike most, he was also perfectly lucid in that condition. Check out Too Sensitive in Tales of Ordinary Madness or his numerous letters).
But enough about Bukowski, who cares about that glob of ethanol anyway.
A bit of philosophy
Originality surprises you, not like a punch in the gut, but as a fresh breeze coming from the ocean. It feels familiar, yet there’s a new scent to it. It treads the somewhat uncanny valley between boring and incomprehensible. It arrives unexpected and leaves you satisfied.
Ok, those are properties, you got me. So what is it then?
What is it like when an idea is born. Hm. Let’s probe the logical extremes. On the metaphorical right, we have the genius of individual creativity — on the left, then, a purely collective effort equating genius to a mere function, a human-represented mathematical transform. Well, look at it! It can’t really be either, right?
No, it cannot. A collective without individuals is an empty set, and an individual separated from society a lunatic. So somehow, someway, it — originality, idea creation, big-bang of the enlightened kind — has to be a synthesis of both at the same time: combining individual divination with zeitgeist, spirit of the era.
Without Watson, Crick and Franklin, would we know the structure of DNA? The molecule would be there to be discovered regardless, so most likely — yes. But contrast that with this: the well-crystalized theories of mechanics and electromagnetism had to exist in their mature stages for Einstein to consistentify them. The key question here, again, is: would it happen without him later? Would that unification look different? Here we will, most likely, never know. Because that’s the history we were dealt.
Names. Labels. Why do they matter so much, at the end of the day? Because without them we forget the ideas? Hard to imagine, in the silicon age. Or, because without them people will stop caring for creating new things, find solutions? Likely some, but equally likely, others will start creating because the perceived, subjective threshold to enter the creative game will not appear so menacing. But perhaps rather than Instagram, think blogging, think citizen science. Everyone can contribute, every meaningful bit counts.
Ultimately it comes down to the voracity of our egos. Yes, we have to feed the ego something, but also prune it, in balance with the rest of the world. Otherwise we become what? A swarm of mindless selfie zombies, becoming upset the moment a conversation turns away from our shiny personas and achievements? Funny how civilization penalizes obesity of the body, but doesn’t care far as much about the obesity of the mind.
To paraphrase a good friend of mine: without uniqueness there is no meaning to anything. Maybe truly so, but it also might not mean much. The question is whether there’s actually anything that’s entirely non-unique, and where lies the threshold. Our industrialized society got pretty good at copying stuff, but let’s devise a mental experiment to probe the absolute extreme.
Art
How much is a Pollock nowadays, about a hundred-million or so? No wonder there are so many fakes floating around. But imagine a machine, let’s say a futuristic 3D printer, creating a perfect replica of one of Pollock’s dripperies, indistinguishable by any existing analytical techniques. Any desired number of molecule-perfect replicas.
One cannot help but feel that the value of the original would progressively diminish with each replica out in the open. But what even is an original, if the copies are identical? If every one of them squeezes the exact same oomph from the viewers? Or does the original have a soul of some kind?…You know, humanity has a precedent for this: software. Of course, the tech industry has to continuously evolve the ways how developing something infinitely multipliable can sustain people. Yet for now, the world keeps spinning.
A relevant argument is that the traditionally important novel works of art have challenged the status quo in some way. That’s what makes them classics, the timing, not just the form! BAM! Except for the caveat that knowledge of the historical context is needed (think John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape no 4 or Duchamp’s fountain or the entire Warhol). The number of such erudites is bound to decrease over time, while the market value of famous artworks tends to grow. That suggests there are other factors in play beside sentiment; factors like fads, fashions, marketing perhaps. We all know the story of Mona Lisa’s fame, don’t we?
Besides, who are the truly original visual artists? Dali. Escher. Giger. Van Gogh? Picasso? Can’t name that many. Yayoi Kusama?? Oh please; — yes, she discovered polka dots. That’s not to say that she’s a bad artist! But because an artist has a significant-enough following does not make them original. Anthough, don’t ask me to prove anything in this paragraph.
So anyway then, we find ourselves in a reality where the arbitrary subjectiveness of fantasies like Existenz, Ready Player One or (and in particular) The Congress doesn’t seem so distant. I mean, embodied by artificial neural networks, we basically have the tools to make the whole industry of stock photography obsolete:
How is the world going to change when headline photographs, paintings, or music become machine-synthesized? All this — and much more — is going to happen rather soon. (Some of today’s pop music could as well already be, amiright?) So, fellow humans, let’s not forget that it is, ultimately, in the hands of us consumers to decide what’s attention-worthy.
Science
The explicit pressure to always present original results actually hurts science — the very trade of ideas. One of the core tenets of scientific endeavor is building on the prior state of matters: from the foundations to the very latest works. Yet as many researchers publishing in computer science (including yours truly) know, submitting results that merely build up existing work is tricky: extra care is necessary to avoid earning the stigma of incremental or derivative work. Thus it became standard practice to reinforce the work with a linguistic veil of novelty.
Okay, computer science is young — surely, more mature fields have managed to deal with this issue. Well, not entirely: already in 1991, psychologist David T. Lykken argues that only a tiny fraction of written and submitted research makes tangible contributions to the field (his estimate lands at around 1%).
Every mature psychologist knows from experience that it is foolish to believe a new result merely on the basis of the first published study, especially if the finding seems unusually important or provocative. — DT Lykken
Lykken analyzes several reasons why that might be, but the researchers’ bias for supporting their own oft-novel hypotheses sits chiefly among them. In spite of his findings and pleas, the situation 20 years later isn’t that much different. It almost seems that science, in its crusade for objectivity, is losing sight of the most essential ingredients towards that goal: modesty and skepticism towards own ideas.
Even the mother of natural sciences — physics (sorry math, nobody knows if you’re natural) — suffers from expectations that every published non-validation paper ought to present a novel interpretation of measured results. As a response, platforms allowing the submissions of raw uninterpreted datasets have been founded by big publishing houses like Springer or Elsevier.
Patents troll
One could argue that the very trade of ideas should actually deal with invention as an institution, an object per se. Ergo, rather than science, that would be, umm, the ecosystem sprawling around intellectual property. Owlright, why not. However, i wish to object: patents are a meta-trade, and therefore do not directly generate value, or capital. Also that thing sprawling there is not so pretty. Not to say science is. But ya know…comparatively.
A patent walks into a bar.
The bartender asks: “Why the long face”?
The patent replies: “I’m tired.”
So much has been written on all aspects of patents that there seems no point in getting into this quagmire. What is clear enough though: patents have become subject to farming en masse; a livestock. As much as they provide investment protection to individuals and startups, they are shells in the corporate warfare. In which sense of the word are round edges a novel idea? — looking at you, Apple.
Society
The antipole to originality is, somewhat surprisingly, tradition: the custom of honoring ideas and practices of perhaps unknown origin, but validated by generations. The story of Keris knives, in itself being only a tip of one particular iceberg, reminds us that in the Eastern cultures, traditionalism remains a strong trait to this day.
The hunt for original throught, seemingly so prevalent in the West, came about with modernism — in arts and sciences alike. At first, the ability to creatively think outside of the box was essential: in sciences, novel views of nature were key to transcending antiquated pseudo-truths in the name of progress; in arts, departing from established forms and themes allowed for expressing individual perspectives and showing the world in many different, subjective colors.
The price for that liberation is significant, however. Over time, both sciences and arts have became servants of its own propellant: originality and individuality are the priority now, and as a result, the Western realm is becoming fragmented — objectively, it appears more connected than ever, but subjectively, feels increasingly disconnected, as if trapped in its own endless cycle of layered meta-innovation and petty sub-cultural disputes.
This has some very tangible consequences. In today’s complex, intertwined reality, the inability of Westerners to reach consensus on the most important questions the society faces (pollution, climate change, wealth distribution, you name it) is hampering efficient governance and putting our futures to risk. According to the economist Dambisa Moyo, the absence of the strong individualism — so common in the West — is allowing China and other countries in the East to act more efficiently in the current socio-economic climate. The forecasts that China is going to surpass USA in its overall economic performance might have seemed outlandish at the beginning of the century; not so much nowadays though. What the East knows very well, is that ideas can be analyzed, reverse-engineered, re-implemented — copied — you know — copied — and any attempt to shackle them with opaque legal lingo is a transient parlor trick.
Conclusion
Great ideas be timeless. Great ideas ought to be greater than any individual. As such, preserving their continuation is more important that giving credit to their creators.
Surely, as the sum of human knowledge continues expanding, it will become increasingly harder to have truly novel ideas. Or track down the lineage of the existing ones.
Surely, Plato, Newton, Gauss or Darwin would be ecstatic about their ideas still going strong, rather that their names being attached to them.
Surely, it matters more what we know and what we do with it. Surely.
The author is primarily a scientist: watch out for his bias. Just as you he’s trapped in a carbon-based body. For now. Either way…he thanks Anisha, Jarda, Tobi, Caesar, and other random victims of the debating obsession.
