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Notes -
Between dream and reality
People say life is like a book. Isn't that a very apt comparison? Everything fits perfectly. People are the characters and the history between them is the plot. But isn't that comparison backward? People and their lives exist first. Only after a while did books come. And after books, films. And after films, video games. Each an imitation of life. Yet each becomes a mold that shapes life
Books were not humans' first attempt at simulating life. Before it there were stage plays and songs. Actors moving, audience watching. A festive atmosphere where people laugh and cry together. Stories were very much alive. And just like life, they are always changing. When the audience rebukes the bard, telling him the development is nonsense, a new version shows up. When the audience complains, bemoans having to listen to the same thing again, a new version shows up. When the audience listens to another bard, a new version shows up. A story lives many lives.
But with the introduction of books, stories can now be singular. There can be just one author and one version. The pages remember. The beginning is set. And so is the ending. The story is already finished before you read it. Life comes before books. But life is like books. I see life as a book. Books have a determined end, so life has a determined end. One life, one book. As many books as there are lives. The books are stored in a library, surrounded by fog. Rumors said it contains all books in existence. The books were there before I came, and it will be there after i'm gone. I see books but see no authors. I see effects but don't see causes
Is life a book? Or is it a film? To read a book one needs to be literate. To watch a film, one also needs to be literate. Film literacy is a thing. In the book Gutenberg's galaxy, McLuhan presents the case of the Africans and the chicken: where when shown a slow-motion health-education film (a sanitary inspector demonstrating how to clear standing water), many viewers only reported seeing the chicken that flitted into a corner of the frame — not the man or the broader narrative. He writes "African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film". The African audiences see the events, but not the plot. The illiterate man sees a dirty stack of paper, but not a book. An educated man sees a book, but not a dirty stack of paper. The stack of paper has been hidden. Likewise, an educated man sees only the plot and not the events. Outside, to live, a living being eat, and sleep and shit. In films, characters eat and sleep and shit in service of the plot. He is drinking milk! This shows he is a psychopath. He is shitting. His son will come in and shoot him to death. This shows even the mighty one can meet such a lowly end. Life comes before films, but life is like films. The educated man sees not the events but the plot. Every action becomes a statement to the invisible audience. What you eat, what you play, who you meet, where you go.... in 1998, Truman could rebel against the show and move to reality. But where would modern humans go, when reality is a film now?
Or is it a game instead? Books and films, there are no places for you there. You can't influence the plot, you can't influence the outcome. Just a passive observer. But in games, it's different. You are the player. You can act. The only being that can, in fact. Salvation or destruction, it's all up to you. Yet the story is still not yours. The player is not the protagonist. You merely inherit his or her fate. How would the game look like from the perspective of the protagonist's friends and family? How would it feel to wake up one day to see your friend changed, doing one impossible task after another. Yeah, it's good that the world is saved. But that being, is it still your friend? If a game has no choice. Then it's the same as a book or a film. The future is not yours, for you have no said in it. But even with choices, you don't decide everything. Before you arrived, some choices must have been made. The choices were not made by you, so it must have been made by another being. That being vanished when you arrived, leaving you with a past that you did not create. What makes you you? Is it the past or is it the future? Do you even want to be you? A common pondering. Isn't the popularity of transmigration, regression, reincarnation, multiverse... stories the proof? Life comes before games, but life is like games. One life, one game. Holding one, I yearn for another.
One can read many books, watch many films and play many games. Yet one can have just one life. How then should such a life be led?
It would be uncharitable of me to simply point out that you're being sloppy in your thinking and leave it at that. But unfortunately, as far as I can tell, that is true. There is a kernel of truth here, but it's not a particularly new or non-trivial observation, and the bulk of it doesn't stand up to scrutiny when we going from playing word-games to considering what those words mean.
Let me explain:
You seem to think that the medium really is the message. Or, to steelman things, that media shapes our perception of our lives. Uh... That bit is true? I strongly wish I had a copy of that meme where some Twitter wag points out that when humanity invented the wheel, we imagined the universe as a wheel, when we invented clocks, the universe became one of clockwork, and when we invented computation, the universe became increasingly interpreted as one of computation.
Edit: Here you go, found it. https://old.reddit.com/r/sciencememes/comments/1jh25uw/5_minutes_after/#lightbox
Here's the central confusion, and it's worth stating it plainly: you keeps mistaking "X is a metaphor for life" with "life is literally X."
For a start, the "paradox" isn't paradoxical. The essay keeps returning to this idea that it's weird or significant that "life comes before books, but life is like books." This is only strange if you forget how similes work. Of course the thing being compared to comes first! We compare unfamiliar things to familiar things, and we create the familiar things from the unfamiliar template.
The fact that we can say "a neuron is like a computer" doesn't mean neurons are secretly running Windows 11 in your basal ganglia. It means we have computers now, and they provide a useful conceptual model. Your "paradox" is like saying: "Whales existed before nets, but now we say 'the net is like a whale's mouth and its filter feeding.' Isn't it strange how the whale came first but now the net defines our understanding of the whale?" No. That's just how language evolves.
I get the feeling that you consider this a deep ontological discovery when it's actually a banal observation about metaphor. You can tell because you never actually derive anything from this "paradox." There's no syllogism like "Books have property X; life is like books; therefore life has property X." Instead, there's just a vague sense of spooky symmetry, like discovering that the word "dog" spelled backward is "god" and deciding this reveals something about canine theology.
The bit about African audiences and the chicken is doing a lot of unearned work here. Yes, film literacy is real. Yes, different cultural contexts produce different ways of seeing. But the leap from "Africans in mid-century educational films noticed different things than Western audiences" to "educated modern humans are trapped in a film-plot prison and can't see reality anymore" is what I can only call an exceedingly ambitious framework.
First, the McLuhan anecdote is more complicated than presented. The original context was about audiences unfamiliar with cinematic conventions, not some profound statement about Western alienation from reality. When you show someone their first movie, they don't yet know the grammar. They don't know the significance of close-ups, cuts, tracking shots. They're seeing moving images, not narrative. This is a literacy issue, not evidence that literacy itself is a prison.
(I would bet my net worth that the flourishing African movie industry in the present day is not plagued by an epidemic of utter incomprehension. They watch movies just fine. Literacy is an acquired trait.)
But here's another problem: the essay uses this as a Just-So story about naive perception versus educated illusion. The African audiences see events (a chicken!) while the literate see plot (sanitary education!). That is really not how things work.
First, if you show me a boring instructional video and there's a random chicken in the corner, I will probably notice the chicken too. Not because I'm "film illiterate" but because the chicken is the only interesting thing happening. My "literacy" doesn't make me stop seeing the chicken; it just means I can also track the intended message. The dichotomy is false.
The implication is that these poor naive Africans, untainted by literacy, see the real world while we educated Westerners (for a very generous definition of "we" or "Western", given that this is my critique) are trapped in our symbolic prisons. This is just noble savage mythology with extra steps. Maybe the audiences were bored. Maybe they were resisting missionary-style health propaganda. Maybe McLuhan was just wrong. You don't stop to ask such questions, you're just using them as a prop for a point about how education = blindness.
The universe, and thus life itself, is deterministic at macroscopic scales, or close enough that I don't care about the difference. But just because events and their outcomes are pre-determined doesn't provide any additional power to alter them, or change the subjective experience of being a computationally bounded agent working under conditions of uncertainty.
A sorting algorithm still has to sort the array. That task gets no easier even when we know precisely how it works, or what the sorted outcome should be. Your mind can't just skip to the end either.
You seem to think there's a library somewhere (the fog is a nice touch, very Dark Souls) where "your life" is already written, and this is somehow proven by the existence of libraries with books in them. But this is just more spooky existential poetry. You've come to a correct conclusion with an invalid argument, or rediscovered the Library of Babel. You could equally say "Life is like an improv show; improv shows are unscripted; therefore life is unscripted." The metaphor is not the territory.
This is framing predictive processing as a delusion. Our brains are prediction engines. We ignore the "dirty stack of paper" (the raw sensory data) to perceive the "book" (the meaning) because that is computationally efficient. You're treating this efficiency as a tragic loss of contact with reality. It’s not. It’s the only reason we aren’t catatonic from sensory overload. We don't see "plot" because life is a movie; we see "plot" because brains are causal inference machines.
Or, in another sense:
The educated man sees both. He acknowledges the stack of paper (the medium) but possesses the additional software to decode the symbols upon it (the message). For most practical purposes, the message really is more important. Both of us are engaging with written text, as opposed to parsing the specific arrangement of pixels on a screen.
Reality isn't a film. That aside, behaving like you are being watched is a rational response to actually being watched! Gen Z in particular lives and dies through their phone and social media, we've got better panopticon surveillance than the Truman Show did. Curating one's personality and behavior makes sense, given that the thoughts and opinions of others can meaningfully impact your life. The only issue is going overboard and becoming a slave to public perception. But becoming some kind of schizoid who doesn't give a fuck what they're recorded as saying or doing is just a mistake in the opposite direction.
This is just a description of being born. Every human being "arrives" in a world where choices were already made (by parents, history, genetics, some butterfly farting in the Mesozoic). You inherit a genetic "past" you didn't create. Framing this as a unique failure of the video game medium ("The future is not yours"), when it’s actually just the fundamental condition of existence is a tad bit unfair. God knows I'd love it if video games were truly open ended with maximal player agency, but that's a possibility for the near future. You can't really draw any real conclusions from noticing that the medium is restrained by the limitations of human effort or even computational feasibility on existing hardwares and budgets, any more than them once using 8-bit graphics says something of real importance about the human condition.
"People like stories about transmigration and regression, therefore they must be unhappy with their own identity." This is a speculation presented as a proof. People also like stories about murder, but even the average True Crime Wine Mom doesn't actually want to be murdered. The popularity of a fantasy genre might indicate escapism, sure, but it might also indicate good marketing, or cultural trends, or just that reincarnation is a cool magic system. The essay treats the most surface-level pop culture observation as deep psychological evidence.
Life is not a book (it has no author). Life is not a film (there is no external audience, only peers). Life is not a game (there is no win condition, only continuation or cessation).
You're staring at a map, noting that the map is made of paper, and then worrying that the territory might be made of paper too. It’s a poetic thought, but as a rigorous analysis of reality, it’s hopelessly confused. We don't need to worry about whether we are "literate" enough to read the plot of our lives. We just need to realize that the "plot" is something we invent in retrospect to make sense of the little bit of signal buried in all of that noise.
(This is why I'm a card carrying member of the Rationalist community, and why I refuse to read Continental philosophy. It helps to be immersed in a tradition where one's expected to speak plainly, and to refrain from the use or abuse of simile and metaphor any more than strictly necessary. Otherwise it's easy to end up making superficially striking connections and tie yourself into a knot)
Found it in video form.
Thanks! Funnily enough, I'm already subscribed to Burial Goods, but didn't know he'd done voice work for this specific meme.
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