Okay. So along with the little Einstein quotes at the beginning, Jon Blow found some Youtube video of some guy named James Burke. Haven't heard of him. Maybe I should have? Dunno. Anyway, he embedded this video directly into the game, and although the means of embedding was kind of cute, the video itself was basically sort of awful. It had a few things to say, but the core of it, I think, was a particular comparison.

Mr. Burke pulled out two pictures; the first, he said, you don't recognize this, do you? I'm looking and thinking… well, it looks like some sort of false-color microscope images of… cells, possibly? It was amino acids. Okay, whatever. The second was some book of medieval art opened up to a random page. He then flipped to a picture of the Mona Lisa. Mr. Burke's assertion was that the first image tells you something about the world, whereas the second image, art, only tells you something about the person who made it. This was the first step in an argument claiming that science is useful and art, aesthetics, are not useful, are something like useless scratching in the dirt.

The point where Mr. Burke lost me, though, was the comparison, because there is an unstated idea at the end of it: learning about people is not important.

This is an idea you can hurt yourself, or others, very badly with, and the rest of Mr. Burke's talk didn't ever escape the taint of this broken idea. It is not hard to find people on the internet whose attitude is shaped by this idea: That we should idealize learning, but we do not need to learn about people. We should think of ourselves as searchers in the world, but it will be a world without any people in it.

It probably ought to be obvious the ways this attitude will leave you not very well equipped to live in the world— ignorant of others' circumstances, unpracticed at empathy. But let's think about what happens when you try to learn with this attitude. At this point you've created a dichotomy where some kinds of intellectual pursuits are valuable and others are not, but in doing so you've cut directly into some kinds of learning are valuable and others are not.

Mr. Burke suggests that the triptych of medieval paintings in his second, hand-waved book is unimportant. Well, wait, I think I can learn all kinds of things from that; as data to observe it's as rich and informative as the amino acid image. The medieval painting and the Mona Lisa, as a pair, communicate an enormous implied amount about art history and how it changed between the two paintings; each painting bears the fingerprint of the time in which it was made, and this communicates to us something about the world outside art. The paintings tell us something about the people who made it, and by doing so tells us something about Europe in the century it was made in. One painting is a set of essentially didactic, ideologically shaped images with what looked (from the glance I got) like hierarchal perspective, artifice snuck in only in the margins; the other, a naturalistic scene, aiming for realism, with a subject of no apparent importance and an emphasis on the technical skill of painting. People made those paintings at those times for specific *reasons*, and understanding those reasons gives us lots of insight into subjects like sociology or the nature of politics (politics being a subject pretty important to science because it impacts how science gets funded).

Mr. Burke doesn't seem particularly interested in any of that. He doesn't seem to think art history is important; he's telling us only learning about the natural world is important, and brings out the art book only to wave it briefly in the air and dismiss it. But this attitude is infectious; once you start ignoring data it is hard to stop. Why is the photo of amino acids able to teach us something important, where the historically important art samples are not? What I would accuse is that at this point the difference is the way one flatters our egos— how it makes us feel. Focusing on the first image we know we are rational people weighing important matters, the second provides no surface elements that feel that way. When we judge knowledge this way science has become an aesthetic, and the amino acids capture that aesthetic whereas art history does not. We start down this path believing we're acting out of passion for science, but eventually our ability to do science is harmed as well; unavoidably by this point we're going to establish a hierarchy where some fields of science are important and others ("soft" or social sciences) are not. Mr. Burke has already stepped down this path by dismissing historical documents (art) which give input into sociology. Take a few more steps down this path, and you're going to start not just discarding good science but elevating bad, rewarding ideas which follow the aesthetics of science but not its actual rules of evidence and testability. The next step on there is posting on Reddit, brandishing poorly supported evolutionary psychology theories which happen to support your personal biases against groups of people, while continuing to consider yourself a rationalist because the vocabulary of your theories makes you sound like one.

At this point maybe it's worth remembering this video is, itself, embedded in a video game; a work of art. Mr. Blow, endorsing the views Mr. Burke, tells us that a work of art is only important for what it tells us about its creator. What, at this point, is the game telling us about the creator? Or, let's say Mr. Blow is just one person and not all that important— what is the game telling us about the group of people that Mr. Blow and Mr. Burke represent?

Before I made it down to the youtube video, I went through a small area whose payoff was just a room full of narrative storytelling, with the centerpiece being a series of drawings left behind by an implied character I've been thinking of as the Puzzlemaker. The puzzles leading up to this area all concerned trees; the Puzzlemaker had drafted several elaborate drawings of tree structures found in nature. Literal trees, the dendrites of a neuron, some vascular-looking human body structure which I think was the respiratory tree, and then a set of drawings where these structures warped and blurred into each other, as if manifestations of a single entity.

What do these renderings tell us? The drawings make a point that trees, dendrites and the respiratory tract have a common structure. Does this tell us something? Let's ask a question: Why are they similar? If I'm approaching that "why" from a scientific mindset, I'd say that this is either convergent evolution, or a coincidence. If it is convergent evolution, we need to come up with some kind of model for why these three separate organs would converge on one structure— a hypothesis. One hypothesis does come to mind: the three examples here all are structures which need to absorb some kind of environmental substance. Trees need to absorb oxygen and sunlight; dendrites (I'm shaky on neurology, but I think this is correct) absorb and emit chemicals and electrical potential for signaling; the respiratory tree needs to maximize the intake of oxygen into the blood. This common function suggests perhaps these three structures settled on this shape this because it's ideal for absorption. This idea is actually sort of inspirational and beautiful; three unrelated forms drawn to a single shape by only a common need. This idea also might be completely wrong. I have no idea? If I'm thinking scientifically, I need to not just sketch this hypothesis but actually move on and test it. Some ways I can think to test such a hypothesis is to look for other absorbing structures in nature, and see if they also take the tree approach; to see if there are phylogenetic antecedents to these structures, and check if they are closer or farther from the tree structure; or to actually test this and other structures to see if they actually do perform a good job of absorbing material. Or you could ask an evolutionary biologist, who would know more than me about both the specific examples and the correct way to test a hypothesis concerning convergent evolution.

The person who made the drawings— either the fictional in-game person, or the development team of The Witness— did not do any of that testing. There is no evidence provided the artist had this hypothesis about the reason for the shared structures— or any hypothesis at all— in mind. There is actually not any evidence of scientific thinking. Returning to the idea that a piece of art tells us something about its creator, what do these drawings tell us? Well, the primary thing they seem to me to communicate is that their artist felt a sense of wonder. The amalgam drawings suggest they see a unity between the three structures, but the presentation— where the emphasis is on the feeling of epiphany at perceiving a pattern, the suggestion of an actual entity the structures in common comprise, one image dominated by a nucleus that is almost like an eye— is all about the emotional intensity of perceiving an underlying oneness. Science here is appropriated to provide an aesthetic; it is important because of how it makes us feel. The result is maybe valuable for its beauty or emotional content, but flat out, that is not what science is for.