The Odysseus Black Box

Circe warns Odysseus:

You will come first of all to the Sirens, who are enchanters of all mankind and whoever comes their way; and that man who unsuspecting approaches them, and listens to the Sirens singing, has no prospect of coming home and delighting his wife and little children as they stand about him in greeting, but the Sirens by the melody of their singing enchant him. They sit in their meadow, but the beach before it is piled with boneheaps of men now rotted away, and the skins shrivel upon them. You must drive straight on past, but melt down sweet wax of honey and with it stop your companions’ ears, so none can listen;

— Homer, The Odyssey Book XII (Lattimore tr.)

She also plants an astonishing idea in his head:

but if you yourself are wanting to hear them, then have them tie you hand and foot on the fast ship, standing upright against the mast with the ropes’ ends lashed around it, so that you can have joy in hearing the song of the Sirens; but if you supplicate your men and implore them to set you free, then they must tie you fast with even more lashings.

Soon afterwards, Odysseus goes on and does just that. He orders to be tied to the ship's mast, has everyone except himself plug their ears with beeswax, then begs them to release him so that he can commit his sweet suicide in the arms of the euphonious monsters. Fortunately they obey his orders, tie him tighter still, and everyone survives the brief rendezvous.

Ever since my father narrated the Odyssey to me a long time ago, probably in lieu of a bedtime fable, this has been the most tantalizing episode in the Odyssey for me. I asked myself, why would he take that risk? Why go to such extents to hear a few minutes of beautiful singing? Was that brief "joy" really worth it?

What was tantalizing was not that I didn't know the answers to these questions, but that I knew I would do the same in his place. It feels like such a human thing to do. But still, why?

This is where I think a worldview based on black boxes helps clearing things up a little.

A black box has something going on within it, but you don't need to know exactly what it is. Yo-Yo Ma can play heart-rending melodies with his cello whether or not he understands acoustics or solid-state physics: all he needs is a deep familiarity with the vibrations the instrument will make given specific, finely-tuned movements of his bow. He predicts the sounds that will come out, and uses his enormous experience to weave them precisely as he intended. To the player, an instrument works just fine as a black box.

Even if you don't necessarily know anything about it, structure is what determines the sound response of the "musical instrument" black box. This includes it shape, size, density, material composition, the properties of the air inside and around it, and so on (the further you go the more blurred you'll find its boundaries to be, but that's another story). When an "input" interaction happens between something else, like a bow or a finger, and the instrument, vibrations propagate and resonate throughout its structure in characteristic ways, eventually leading to the production its "output" notes. That's why many professional players spend tens of thousands of dollars on their instruments, and why you can instantly recognize if a given melody—Happy Birthday, say—is being played by a piano and not a flute: their different structures process, amplify, and compose the same vibrations differently.

Musical instruments are neat examples of black boxes, but precisely the same argument can also be made for any "organism" black box. A living system processes not only sound but many other kinds of inputs as well, like photons, impacts, food, and temperature, to name a few. Of course, the pathways this information takes inside the organism before producing an "output" action, if any, are mind-numbing in variety and scope. These are highly complex black boxes we're talking about. The principle is the same, though: the internal structure of tissues and organs and nerves, and how they are all connected to each other, determines the range of possible behaviors and responses.

Each organism is a unique resonance chamber for the differences (aka information) that traverse it. Its outputs are tuned by evolution to work reasonably well in favor of its preservation and proliferation, within the environmental context it finds itself in.

Needless to say, the same is also true for that king of black boxes, the human nervous system. Every human mind receives information through its various sensory entry points, does something with it, and produces specific patterns of activation that may or may not lead to muscular action—be it to speak, to deambulate, or to interact with other things around it in any way. Here we're talking about levels of structural complexity beyond compare. The way the brain's structure affects its processing is still a mystery—albeit quickly shrinking—and the range of its outputs is still mostly unexplored.

Neuroscience is the attempt to map that out. The aphantasia experiments I participate in are, at their core, nothing more than a systematic and hyper-focused tinkering with the black box inside my skull. The researchers ask, "if I show Marco this hippo picture, which brain regions will light up in the MRI recording?" or "if he sees a picture of a bedroom, then a picture of a lampshade that was in that bedroom, will he be able to recognize that he has already seen it?" Input, output. Do it a few thousand times, and they might begin to get a rough idea of what's going on inside the box.

Once you start looking at things like that, many of our common human activities turn out to be very similar in nature to those scientific experiments.

What is a conversation if not a reciprocal tinkering with each other's brains to see what will come out? The feedback loop between different people can lead to escalations towards surprising and exhilarating results that would have been impossible for any of the participants on their own. Similarly, when you talk about "seeking inspiration" for an idea, what you mean is that you want to stimulate your brain to produce a novel output by feeding it with the right inputs.

Even a mere change of environment will often incite new behaviors and mental regimes. Karl Ove Knausgård reflects on this in his autobiographical novel:

To live in Japan, surrounded by all this foreignness, all the things one saw but did not understand, whose meaning one might intuit without ever being sure, was a dream I had long held. To sit in a Japanese house, furnished in simple, Spartan fashion, with sliding doors and paper partitions, created for a neatness that was alien to me and my northern European impetuousness, would be fantastic. To sit there and write a novel and see how the surroundings slowly and imperceptibly shaped the writing, for the way we think is of course as closely associated with the specific surroundings of which we form part as the people with whom we speak and the books we read.

— Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle, Book 1

Call it a sort of "mental plucking and drumming game", an exploration of what "notes" and "tones" your specific mind can produce by altering the things you interact with.

But the brain is more interesting than a musical instrument in at least one aspect: oftentimes, the inputs will change the structure of the brain, possibly forever. For example, I believe in the transformative power of some books. Somehow, with a complicated mix of synapse formation, synapse potentiation and depression, dendritic remodeling, and other fancy mechanisms I don't understand in the least, the contents of those books are capable of restructuring my brain into novel resonance patterns. When I put the book down, I'm a slightly different person, one endowed perhaps with deeper overtones, perhaps with a broader dynamical range. It's exciting to think about what these new "powers" will allow me to do next: what new conversations, ideas, creative outputs.

Simply out of the sheer complexity of our brains and developmental processes, each of us is born with a unique mental resonance pattern, a "black-box fingerprint" that distinguishes one from everyone else. And as we live, as we watch and hear and learn from everything that happens around us, we accumulate unique assortments of changes that sharpen even more those differences in mental processing.

I think this is an excellent and beautiful truth. As someone aiming to pour his output into the world in the form of prose, I want to accelerate and catalyze this process—make my mind as unique as possible in the limited time I have until I die. Thus I crave interesting things and new things, but not just anything: it has to be the right input at the right time for me to be changed by it. (Also, preferably it shouldn't kill me.)

Maybe that is also what Odysseus was after when he told his men not to pour the wax in his ears, with great risk to his sanity and to the success of his crew's journey. Perhaps what he sought was not the fleeting joy of a sublime song, nor the right to boast about his bravery, but the kind of input that no other mind had ever survived long enough to make theirs.

Odysseus was human: he took the risk because he wanted to be changed. ●