"Stories of Your Life" (Arrival) Review

The film Arrival was released this week and it is based on the short story "Stories of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. I have not see the movie yet, but the topic was interesting enough for me to immediately pick up a copy of the short story collection. I was not disappointed.

This "review" may contain spoilers, but I will tell you that it does not matter. In fact, this isn't even a review as much as a discourse on some philosophical concepts relevant to the story. If you're someone who cares about spoilers, then you would miss the moral of the story anyway. Superficially, this story resembles Avatar, you could tag both with trippy, aliens, and linguistics, but "Stories of Your Life" is much deeper in a metaphysical way. It completely deconstructs your perception of the world, including how you perceive the scientific method, which is the most central concept of how we view the world.

The heptopods (aliens in "Stories of Your Life") seem to be constantly experiencing a powerful psychedelic trip. Their way of thinking is teleological rather than causal. They see all of the past, present, and future happening simultaneously. They exist sempiternally: outside of the constraints of time. To them, time really is just one dimension of space and that the future is no different than the past. Thus, determinism is assumed to be the truth here.

I had previously explored unconventional thoughts in linguistics in the hyperlinked post, but the concepts in "Stories of Your Life" took things to an even deeper level.

The powerful idea explored in this story is that language can completely change the way you think. Recently, I had been studying Chinese due to the insanity of the US Presidential Election. Why? Because thanks to Scott Adams, I realized that everyone is delusional and nobody really knows what they are talking about. I discovered zhihu.com from a few posts on quora.com and it made me realize how differently Chinese intellectuals viewed Trump. Most Chinese intellectuals didn't fear Trump at all... in fact, they even favored Trump affectionately. It was very clear to them that Trump was going to win despite what the polls had been saying. How could this be?

I started to review the Chinese idioms (成语) I had learned in my childhood and picked up dual-lingual copies of Sun Tzu's Art of War (《孙子兵法》), Tao Te Ching (《道德经》), and 36 Stratagems (《36 计》). I realized how Westernized my mindset has become without me being conscious of it and how much ancient wisdom I had lost. I had rejected traditions all my life, but now I see that in order to create something new, sometimes we have to reclaim what was lost to history. 借尸还魂: Revive something lost in history by giving it a new purpose. This is Strategem 14.

It became apparent to me that the lack of idioms in English has dulled the metaphorical capacity of the Western mind.

In the US, everyone compared Trump to Hitler in hallucinatory panic, while in China, everyone knew who Hitler was, but was also aware of thousands of other historical figures and situations throughout Chinese and world history. As a result, we could clearly observe the strong time dependent attentional bias in the American mindset. Because Hitler was a major figure in recent Western history and that most Westerners are ignorant of the histories of other civilizations that spanned 5000+ years, Westerners gave Hitler an irrationally high significance weighting.

What I "blame" for the election of Trump is different from anyone else's reason I've seen so far. I blame it on the English language itself. Blasphemous, isn't it?

If the heptopods came to Earth at this year, they would have been very puzzled by the chaos surrounding the Trump phenomenon. They would have seen that Trump will be elected and wouldn't judge it as a positive or a negative. It simply is the truth of reality. This is how you would view things during a strong psychedelic trip or while doing Zen meditation or some other practice of Eastern philosophy. It is naive to emotionally respond to a fact of reality. 4 months ago, I saw this coming and wrote about it in my article "How Peter Thiel, Zen Meditation, and the DMT Psychedelic Experience Led me to Endorse Trump". At that time, my spiritual practice and understanding of philosophy is way weaker than it is now, but I still managed to get the basic sentiments down.

Similarly, in this post, I have touched upon the main philosophical points of "Stories of Your Life" without making this an actual book review at all. Yet this is crucial to the message of the story itself and perhaps a more true review of the story than any that focuses on the story literally. The fundamental concept lies in way-seeking vs. truth seeking philosophy. What I am doing here is applying the methods of the heptopod mindset in action. The heptopods already know the future, so all which they write or say are actions that enact chronology with an innate minimization/maximization purpose.

Sometimes when we speak, we know what everyone would say anyway, but we go through the motions of speaking anyway. For example, a child might ask her mother to read to her a bedtime story that she has heard a million times. You might listen to your favorite song or watch your favorite movie multiple times. At a wedding, everyone anticipated the words "I now pronounce you husband and wife," but the marriage wouldn't actually count unless the words had been said. The heptopods experience all of reality in that manner. How trippy is that? It just makes our way of thinking feel so primitive and insignificant.

"There is no evil in things changing, just as there is no good in persisting in a new state." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4:42

"Just as the world forms a single body comprising all bodies, so fate forms a single purpose, comprising all purposes." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5:8

The heptopods practiced complete amor fati. This is why humans remained completely puzzled by their behavior. Nobody knows why they came to Earth and why they suddenly left. Nobody understood why they wished to exchange gifts with humans in a way that made no economic sense. Nobody understood why they came to observe humans yet they remained passive and seemed disinterested in humans the whole time. Yet I imagine that this is exactly how Stoic/Buddhist/Taoist hermit aliens might behave should they come to visit us. They have fully given up attachment to simple materialistic desires. Perhaps this is the most realistic science fiction future. Eventually humanity will realize the futility of materialistic pursuits and make more advancements in inner knowledge. This would require a shift away from English and more towards the semasiographic language language of the heptopods.

Perhaps we are already shifting in that direction through the rise of memes and emojis. The heptopod semagrams cannot be spoken. The directly communicated ideas. Not only that, changing their orientation of graphemes adjusted the meaning and the writing was not confined to go in any particular direction. The whole semagram "sentence" forms a full picture that resembles a mandala that is meant to communicate the whole idea fully. There was no "train of thought", the entire concept was completely mentally formed before the writing of the first stroke. The semagram mandelas can put you into a meditative trance that etches the entirely of the concept of into your memory. If humans can invent a language that processes information like this, then we would have far more solid understandings of concepts that come in large, discrete chunks and be able to see the big picture. It would eliminate our time-based attentional bias.

If we wrote like this, we would have a lot fewer conflicts and misunderstandings in this world.

Wouldn't it be great to unambiguously communicate large chunks of concepts rather than constantly struggle through the limitations of spoken language? If you've played the Telephone Game, then you know what I mean. The first player whispers a message to the next player and all the players repeat the message to the next player. When you get to the last player, the message can end up being very different from the original message. This loss of information and large error vector is a huge problem in communication that has lead to countless social problems. In our age of computers, we now have a chance to technologically minimizing this error by exponential factors. We have much hope for the future.

However, despite my criticism of English, it isn't fully useless. The sequential logic and phoneme based written language led to the scientific method and the structure of modern programming languages. The teleological world view of the heptopods does suggest new potentials though. If we made a teleological programming language that is based on an ideogramic language like Chinese, and allow it to be written in all directions rather than standard left-to-right, top-to-bottom syntactical structure, which might be able to build programs that are more flexible and coherent. But then again, because it isn't the natural way for humans to think, it might take many generations to catch on and could ultimately end in failure. If I were a heptopod, I would know how it would end and if it is the right path in the destiny of the universe, but as a human, I'm really just throwing random suggestions out there.

This post is a cluster of tangentially related ideas that isn't chronologically organized. I hope that it remains true to the intent of the heptopods, given the limitations of human language.