Page 60 - The Revolution Will Be Automated

I’ve had a

Regrets? few.

A creative explorer of a search space aims to find states that are both

novel and useful/valuable according to some metric. It can be frustrating

to get lost in a valueless area of the space, or to realize that one has been

mislead by faulty intutions into searching the wrong part of the space.

Narrative jokes do precisely this: they exploit (and reinforce) our

assumptions so as to fool us into exploring a space of possibilities that

are simply not relevant to the understanding of the given narrative.

The punchline, when it finally comes, makes no sense at all in the part of

the space to which our mistaken System 1 assumptions have lead us. To

make sense of the punchline, we call on System 2 to resolve the impasse

and take us – chastened but relieved – to a very different part of the space.