Some things become difficult to imagine long before they become impossible to describe.
The Auditor began as an idea involving comparatively small machines.
There were collectors, workers, mechanical components and systems with their own peculiar understanding of what things were for.
In the first Max Aura Dungeon novel, the Auditor becomes a much larger mechanical opponent. During the encounter, smaller units bring additional parts that can be incorporated into its growing, increasingly unstable construction.
I enjoyed exploring that kind of machinery.
Something can be entirely committed to a task and still be catastrophically wrong about how to perform it. A system can operate according to consistent rules while producing results that become increasingly absurd.
And a relatively simple idea can develop into something that demands an entirely different sense of scale.
As I continued imagining the Auditor and what its existence might imply, the possibilities grew well beyond the original machines. Eventually, I was considering forms or collections so enormous that describing their size became easier than actually picturing them.
That is a strange problem.
I can put an impossibly large number on a page. Understanding what the number means does not give me an equally clear mental image of the thing it describes.
Somewhere in that gap between description and imagination, I began thinking about much older questions concerning the universe, causality and what it means to create anything at all.
A world of causes
Baruch Spinoza understood existence through a radically different conception of God from the familiar image of a divine being standing outside the universe and deciding how to arrange it.
His philosophy identifies God with Nature, understood as the single fundamental reality from which everything else follows. Spinoza develops this account in Ethics.
Within such a worldview, an event does not become an exception to nature merely because we do not understand its cause.
Human thought belongs to nature too.
So does imagination.
And if someone constructs a machine that produces language, the machine’s activity is no less a part of the natural world than the activity of the person who built it.
There is something initially unsettling about following that thought.
If every idea I have is shaped by causes that precede it, what happens to the sense that I am creating something?
But perhaps the difficulty lies in assuming that an action must be uncaused to be meaningful.
A tree does not cease to grow because we can explain how it grows. Music does not stop being music when we understand sound waves.
I can recognize the physical processes involved in reading and still become absorbed in a fictional life.
Explaining how an experience is possible and deciding what that experience means are not necessarily the same activity.
Of course, this does not establish that machine-generated writing is art. Spinoza offers a way to question the boundary between the natural and the artificial, rather than a definition of artistic achievement.
The creative problem remains.
It has merely acquired a much larger universe around it.
Everything has a reason. Not everything had to be.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz also believed that things require sufficient reasons, although his philosophical system differs significantly from Spinoza’s. His Monadology can be read in a free English rendering.
For Leibniz, there is an important distinction between what is necessary and what is contingent.
Something can have a sufficient explanation without being the only possibility that could ever have existed.
This matters because explanations are often mistaken for inevitability.
If we can trace the decisions, experiences and circumstances that led to a particular story, we may be tempted to describe the result as though it could only have taken that form.
But my experience of creating fiction is full of abandoned alternatives.
A character might have made a different decision.
An encounter might have unfolded in another place.
An idea that initially occupied several chapters might eventually disappear from the book.
Those alternatives may no longer exist in the finished text, but they were real possibilities within the creative process.
The distinction between necessity and contingency gives us a way of thinking about causes without immediately turning everything into an unavoidable mechanical outcome.
It does not resolve the ancient philosophical arguments about freedom and determinism.
I am rather glad it does not.
A theory that explained every creative decision and left absolutely nothing interesting to discuss afterward would be a remarkably disappointing contribution to the subject.
What rules cannot tell us
Artificial intelligence makes these questions unusually visible.
We can describe the processes involved in generating words. We can investigate how a model responds to context, why different settings produce different outputs and how patterns in training data influence the results.
The outcome may still surprise the person using it.
Surprise, however, is not proof of freedom.
Nor is randomness automatically creativity.
A completely unpredictable arrangement of words may be fascinating. It may also be nonsense.
A carefully constructed and reproducible passage may be emotionally powerful.
The mechanism helps explain how something happened.
It does not automatically establish its artistic significance.
The distinction becomes more uncomfortable when we turn from mechanisms to experience.
A model can produce a description of fear. A person reading that description may feel afraid.
The question of what, if anything, the model itself experiences remains separate from both observations.
The words, the process and the subjective experience cannot simply be treated as interchangeable.
The person who has to exist
Søren Kierkegaard’s work offers another way of approaching the problem. Selections from his writings are available to read freely.
His concern with subjective existence and inwardness challenges the idea that understanding a proposition from a detached position is equivalent to living with its significance.
I can explain why a person might feel guilt.
That is not the same as being the person who must live with the decision that caused it.
I can produce a perfectly logical description of courage while having no idea how I would behave under the circumstances being described.
Kierkegaard also understood these questions within a profoundly religious project, so it would be misleading to detach his interest in inwardness from that background and present him merely as a philosopher of personal feelings.
His perspective nevertheless raises something important for fiction.
An imagined character can be described from the outside. But convincing fiction often attempts to show what the world is like from inside that character’s particular existence.
The difference is especially noticeable when an apparently reasonable decision becomes unbearable because of who must make it.
That is where a great deal of the fiction I enjoy becomes interesting.
Not in the abstract structure of a dilemma, but in the person who finds themselves unable to escape it.
Without a predetermined answer
Albert Camus approaches the problem of human existence from a very different direction.
For Camus, the absurd arises from the confrontation between our longing for meaning and a universe that does not provide the ultimate answers we demand.
His response was not simply that everything is pointless.
He explored what it means to continue living, choosing and resisting without resolving that fundamental tension through an appeal to a guaranteed higher purpose. See The Myth of Sisyphus.
His famous image of Sisyphus, condemned to push a rock uphill only to watch it roll down again, is a powerful way of examining the relationship between effort, repetition and significance.
There is a considerable distance between Camus and Kierkegaard.
One cannot simply combine their positions into a pleasant agreement that creating things gives life meaning.
Their disagreements concern far more fundamental questions about existence, faith, truth and how a person should live.
That is precisely why I find it useful to consider them together.
Art does not have to be experienced within only one metaphysical understanding of the world.
A religious person may find significance in it through a relationship to something transcendent.
A naturalist may understand the same experience through human consciousness, culture and emotion without appealing to a divine purpose.
Others may remain uncertain, or hold understandings that fit neither description.
The artwork does not erase those differences.
Sometimes it becomes a place where they can be explored.
When imagination reaches its limit
I return to the Auditor.
In the novel, a mechanical construction can grow as additional parts are attached to it. The process is visible and comprehensible, even when the result becomes absurd.
But what happens when I keep extending the idea?
A machine the size of a building can be compared to a building.
A machine the size of a mountain can be compared to a mountain.
Eventually, the comparisons become less useful.
I may know the dimensions of something and still fail to comprehend its totality as an image.
Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the sublime offers an intriguing parallel. In his account of overwhelming magnitude, the imagination struggles to encompass what reason can nevertheless conceive. He develops this account in the Critique of Judgement.
Kant was primarily examining our experience of nature, not the design of gigantic fictional machines.
Still, his analysis helps illuminate the difference between giving the reader a measurement and giving them a sense of something that exceeds ordinary perception.
A number can establish scale.
It cannot necessarily make us feel it.
I may need to describe what disappears behind the object, how long it takes to pass, or what happens to the familiar surroundings when it moves.
Perhaps the most convincing description is the one that never allows the reader to see the whole thing.
There is something fitting about that.
An idea that began with small machines and comprehensible tasks leads toward the limits of what I can imagine.
The tools I use can help me explore those possibilities, but they do not eliminate the challenge.
At some point I still have to decide what the reader should encounter.
And sometimes the most interesting thing to encounter is something the mind cannot comfortably hold.