This weekend I had the pleasure and privilege of conducting a short on stage interview with the musician, composer and now film maker Anil Sebastian following a preview of his new short, Daffodil. (It was part of the unique and wonderful Normal? Festival of the Brain in Folkestone.)
The film addresses themes of artificial intelligence and artificial life, in particular the attempt to bring back the dead, or perhaps even versions of our selves. Sebastian (a.k.a. Anil Kamalagharan) read philosophy and physics at Bristol University a decade or so ago, but the way in which his film explores the issues musically and visually is very different from the way in which philosophers do so, verbally and logically. But it is still, I think, doing philosophy.
I say this because I think one central feature of philosophy is that it directs our thought by forcing us to attend carefully to whatever it is we are philosophising about. Modern philosophy has put so much emphasis on argument that this attending has become under-appreciated.
Daffodil made me attend in many philosophically fruitful ways. First, it made me think about the distinction – if there is any – between the organic and the inorganic. In Sebastian’s film, the AI that is being created sometimes seems to be biological, sometimes simply a program running on a computer. The accompanying music emphasised this blurring of distinctions. I wasn’t sure how much was being played on acoustic instruments and how much was electronic. Sebastian explained that although there are some purely electronic elements, most of the instrumentation is a string section, percussion and harp, with his own voice and that of the London Contemporary Voices choir. But he then manipulates these electronically, stretching sounds out, sometimes squashing them back again, sometimes repeating this process more than once.
Sebastian said he was very conscious of these themes and was particularly interested in synthetic biology. It seems to me that the blurring of the artificial/real, organic/non-organic distinctions is a defining feature of our times. The idea, for example, that the human brain is “just a computer” seems less reductive when you realise that biological computers do more than just serially process information.
Another focus of attention was the way in which the film suggested that the self is not a singular entity but “a cage in search of a bird”, a quote from Kafka which Sebastian borrowed as a lyric. It’s “the reverse of the idea of a spirit looking for a body”, as Sebastian put it. This fits my view of the self, which is very close to that of David Hume and indeed Buddhism. Sebastian’s film shows how much this venerable idea fits in with our current way of thinking about the self as being made up of memories and mental traits, a product of sever al different mental processes going on in different parts of the brain. These things add up to a self, they are not things which a pre-existing self has.
A third theme that attracted my attention was the way in which the film, and especially the music, had been constructed. Contemporary recording and editing techniques mean that many end products are made up of dozens, even hundreds of layers, all of which have been edited and manipulated. In that sense, the music Sebastian makes is more complex than a symphonic score, where a limited numbers of lines are written and the musicians simply play them.
Modern technology gives us unprecedented capacity to revise, edit and improve, and this applies to ourselves too. It’s partly liberating but also pressurising. “On a personal level I have a huge problem with that,” Sebastian told the audience. “It can be severely debilitating at times. It took me so long to do the first album [the excellent Mesonoxian]: constantly changing things, throwing away songs, changing my mind and pretending not to change my mind – all sorts of things like that.” He talked of the “constant desire for perfection and revision” and the “terrible performance anxiety” that created. Hie antidote was to “start doing live performance with just me and a harpist, reducing things right down.” I suspect the appeal of the stripped-down to increase in general, as people seek release from the complexities of contemporary living.
In this and many other ways, Sebastian’s film did what much great art does: it gives us new ways of looking. In doing so, it does something that prose argument cannot do, at least not as effectively. That would of course mean that my description of what Sebastian gets us to attend to is a pale second-best to what his film manages to achieve. So to know if I am right, you have to see Daffodil for yourself when you get the chance. I strongly recommend you do. Even if I’m wrong about how it philosophises, you will still have had an aesthetic experience that is far superior to reading any philosophy book.
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