WHAT MAGIC PERFORMANCES SHOW US ABOUT THE
Why surprise matters
Surprise itself is a complex, hazy experience that, through its inquiry can act as a spotlight to reveal the complexity of the human condition in this postmodern era. An investigation into surprise can illuminate:
surprise, magic & machine learning
Why are some effects in magic more surprising than others?
Led me to research hierarchies of surprise and if surprise is a defining characteristic of human consciousness…
“Can a machine take a human by surprise?”
This performance and installation series explored the relationships among magic, machine learning, and surprise as it welcomed attendees to step inside a thought experiment – a Turing Test of sorts. Taken by Artificial Surprise utilized historic parlor magic to examine hierarchies of surprise and the human creation of surprise as compared and contrasted to that of machines.
What might performances of the seemingly impossible demonstrate about the capabilities and limitations of both machine learning and the human mind? Andrews invited participants to think about whether surprise is a unique, defining factor of human consciousness and how the mechanisms that create surprise lie deep within the gaps of lived and learned personal and cultural experience.
Taken by Artificial Surprise
The performance aspect of this work showcased magic effects with varying levels of surprise factors. Andrews presented historic pieces of magic alongside algorithmically generated magic effects that she has devised ways to perform in reality. Participants found themselves a bit unsure as to which may be which.
In 1950, pioneering mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing wrote the seminal paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." He drew inspiration from Victorian parlor games to imagine his own parlor-style amusement: the imitation game. This inspired the now-famous Turing Test and utilized the question, "can a machine take us by surprise?" as a way to investigate artificial intelligence. The installation references imagery from Victorian parlor games contrasted with a glossy, early technological ideal.
Q U E S T I O N S
The Guiding Q:
Why are some magic effects more surprising than others?
N O T
S U R P R I S I N G
The seemingly impossible vs. suprise
Experiences of the impossible tend to lean heavier to the ‘how’ rather than the initial ‘what.’
“The instantaneous first questions after the (Humean) “impression” are “what?” and “how?,” which then return us to the life that has provoked attention in the first place. “What could this be?” and “How is it possible?” The intuition and analogy of ordinary thought are suspended so that the phenomenon can be its own form of life, continuing to make its own impression, and not yet taken into our own frames of reference as an object of study or interpretation.
“The quickening of the unknown”: Epistemologies of surprise in anthropology: The Munro Lecture, 2013
Jane I. Guyer
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2013 3:3, 283-307
W H A T I S
S U R P R I S E ?
Surprise vs the….
Weird
Eerie
Interesting
C U L T U R E
Q:
What can cultural context show about what may or may not afford experiences of surprise?
Etymology & Colloquial Usage
surprise (n.)
rom Old French surprise "a taking unawares" (13c.), from noun use of past participle of Old French sorprendre "to overtake, seize, invade" (12c.), from sur- "over" (see sur- (1)) + prendre "to take," from Latin prendere, contracted from prehendere "to grasp, seize" (from prae- "before," see pre-, + -hendere, from PIE root *ghend- "to seize, take").
The general meaning "something unexpected, that which causes a feeling of surprise" is recorded by 1590s, that of "feeling of astonishment caused by something unexpected" is c. 1600, as in taken by surprise (1690s).
surprise (v.)
also formerly surprize, late 14c., surprisen, "overcome, overpower" (in reference to emotions, a sense now obsolete), from the noun or from Anglo-French surprise, fem. past participle of Old French surprendre (see surprise (n.), and compare supprise).
The military sense of "attack without warning" is by 1540s; the general sense of "come upon unexpectedly" is from 1590s; that of "strike with sudden astonishment" is 1650s.
Etymology & Colloquial Usage
surprise (n.)
rom Old French surprise "a taking unawares" (13c.), from noun use of past participle of Old French sorprendre "to overtake, seize, invade" (12c.), from sur- "over" (see sur- (1)) + prendre "to take," from Latin prendere, contracted from prehendere "to grasp, seize" (from prae- "before," see pre-, + -hendere, from PIE root *ghend- "to seize, take").
The general meaning "something unexpected, that which causes a feeling of surprise" is recorded by 1590s, that of "feeling of astonishment caused by something unexpected" is c. 1600, as in taken by surprise (1690s).
surprise (v.)
also formerly surprize, late 14c., surprisen, "overcome, overpower" (in reference to emotions, a sense now obsolete), from the noun or from Anglo-French surprise, fem. past participle of Old French surprendre (see surprise (n.), and compare supprise).
The military sense of "attack without warning" is by 1540s; the general sense of "come upon unexpectedly" is from 1590s; that of "strike with sudden astonishment" is 1650s.
Shifts between physical enactments, to a cognitive state
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Evolving cultural conditions
Evolving cultural conditions
Unseen movement
The weird
Mark Fisher notes that the weird, “allow[s] us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside. As we shall see, the weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it [....] conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together.”
It seems to possess a quality of being out of place, and / or out of time for cultural norm or milieu.
Surprise vs the….
Weird
Eerie
Interesting
Out of place and/or time.
Intent of Known Causal Agents
Let’s explore questions in how ideas of machine-generated surprise and by extension, machine-learning-generated surprise, highlight the role of embodiment and the intent of a known causal agent in the creation of surprise.
Lovelace & Turing
“The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false.
I do not expect this reply to silence my critic. He will probably say that such surprises are due to some creative mental act on my part, and reflect no credit on the machine. This leads us back to the argument from consciousness, and far from the idea of surprise. It is a line of argument we must consider closed, but it is perhaps worth remarking that the appreciation of something as surprising requires as much of a ‘creative mental act’ whether the surprising event originates from a man, a book, a machine or anything else.
A G E N C Y
between the technological and the agent
T H E
E E R I E
The technological and the agent
The eerie
Mark Fisher again from The Weird and The Eerie:
“Yet, like the weird, the eerie is also fundamentally to do with the outside, and here we can understand the outside in a straightforwardly empirical as well as a more abstract transcendental sense. A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved?
What kind of thing was it that emitted such an eerie cry? As we can see from these examples, the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?”
Surprise vs the….
Weird
Eerie
Interesting
Out of place and/or time.
Lacks agent entirely or known agent
Q:
Why are some magic effects more surprising than others?
Considering the appeal of different magical transformations exposes some systematic asymmetries. For example, it is more interesting to transform a vase into a rose than a rose into a vase. An experiment in which people judged how interesting they found different magic tricks showed that these asymmetries reflect the direction a transformation moves in an ontological hierarchy: transformations in the direction of animacy and intelligence are favored over the opposite. A second and third experiment demonstrated that judgments of the plausibility of machines that perform the same transformations do not show the same asymmetries, but judgments of the interestingness of such machines do. A formal argument relates this sense of interestingness to evidence for an alternative to our current physical theory, with magic tricks being a particularly pure source of such evidence. These results suggest that people’s intuitions about magic tricks can reveal the ontological commitments that underlie human cognition.
“Revealing Ontological Commitments by Magic”
by Thomas Griffiths
ontological commitments & connected points of symmetry / asymmetry for surprising transformations?
“[Magic is] the theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to."
- Teller
ontological commitments & connected points of symmetry / asymmetry for surprising transformations?
Scale
Color
Animacy
Material
Focus now only at objects at play in transformations in magic to expand upon his line of thought from ‘interestingness,’ to hierarchies of surprise, by showing the impact of specific sensory qualities, such as perception of color and scale in relation to the viewer.
-
Lovelace & Turing
“The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false.
I do not expect this reply to silence my critic. He will probably say that such surprises are due to some creative mental act on my part, and reflect no credit on the machine. This leads us back to the argument from consciousness, and far from the idea of surprise. It is a line of argument we must consider closed, but it is perhaps worth remarking that the appreciation of something as surprising requires as much of a ‘creative mental act’ whether the surprising event originates from a man, a book, a machine or anything else.
Turing, Alan M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59 (October):433-60.
“Taken by Artificial Surprise”
“Today you will see performances of pieces of magic with varying levels of surprise factors.
You may see some pieces which are Jeanette's twists on historic magic effects. You may also see magic effects based on text descriptions of magic effects that were algorithmically generated that Jeanette has devised ways to perform in reality. We invite you to join us in this live thought experiment and welcome you to see if you can discern which is which….”
This performance and installation series explored the relationships among magic, machine learning, and surprise as it welcomed attendees to step inside a thought experiment – a Turing Test of sorts. Taken by Artificial Surprise utilized historic parlor magic to examine hierarchies of surprise and the human creation of surprise as compared and contrasted to that of machines. What might performances of the seemingly impossible demonstrate about the capabilities and limitations of both machine learning and the human mind? Andrews invited participants to think about whether surprise is a unique, defining factor of human consciousness and how the mechanisms that create surprise lie deep within the gaps of lived and learned personal and cultural experience.
In 1950, Alan Turing wrote the seminal paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." He drew inspiration from Victorian parlor games to imagine his own parlor-style amusement: the imitation game. This inspired the now-famous Turing Test and utilized the question, "can a machine take us by surprise?" as a way to investigate artificial intelligence. The installation references imagery from Victorian parlor games contrasted with a glossy, early technological ideal.
On machine-generated ‘surprising’ magic
We have seen based on the way that the creation of magic combines long standing tropes with shifting cultural ideologies and norms and new technology.
Also relies on multimodal, on-the-fly adjustments to create the both the impossible conditions that are both perceived and hidden. (As we will later see in terms of the presentation and perception of surprising events as it pertains to expertise.)
Black boxes
Historical knowledge of how to be inefficient and create pattern breaks based on expectations while building trust and nuanced filling in of mental gaps amidst epistemic hostility.
Some q’s on the agent
Does surprise have to have a known causal agent possessing the following?:
It’s understood within magic there are unseen forces at play. Does this help to lead to belief, and trust in a causal agent, as opposed to an unknown causal agent?
Live enactment of magic and the intent of a known causal agent
Magic relies on embodied actors presenting it. (Video does not capture as it lacks the needed impossibility conditions that are present to heightened impossibility and implausibility conditions in magic! )
Explicitly relies on the changing of impossible conditions and nuanced understanding of complex system dynamics both by the performer and the viewer.
Magic relies on embodied actors perceiving it.
Expertise and relativity of surprise
“An fMRI investigation of expectation violation in magic tricks.”
Danek, et al.
“As hypothesized, the magician’s brain activity differed clearly from the experimental group. It was mainly parietal activity, whereas the experimental group had active clusters in the more anterior parts of the brain and the basal ganglia. That we did not find any overlapping regions in our conjunction analysis shows that the magician processed the magic tricks and the control clips differently than lay people and supports our hypothesis that he did not experience any expectation violations.”
—---
This speaks to the:
The expertise of the agent to bring about previously unseen relations
Their foreknowledge, that does not exist for the perceiver
And primarily…
The relativity of surprise as an experience
surprise, magic & consciousness
Surprise and consciousness
Expectation violation as a foundation for learning
Surprise vs. expectation violation
surprise, magic & consciousness
What might thinking about the fine-grained structure of surprise teach us about technology, data and machine learning?
Magic is often best at providing through experiments that serve questions and not necessarily answers. In that spirit:�
slides
JeanetteAndrews.com/slides
(case-sensitive)
C O G N I T I O N
Surprise vs the….
Weird
Eerie
Interesting
Out of place and/or time.
Increase in attention often inspiring active learning / onboarding knowledge
Lacks agent entirely or known agent
Learning
Baillargeon, R. (1987). Object permanence in 3½- and 4½-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology, 23(5), 655–664. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.23.5.655
Learning
“[....]the sense of surprise corresponding to the statement “I didn’t expect that to happen.” These theories are supported by findings that surprise facilitates learning, [....] and we are surprised to the extent that we cannot find an explanation—the sense of surprise corresponding to the statement “I can’t explain why that happened.
As such, we propose that a major function of education—broadly construed as the work of teachers, journalists, parents, etc.—is to assist learners in using their metacognitive surprise signals to facilitate the building and adaptation of belief networks.”
This takes us back to the what vs why / how…
Munnich E, Ranney MA. Learning From Surprise: Harnessing a Metacognitive Surprise Signal to Build and Adapt Belief Networks. Top Cogn Sci. 2019 Jan;11(1):164-177. doi: 10.1111/tops.12397. Epub 2018 Dec 13. PMID: 30549202.
Learning
Stahl AE, Feigenson L. Cognitive development. Observing the unexpected enhances infants' learning and exploration. Science. 2015 Apr 3;348(6230):91-4. doi: 10.1126/science.aaa3799. PMID: 25838378; PMCID: PMC5861377.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/observing-the-unexpected-enhances-infants-lea/
Surprise & Intuitive Physics
“[w]e ask adults to judge how surprising a scene is, when that scene is surprising, and why it is surprising. We find good consistency in the level of surprise reported across these experiments, but also crucial differences in the implied explanations of those scenes.
[....] overall judgments of surprise, moment-by-moment surprise, and explanations of what is surprising, and found consistency across these three measures. However, [...] what people find surprising differs based on whether they are reporting moment-by-moment surprise, or explaining a scene in retrospect.”
Smith, Kevin, et al. "The fine structure of surprise in intuitive physics: when, why, and how much?." CogSci. 2020.
https://www.mit.edu/~k2smith/publication/fine_structure_surprise/
https://www.mit.edu/~k2smith/videos/Video_Surprise.mp4
Judgement and reflection
“The fine structure of surprise in intuitive physics: when, why, and how much.”
Belief and Surprise
“Davidson supports the first step of his main argument by pointing out what he sees as a logical connection between the possession of belief and the capacity for being surprised, and between the capacity for being surprised and possessing the concept belief.
The incoherence is felt as a clash and not merely as a judgment of logical impossibility.50 The advantage of understanding the incoherence in surprise as a felt experience is that we can see how it has the potential to lead to further inquiry for the individual, to unearth the faulty belief, and to make an abduction. “
Surprise on belief and error for metajudgement…
-Phenomenology of Error and Surprise: Peirce, Davidson, and McDowell by Elizabeth F. Cooke
Alief
Why magic is ripe for creating surprise
“If beliefs are conscious responses to how we think things are, aliefs are more slippery: they’re responses, also sometimes conscious, to how things seem. You can believe one thing while alieving another.”
“Alief is an automatic or habitual belief-like attitude, particularly one that is in tension with a person's explicit beliefs. For example, a person standing on a transparent balcony may believe that they are safe, but alieve that they are in danger.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alief_(mental_state)
https://tamar-gendler.yale.edu/news/column-will-change-your-life-alief-belief
Cognitive shifts in magic
Magic is ripe for producing experiences of surprise based on this theory.
An example of a three part mental shift for the embodied experience of surprise in magic:
Framing of magic (know you are deceived and then you are)
Cognitive shifts in magic
Magic is ripe for producing experiences of surprise based on this theory.
An example of a three part mental shift for the embodied experience of surprise in magic:
Framing of magic (know you are deceived and then you are)
Lulled back to normality (backed by concrete, culturally normative actions and visuals within proper context (i.e. things out of time, out of personhood, or too ambiguous and this does not work)
Cognitive shifts in magic
Magic is ripe for producing experiences of surprise based on this theory.
An example of a three part mental shift for the embodied experience of surprise in magic:
Framing of magic (know you are deceived and then you are)
Lulled back to normality (backed by concrete, culturally normative actions and visuals within proper context (i.e. things out of time, out of personhood, or too ambiguous and this does not work)
Finally one is met with other phenomena (that are unfolding and need to be experienced through the body as a means of ‘proof’ (otherwise things can be reasoned away if purely an intellectual exercise).
Yet, there is still a seamless thread of conscious experience that links these states together, so they don’t read as incongruous (I.e. not passing out and waking up somewhere else.)
S E N S A T I O N
The startling
Startle (v): cause (a person or animal) to feel sudden shock or alarm.
OED
https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=startle
Surprise vs the….
Startling
Weird
Eerie
Interesting
Biological reflex to sensory stimuli
Boxes
The perceptual field
Yet, this shows the importance of the phenomenal field and how it appears that embodied perception is a factor in surprise.
embodied perception
Merleau Ponty’s ideas in noting how we don’t see qualities in isolation….
Alva Noe speaks to the constant navigation of bringing the object into focus and that, “perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession of bodily skills.”
Therefore we can see an understanding of the robust, reflexive nature of perception given that we derive aspects of this interrelationality only by our own natural unfolding of perception.
Does this note how an aspect of surprise is the emergence of previously unseen sensory relations?
Therefore surprise seems to have roots in sensation, yet seems to need components of cognition and / or belief.
Surprise vs the….
Weird
Eerie
Startle
Interesting
Out of place and/or time.
Lacks agent entirely or known agent
Biological reflex to sensory stimuli
Increase in attention often inspiring active learning
Surprise vs the….
Weird
Eerie
Startle
Interesting
Out of place and/or time.
Lacks agent entirely or known agent
Biological reflex to sensory stimuli
Increase in attention often inspiring active learning
Points of symmetry and asymmetry in ontological commitments
Known agent, usually intentional
Entails cognition & belief
May or may not be onboarded as new knowledge
Distinguishing features of surprise?
maybe…
Does this mean that surprise is a temporally extended, sensory and cognitive reaction to contradictory states of reason and visceral stimuli, intentionally presented by a known actor and perceived by embodied agents that is relevant to its exact cultural context?