On "The Revelations" and the self-insert writer
A contender for the top of the "so bad, it's good" novel list
Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ (1 out of 5)
Science Fiction: ★☆☆☆☆ (1 out of 5)
Literary: ★☆☆☆☆ (1 out of 5)
Vibe: ★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5 — in a so bad it’s good sense)
[No spoilers section]
All you need to know about The Revelations by Erik Hoel is that Keirk (Erik’s self-insert character), a brilliant neuroscientist with vainglorious aspirations to writing, not only has a brilliant and beautiful neuroscientist-model (Carmen) fall in love with him but has characters that let us know Keirk’s (and therefore Erik’s) writing is good. The book is the literary equivalent of The Room. I almost stopped reading it, but decided to press on out of pure “so bad it’s good” comic enjoyment. I’d occasionally point things out to my partner — “Did you know he uses the word ‘chthonic’ four times?” — who’d respond with “Why are you doing this to yourself?”
You can easily tell when we’ve switched from whodunnit exposition to Creative Writing™ mode and you can almost hear Hoel under his breath saying “that’s so good” after every few lines. It sounds like an undergrad science major who fancies himself a modern Renaissance man so has to do something right-brained1. While there are some creative phrases, they are self-consciously so. I found it funny given all the candy-coated choices for the self-insert character. It’s like the intellectual version of those rich people who decorate their houses in (posters of) Renaissance art, (reproductions of) ancient Greek sculpture, and gold (plated) accents and think they’re classy. Plus the reason I picked this book up — I was interested in a sci fi2 book about consciousness written by a neuroscientist — was frustrated by the complete lack of anything novel to say about consciousness that you wouldn’t hear from your stoned friend at 3am between mouthfuls of omelet at an all night diner.
As for content warning, there are graphic descriptions of experimentation on animals (there’s a plot element where people are opposed to it, but I’m not sure they’re supposed to be sympathetic in that opposition) and Carmen is a Karen. There are a couple of sex scenes that seem to appear only because Hoel thinks a novel with literary aspirations has to have them — with obvious results. Then again, I read The Verificationist so my view of what breaks new ground might be warped.
[Spoilers section]
The things you say
Your purple prose just gives you away
The things you sayYou're unbelievable (oh)
(What the...)
EMF “Unbelievable”
I had taken an interest in the work of Erik Hoel (and co-authors3) on ‘causal emergence’ — the idea that you can view a model of a process as a kind of efficient encoding of that process, and at higher (or lower) levels of complexity there may be more (or less) efficient encodings in an information-theoretic sense. Local maxima in ‘effective information’ of models at a particular scale more efficiently capturing what is happening is a good way to summarize the fact that we look at quarks, or protons, or nuclei, or atoms, or materials, or economic agents at different levels of description of our universe. ‘Causal emergence’ was even pushed as a “explanation of how consciousness and agency arise”. (It’s not.) These things tend to get over-hyped among the TED talk set — I remember a “new equation for intelligence” based on a concept called ‘causal entropy’ [pdf]. Apparently ‘causal’ has become quite the buzzword outside of physics4.
As I said at the time, I did not believe the predictive part of causal emergence — that as complexity increases, new paradigms or concepts must arise to improve the efficiency of description — but the mathematics behind less lossy representations of information moving through networks considered at a different scale with different degrees of freedom is sound. That is to say it makes sense that it could happen, but it doesn't have to. We could be stuck with a mathematical mess.
You can hear some of Hoel's literary ambition in his essay on how rational agents with goal-oriented behavior might arise via causal emergence, and his first fiction novel side-steps the hedging (the word appearing only in a citation in the earlier essay) and seeks to tackle the subject of consciousness. Except it doesn’t.
Even by the end of first quarter, there is nothing of substance on consciousness aside from a strawman “is it an illusion?” argument between a candy-coated protagonist (Keirk) and a disarmed opponent — one who has barely existed except to accept this fate.
I use the term ‘candy’ borrowed from mythcreants because it is a great encapsulation of the concept. “Candy is anything in a story that glorifies a character.” It’s meant as a more neutral term compared to the sexist “Mary Sue” or the vague “self-insert character” (which, don’t get me wrong, Keirk is). Of course, candy is in the eye of the beholder, but we get quite a bit of confirmation that of Liam Bright’s “Two Tendencies” in philosophy Hoel’s candy should be seen from the perspective of the “Sexy Murder Poet”. Keirk doesn’t play by your rules, man, He goes AWOL after being accepted for a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship to live out of his car for several months. He can’t stand the networking involved in science because it’s a waste of his prodigious intellect. He has green eyes — the rarest color. He saved himself from dying of blood loss while his roommates stood and stared. He reads literature — which is somehow construed as out of the norm, even career-ending, for a scientist. I found this last part hilarious. Maybe I just associated more with physicists who had interests outside of physics, but even the least socially adept string theorist, especially at the grad student or postdoc level, was a whole person. Maybe neuroscience is different?
It’s possible I misunderstood and the protagonist is supposed to be insufferable5 — as insufferable as a fellow Dean’s Scholar triple majoring in physics, Plan II, and pre-med who unironically said he “exudes academia”6. Maybe this novel is an expression of self-hatred. If anybody shouted “petitio principii” at me, my first reaction would be to laugh; does Hoel want me to laugh at his self-insert character, and, by extension, him? Especially as the Latin phrase (there are many) is used incorrectly — the assumption that consciousness is not an illusion because of our experience of it is begging the question, not suggesting that it is an illusion7.
The protagonist's love interest is equally candy-coated. Carmen is both a neuroscientist and a model — perfectly symmetric per a theory of beauty. She has been in a relationship before, but instead of being dumped for any character flaws or bad behavior she is dumped because her previous boyfriend thinks she is too good for him. She of course goes for Keirk because ... reasons. Because he is a sexy murder poet, I guess. Also because Keirk doesn’t immediately fall over his own boner for her like every other male character. As you can tell, this book is very intellectual and literary.
As the novel goes on, you understand that Hoel thinks in the Darwinian terms of evo psych and survival of the fittest. The issue is that he gets this wrong in the way a freshman college student might — in a passage referencing sexual dimorphism, Hoel makes it seem like men are bigger and stronger from selective pressure but most of the evidence is humans have fairly low levels of sexual dimorphism for primates and like the large canines of our evolutionary ancestors seems to have been selected against. This just may be Carmen the Karen (as it seems to come from her), but I didn’t know until more recently that Hoel is at least rationalist-adjacent (q.v. Slate Star Codex now Astral Codex Ten where Hoel entered (and won) a contest) — the adolescent intellectual community included in the aggregation termed TESCREAL by Timnit Gebru for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. It’s hard to imagine he’s giving Carmen character flaws with these evo psych just-so stories.
It’s a strange coincidence that the contest Hoel won was with a review of a posthumous book from David Graeber. I found Graeber’s other books interesting at first, but as soon as they ever ventured anywhere I was knowledgeable they fell apart in a morass of misstatements, errors, and just plain bad reasoning. This made me suspect of the information he presented that was outside my knowledge rendering most of his work moot in my opinion.
Hoel has a similar problem when he starts to talk about Boltzmann brains in the context of Keirk having a Socratic dialog in his head:
Laughing Mask: … So if you’re just some configuration of physical or functional states of atoms, and the universe, multiverse, whatever, is astronomically large or infinite, then you’ll pop up over and over again. And since simpler order is more likely, you won’t be on this planet with these people, you’ll just be a brief conscious phantom, what’s called a Boltzmann brain. And if you are a Boltzmann brain, which in all vast likelihood you are, you have no reason to believe in contemporary physics. Therefore to believe in contemporary physics leads directly to disbelief in contemporary physics!
(This is followed by an extended wave of disembodied clapping from the many hovering masks arrayed in a darkened amphitheater around them. Each mask in the audience is a different emotion.)
Crying Mask: Do not applaud, you fools. There is a flaw. I know that I am not a Boltzmann brain because a Boltzmann brain would only exist for a moment, whereas I can check my own mind, check my own memories, which extend over time, thus proving I am not a Boltzmann brain.
Laughing Mask: Too easy! There’s no time for you to make sure you aren’t a Boltzmann brain if you are a Boltzmann brain, although there’s plenty of Boltzmann brains who think they just completed such a survey!
*sigh*
The idea behind the Boltzmann brain thought experiment8 is that it is a reductio ad absurdum that points out an issue with the measure problem in (not astronomically large but actually infinite) cosmologies — it is considered a pathology for particular theories (e.g. eternal inflation) and various regularization procedures are introduced to get rid of the possibility. It is like taking the argument that there is no smallest rational number because if there were, you could divide it by two to get a smaller rational number and using it to say “mathematics says there is a smallest rational number”! There’s a paper [pdf] on one of those procedures that says given particular assumptions the geometric cutoff regularization implies time ends. This does not mean contemporary physics is saying time ends.
Most of the rest of the science in this sci fi (or maybe more “scientist fiction”) is all too vague to be judged in any way. The focus appears to be on being literary and that’s where this book makes my skin crawl. It’s possible I don't know anything about writing — that everything I write is bad and I cannot discern bad from good. Maybe there’s no accounting for taste. Hoel seems to think other writers’ unfiltered writing is bad, which is a trip. Let me just work through a single sentence9 to let you see what I mean, though.
The first line of the book has confused verb tenses and is otherwise a modified cliché of an alarm going off:
Keirk wakes up in the back of his car brought into being by a knocking on the window so loud and forceful the whole car shakes.
In terms of a causal diagram, there’s the knocking, the shaking, and the waking — the shaking is either an on-going action (so should be “was shaking”) or happened with the knocking that brought Keirk into being (so should be “shook” to match the tense of “brought”). It doesn't make sense from a word choice perspective — “knocking” with almost any force on a window that would cause a car to shake fails to be a knocking and is more likely a pounding or a bashing. Plus “character wakes up” is one of the most risible opening clichés in writing.
Now anyone can make this kind of possible weird construction/possible mistake/possible intentional rhyme with wakes/possible higher order parallelism with “Keirk wakes … car shakes”/possible random throwaway line used only for exposition (I don’t know what it is, which is the problem). And maybe my analysis of the grammar is wrong. I mean, if someone said this in conversation, I’d have no problem. It’s understandable as English.
But this the first line and it sets you up with a question: are these word choices intentional? We encounter a lot of Creative Writing™ later, so do we have an author that is carefully crafting this work or just writing stuff that sounds good at the time while telling a story? Either is fine! However the latter conflicts with the literary intention — the name-checked references; the random Latin; the points where the story stops and we get a paragraph of flowery description. It comes off as pretentious, but lazily and ineptly so. This is why I think of The Room. Tommy Wiseau thought he was making deep cinéma vérité about his self-insert character (like Keirk), but his pretensions were greater than his skill as a filmmaker. For me, The Revelations was “so bad, it’s good” in the same way10.
I’ve written lots of trash in my life (a few cringe poetry readings at various venues in Austin in the 90s come to mind), but then again I don’t put characters in my stories that complement my self-insert character’s ghost-written writing.
Update 29 April 2023
I was probably 90-95% through the book when I wrote the review, so I hadn't read the end which reiterates Hoel's thesis that somehow the idea that every human-developed theory to explain the universe is dependent on conscious observers means all of science is invalid. Or something. It's the philosophy behind the axiom "I think, therefore I am" with random mentions of information theory taped to it.
Hoel goes one step deeper than most people do when they inappropriately bring up Gödel's theorems by not talking about the first incompleteness theorem, but moving on to the second — that a formal system capable of proving a sufficient set of theorems about the natural numbers cannot prove that formal system will not lead to a contradiction. Side note: I did not just one but two undergrad research projects on Gödel's theorems as part of my math major. The first was because I thought it was neat. The second was because I realized Gödel is often misrepresented in exactly the way Hoel does here.
Gödel's theorems are talking about properties of the formal systems with regard to the natural numbers. It works through a neat self-encapsulation trick where formal statements about natural numbers are encoded as natural numbers themselves — and then you can use the formal system to make formal statements about itself.
Things Gödel's theorems do not say:
That the physical universe somehow succumbs to the same self-encapsulation trick resulting in the same limitations
That a formal system capable of producing a complete and consistent set of properties of the natural numbers is relevant to understanding the physical universe or subset of it (such as consciousness)
That being unable to prove the consistency of the formal system is the same thing as saying it is inconsistent
Take the Riemann hypothesis. Most scientists would take the fact that the first billion or so zeros of the Zeta function have been numerically calculated to be on the critical line to be good enough evidence they all are in the same way that hundreds of thousands of sunrises have been good enough to say it'll come up in the morning.
It's the philosophical "problem of induction" that scientists just live with while those who live in a logical straitjacket — those who see mathematics as more than just a tool, a technology, we humans invented to make certain statements about the world more precise — see it as undermining science.
A pretty glaring discrepancy between the way scientists look at the use of mathematics to describe the universe and this "logical" straitjacket approach is apparent in the fact that the former don't really care that the mathematical existence of e.g. Quantum Chromodynamics has not been proven. The former actually continue to use Quantum Electrodynamics perturbation theory despite the fact that it doesn't actually converge11.
When scientists see Gödel's incompleteness theorems, we see them as odd quirks of our electron microscope setup. Well, let's just not use our electron microscope that way because it gives us data we can't use — just use it in a normal way. Oh, those natural numbers have weird properties when you do this? Well, how about we just use them in a normal way — for counting stuff.
So when Hoel says through Keirk12:
[…] for there exists a formal paradox here, a proof of sorts, with regards to consciousness, something touched by Gödel, but also by someone more ancient, eldritch13 … Euclid! Because the basic structure of formal systems, defined as a set of axioms and subsequent theorems, inherently means that one cannot derive the axioms of a formal system or formal method from within the system or method … axioms must always stand outside of it … […]14
[…] in doing so he would sunder science itself, show it to rest on untenable foundations and paradox just as Gödel did to mathematics, and he sees all of this theory, the line of argument he’s uncovered, laid out before him, a thing of terrible beauty and utter destruction, a completely alien form of wreckage […]
There are no real implications of the consistency result for our physical reality. Using this as a metaphor to illuminate how Keirk’s idea that consciousness is a prerequisite for theories of consciousness is more heat (i.e. noise) than light15.
Also, we find out in the very end that Carmen is not just a Karen but a simp for Keirk. I recently watched Reality Bites with my partner and kid as part of a trifecta of 90s movies filmed in the three cities we grew up in. It's a terrible movie. Keirk is Troy (Ethan Hawke's character) — an asshole who is apparently seen as brilliant by the story despite not doing or saying anything particularly brilliant. Like Troy, we see no particular reason for his love interest to have any reason to want to be with him.
In the review, I forgot to mention why Carmen is a Karen:
She holds the view that affirmative action is not a process by which bias is mitigated to create a level playing field, but actually a benefit for people of color that gives them a leg up
She perpetuates the stereotype that an identifying characteristic of homeless people is that they are dirty — knowingly pointing this out as "politically incorrect" and that somehow being "politically correct" (i.e. showing respect to other human beings or giving in to the bias of prejudice) is contrary to science
She takes it upon herself to investigate something that really isn't her business
I know right-brain/left-brain is a generally a myth — or at best an oversimplification — but I think the reference here is appropriate especially as Hoel, purported neuroscientist, actually perpetuates it in this book.
The book is more “scientist fiction” than science fiction — it tells a story of scientists but has some fictional science elements.
Which Stephen Wolfram-style seems to be dropped more and more in his writing.
Where it has the very boring definition of “obeys the speed of light”.
By the way, every character is insufferable.
I actually recall him saying he “exubes” academia which is why I still remember the incident to this day — but may have misheard him.
The actual “it’s an illusion” view is also pretty close to what physicist’s call effective theory. Just because a mathematical description captures phenomenology doesn’t mean it’s what’s “actually happening” — just because we experience consciousness doesn’t mean it’s what’s “actually happening”. It is also extremely biased as a scientist to put weight onto your own subjective experience — some kind of mitigation, some kind of leaning over backward, needs to happen whenever you talk about consciousness.
There is a pretty funny paper [pdf] that goes about trying to compute the probabilities in the context of scale factor regularization (cutoff).
There are a couple of sentences in the larger block quote that also have me scratching my head. I mean shouldn’t it be ‘Therefore belief in contemporary physics’ in order to parallel with ‘disbelief’ in the second half? What is the meaning of the phrase “all vast likelihood”? Likelihood is being used as a synonym with probability here, so represents a measure between zero and one; it isn’t ‘vast’. ‘All vast’ is just odd. And I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be visualizing when the masks clap. Did they materialize hands? Ah, but the clapping is disembodied. So is it just the audio of clapping emanating from the masks? Imagine that scene in a film. It’s stuff like this on almost every page — it’s what makes this a “so bad it’s good” novel.
I did a quick check to see if there were other “so bad it’s good” novels. The one that comes up the most is Fifty Shades of Grey.
There are some fun new developments that go by the name of “resurgence” [pdf] that may end up solving this little asymptotic series issue.
First let me give Hoel the benefit of the doubt in that I am pretty sure he is not just saying you can’t derive axioms because that’s effectively what we mean by the word axiom — it is no great insight. “Things appear illuminated because of the existence of light!” is not particularly deep. These two mentions of Gödel that imply a reference to the incompleteness theorems — reference to Gödel’s work on e.g. set theory or the general continuum hypothesis wouldn’t make sense in this context.
Ed. note. With regard to consciousness (no ‘s’ on regard) and I’m not sure “eldritch” which has the meaning “unearthly” is the word Hoel is looking for here — but maybe he is and this is supposed to be brilliant writing or something.
Also part of this quote is “then a science of consciousness would be the ultimate begging of the question, petitio principii” which is used correctly here. (Hoel emphasizing the traditional meaning of the phrase in reaction to its common usage today — adding ‘of’ and the Latin phrase — feels cloying.
There are a large number of bootstrapping or self-consistent approaches in the sciences that could easily allow this kind of “paradox” to be overcome.