Hyperspace of Perception
When Beauty Breaks Predictive Processing
Back around 1993 or so I saw Michael Hedges perform live for the first time. You have to remember, in 1993 there were no cell phones, shareable videos, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or anything like that. I had no idea what it would be like to see Hedges in person. Although I knew Hedges’s recordings with Windham Hill, I’m not a guitar player and didn’t have much of a clue about the kind of talent it took to make those sounds. A good friend of mine was a fine amateur guitarist and tried to tell me how amazing Hedges’s playing was, but honestly I didn’t really get it.
Seeing Hedges live in concert blew my mind. I literally had no idea that human beings could do what he did on the guitar. It was a mastery so far above what I thought was even possible that I can distinctly remember wanting to call everyone I knew and tell them I was witnessing genius, and they needed to drop whatever they were doing and rush to the theater to see. Just to get a taste of it, here’s Hedges playing “The Rootwitch,” nearly 30 years ago. He played an insane version of The Rolling Stones’s “Gimme Shelter,” while spinning in a circle on one foot, hammering all the parts as two-handed arpeggios on the frets of his guitar, and singing. He had a harp guitar, which I had never even heard of before. His playing wasn’t next level, he was the level, the final boss of acoustic guitars.
Nowadays plenty of top-tier players can shred on “Voodoo Chile,” or “Eruption” and it may be easy to forget how revolutionary Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen were in their time. Pete Townshend of The Who recalls attending a Hendrix concert with Eric Clapton, gripping each other‘s hands as they watched in awe. Townshend writes, “With Jimi, I didn’t have any envy. I never had any sense that I could ever come close. I remember feeling quite sorry for Eric, who thought he might actually be able to emulate Jimi.” Nuno Bettencourt, the virtuoso guitarist for Extreme, writes that first hearing Van Halen play “was so alien to me that it might as well have been a spaceship flying over my house…it was a whole different world.”
Loads of contemporary guitarists (e.g. Mike Dawes, Tim Henson, Rodrigo y Gabriela, etc.) use hammer on/pull offs, tapping on the fretboard, drumming on the guitar body, and other techniques that Michael Hedges mastered 40 years ago. I’m not claiming Hedges invented all those techniques, but he was a pioneer.
I saw Hedges twice more after that ‘93 show, and while he was just as impressive and enjoyable, I didn’t experience that sense of supernatural amazement, of a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. What is going on? That’s what I’m wondering about here.
The sublime
I think there’s two categories of positive aesthetic judgment.
Category one: beauty, impressiveness, elegance, skilfulness, fluidity, enjoyability, magnificence
Category two: the sublime
What’s the sublime? The first discussion I’m aware of is On the Sublime, a 1st century Greek work. It is traditionally ascribed to Longinus, but the true author is lost in the mists of time. Longinus (or pseudo-Longinus) is interested in the sublime in writing and speechifying. He writes, “the Sublime leads the listeners not to persuasion, but to ecstasy: for what is wonderful always goes together with a sense of dismay, and prevails over what is only convincing or delightful, since persuasion, as a rule, is within everyone's grasp: whereas, the Sublime, giving to speech an invincible power and [an invincible] strength, rises above every listener.”
Much later Immanuel Kant associates the sublime with enormity and power, and even fear; it is an overwhelming experience that trips our mental breakers. His contemporary Edmund Burke describes it as a tremendous aesthetic encounter that produces profound feelings of awe, terror, and astonishment, particularly in response to experiences of immense scale.
The sublime is not just more beauty or extra elegance, it is something else altogether.
You know how in sci-fi movies spaceships can make a jump to lightspeed? They are trundling along at a presumably quite fast pace, but when they go to warp, hit the hyperspace button, or whatever, it’s like they leave ordinary reality altogether. It’s not simply that they do something unexpected or even at the limits of what seems possible, but they move orthogonally to what we thought could happen.
Probably you’ve seen loads of Star Wars, Star Trek, or whatever sci-fi movies with this effect. The hyperspace jump no longer seems amazing–just a familiar trope to be wheeled out when the plot requires it. Can you remember back to when you first saw it, or encountered the idea? The ecstatic intake of breath, the impossible made possible in a way that was exciting but also a bit frightening.
The Hedges concert wasn’t my only experience of the musical sublime. There’s been a handful of recorded musical pieces too: John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme for one. Even now I can’t listen to part 3 without stopping whatever else I am doing to listen. When I first heard Philip Glass in concert performing Glassworks it sounded like he was speaking in tongues, an alien language that I should not have understood but somehow I did, as if in a dream.
I am not alone in hearing the sublime. Richard Wagner claimed that the greatness of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was that it took listeners beyond the merely musically beautiful to the sublime.1 No composer had ever included choral music in a symphony before Beethoven did in the 9th. For Wagner to call it sublime captures the absolute shock the 9th gave at the premiere, where the performance received no fewer than five standing ovations. The audience knew they were in the presence of greatness, but even more that their expectations of what a symphony could be were blown to pieces. Beethoven’s 9th was just beyond.
Predictive processing
Here’s my take. The sublime is a failure of predictive processing in the presence of beauty.
Our brains are forever trying to predict what kinds of experiences we are going to have. In fact, they try so hard that a lot of our experience is more due to top-down expectation than bottom-up sensory input. Once our subconscious mind has decided what our senses should be telling us, it tries mighty hard to fit our actual sensory stimuli into that box. As long as the actual stimulus is not too far away from the predicted one, the brain just sort of rounds things off and decides the prediction was satisfied.
Predictive processing can lead to some bizarre and funny results. Several years ago Penn & Teller had a debunking show called Bullshit. On one of the episodes they conspired with a high-end restaurant to serve “artisanal” bottled waters to their diners, all with fancy names like Agua de Culo, Amazone, Mt. Fuji, and Le d’Eau Robinet. Then the water steward, a.k.a. an actor working for the show, described the supposed flavor profiles of the different bottles to unsuspecting diners. True to form, when asked for their impressions of the taste differences, the diners all sincerely reported that “oh, yes, I can taste the glacial qualities in this one! So much better than tap water!”
All bottles had been filled with water from a garden hose on the restaurant’s back patio. The diners just tasted what they expected to taste.2
Part of our brain’s predictions are about the range of possible experiences. It’s when we experience something that is outside that range, something that seemed impossible, that’s when we encounter the sublime. Remember that when Kant and Burke talk about the sublime they associate it with (1) immensity, power, something vast and outsized, and also (2) fear and terror. This last has mystified philosophers (although in fairness we’re quickly mystified). How can something be both wonderful and beautiful but also frightening?
The account I’m giving explains both of these points. If you’re in a spaceship you expect it to be fast. But all your background knowledge and prior experience tells you that it still takes a long time to get anywhere. A one-way trip from Earth to Mars given the best rocketry we can build will take nine months. Suppose you’re in a super-advanced alien spaceship. You might think, well, can it go twice as fast? Five times? Ten times? If you accelerate or decelerate too quickly the g-forces will mush you into goo. So should we say a month to Mars?
Now imagine the captain presses the hyperspace button and you are safely at Mars in two minutes (lightspeed would take 4.3 minutes). That is an experience of immensity, power, of speed beyond what you believed physically possible. When something you thought—or even subconsciously expected—to be impossible happens, then all bets are off. Anything could be true, anything goes. A radical failure of induction means there is no chance of properly predicting future experience, of understanding what is happening, and that is a terrifying thought.
I’m reminded of an hallucinogenic passage in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, when the protagonist Roquentin encounters the unmediated stuffness of the world.
I had this vision. It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of “existence”… then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this [chestnut tree] root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished : the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.
Roquentin could no longer make sense of the world, no longer could he fit the components of reality into nice neat categories. To experience the sublime is to see that your categories of thought no longer apply. We’ve gone into hyperspace. When a category 1 aesthetic experience of beauty, profundity, elegance, etc. is caused by something beyond imagination, beyond prediction of what you thought possible, that is sublime. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The sublime is ephemeral
After I first heard Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue I never wanted to hear it again. Not because I hated it, no, no, the exact opposite. It was one of the most perfect pieces of music I had ever heard in my life, a brilliantly cut diamond, flawless and clear, like a divine gift to me and me alone. But I knew that every time I listened to Kind of Blue afterwards that the feeling of its supernal greatness would gradually diminish and disappear. I never wanted to lose that feeling. At the same time I wanted to hear it all over again, immediately and indefinitely. Maybe this is the experience of drug addicts, always trying to feel that first high once more and always failing.
Why would sublimity fade? Here’s the answer: because now the subconscious mind’s boundaries of possibility have enlarged to incorporate the novel (and previously thought to be impossible) experience. Michael Hedges was just as incredible a guitarist the 2nd and 3rd times I saw him perform, but I now knew what he could do and what I could expect. Kind of Blue is still a gorgeous piece of music, but it is firmly within my understanding of what modal jazz can be.
The same is true of other aesthetic experiences. Think about when you first read an author whose command of language seemed beyond mortal ken, or ate a meal that surpassed what you thought those dishes could be, or saw a stage play that left you breathless. The more you read great writers, eat at Michelin-starred restaurants, or go to Broadway, the more you realize what is actually possible, and the less you feel the presence of the sublime. Reading Richard Powers is always amazing and dinner at Pedro Lemos is always delicious, but after repeated exposure they are less astonishing. It may be that this account of the sublime helps explain the hedonic treadmill.
I suppose the way to pursue the sublime is to chase novelty, to look for the absolute best that some new kind of experience could offer. It may exceed what you thought possible. Then… hyperspace.
Here’s Wagner: “I soon conceived an image of [Beethoven] in my mind as a sublime and unique supernatural being, with whom none could compare. This image was associated in my brain with that of Shakespeare; in ecstatic dreams I met both of them, saw and spoke to them, and on awakening found myself bathed in tears.”
Compare Scott Alexander’s discussion of wine tasting.