On the Paradoxical requirement of static constraints for individual autonomy
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An Anecdote to the Paradox of Autonomy
Anyone who has glanced through my “Compound Nature of the Culinary Arts” [1] knows that I love autonomy in the kitchen. Choice of tools and environmental setup is important, but autonomy within recipes is more essential. My culinary endeavors increasingly involve more daring riffs on traditional dishes that lie closer to the fringes of regional cuisines.
Indeed, part of my motivation to delve deep into cooking comes from my desire to create in the kitchen, not simply follow a recipe. As one would expect, my success in this creative realm has increased with my skill and experience. I notice, however, that my ability to improvise “freely” depends on my prowess in applying particularly universal/traditional ingredients and techniques.
This seems counter-intuitive; why might reliance upon well-established, possibly foundational techniques breed the greatest autonomy within a craft?
After all, the colloquial understanding of autonomy and creativity, especially with respect to a craft, is one of boundless expression, free of constraints. I assert that constraints intrinsic to a space constitute and contain the very existence of autonomy that lives within said space. To expand upon this, we shall examine the case of an autonomous mechatronic system interacting with its environment — a.k.a. a robot.
The “Fully Autonomous” Robot
One of the most interesting bi-products of the increased efforts towards the field of robotics is the realization that we don’t understand how humans see and conceptualize the world very well.
The task of building a “fully autonomous” robot would prove that we can at least concretize the notion of an “autonomous agent” in the form of bits and wires. However, the question of how to program a robot is quite abstract and reaches towards concepts of perception, motion control, localizing in an environment, information theory, probability, and more. Where do we start?
Where indeed? It becomes obvious that we need to program in constraints. They can begin abstractly, in the form of end goals — driving for us, massaging our backs, and delivering us pizzas. We might break these ends down into specific tasks, such as picking up objects, mobilizing, and sensing the world. After we make enough subdivisions, each of these tasks can then be further reduced down to a series of algorithmic steps. Each step of the way will require us to place more and more constraints on our creation. This of course comes in the form of physical constraints, such as the limits of embedded hardware & software; it also grows organically within the way that we conceptualize the robot interacting with the world. We must sacrifice boundless freedom for effective functionality.
This becomes especially challenging when we tackle the problem of perception. We’ve realized how fundamentally difficult it is to make a robot “see” the world and act accordingly. We integrate complex systems of sensors and sophisticated algorithms to simulate visual, auditory, and tactile feedback to raw phenomena. Of particular interest is the realization that the sophistication of human phenomenology comes not necessarily from acquiring data, but from filtering it ever so finely to craft that which we call our experience. The deeper we delve into machine perception, the deeper we understand just how incredibly precise the constraints and filters that dictate our experience of reality are.
This certainly isn’t a bad thing — without these constraints and filters, our lives would be ones of unimaginable chaos. Our brains are constrained by the quantity and types of information that we can handle at any given time, and disturbing this delicate balance would very likely run us into madness.
However, it is important to note the incredibly specific constraints that (unconsciously) dictate our experience. Even more important to note is that the nuances of reality and the plasticity of experience both exist in and are predicated on these ever-present limits.
Education & Mastery is a Journey through Constraints
We intuitively recognize this requirement for constraint, too. Education usually consists of understanding the nature of discipline-specific constraints. Take engineering, for example. Incoming engineering students are brimming with excitement to design and invent new technologies. Being a mentor or TA for a class of engineering freshmen is akin to drinking from a firehose of crazy ideas and wild ambitions of creation.
As students progress through their curriculum, this boundless excitement is met with….constraints. First, the constraints intrinsic to the natural world are introduced through physics, chemistry, and mathematical axioms. Then, students learn the finer-grained constraints specific to their engineering discipline — the “need to know” numbers of a diode, for example. They also learn about constraints placed on us, not by nature, but the discipline as a collective. Naming conventions, standard package types, and communication protocols fall into this category.
Students will come to understand more and more complex constraints within a narrowing field of focus. This can leave students feeling pigeon-holed into “the way things are,” and their creative flames die off to a smolder. Is it essential to trade ambition for ability?
It’s a shame that so many students can feel that their drive has been extinguished by academia (or other social pressures,) but without knowing the constraints that are fundamental to a discipline, one’s drive is an uncontrolled and ultimately ineffective force. Perhaps, then, the process of gaining competence really does need to result in a culling of creative bent.
What is essential, then, is to maintain the aspiration that is not pruned by constraints and cultivate the space left by dead ideas with a new (disciplined) vitality. Only now can one’s drive flare back up in a controlled manner and go to work producing genuine results.
The Unwavering Constraints of Craft
While the engineering constraints we’ve considered are largely taught in a classroom, true understanding of a discipline’s constraints exists within doing — a hands-on connection to one’s craft. The trades seem to be far ahead of academia here, as the work of cooks, apprentices, and fabricators is largely learned through the observation and the assisting of a mentor.
There is something to be said for the competence one acquires within more “concrete” crafts, as opposed to abstract anthropological inquiry. The constraints that one deals with are imposed by nature — and nature has no interest. The metallurgy of a cast iron pan and the properties of the butter in it exist with a non-negotiable nature. The garlic that you just forgot about in the pan…is burnt. No amount of scientific description, reduction, and linguistic debate can change those simple facts. You might finish your dish as if nothing happened, but if it sucks, it sucks. And it’s your fault.
Being so, one firmly understands the “rules of the craft” — that which cannot change. Only then can the autonomy that we seek arise. Only when constraints are not known but felt can we flow with direction, in a dance that breaks our conceptual walls between thought and action. Once this flow is initiated, disciplined creative freedom is born.
The shift towards “heady” work can break this unified flow as we begin to deal with more abstract notions that alienate us from our reality. These (often white-collar) pursuits are potentially constructed of man-made constraints that have no firm basis, and shift mysteriously. How is one to conduct oneself with autonomy if their domain of play is unstable? How is one to make value judgments when the man-made dynamic nature of the domain leads to spiral-shaped convictions? This topic is sufficiently important enough to dissect in a separate work and will not be discussed more here.
I suppose it makes sense, then, why my creativity with food only spread its wings once I truly understood the fundamentals of cooking as constraints. This can be said about any other discipline — including sciences, arts, and all that lies in between. Though I emphasize the importance of concrete craft, I believe that this can be generalized to more abstract notions as well.
The Unwavering Constraints of Human Experience
Specifically, I believe that constraint is not only necessary to the human experience but is intrinsic to human consciousness. One of the most difficult concepts to conceptualize and primary failures in the realm of philosophy is that of constraints.
I’ll credit Plato with the first conception of the perfect “other world,” which manifested as his “World of Forms.” [2] Here we see the birth of an abstract space that exists high above concrete reality, exhibiting architectonic perfection. This conception of this world changes forms throughout history, influencing the heavens and hells of later religions. Kant shifts this conception to one that describes the world as it “nominally” is. [3] This noumenal world may as well be the abstract world of forms, as we have no access to it — we can only know the “phenomenal” world as a matter of experience.
Kant goes on to base his theory of deontological morality on this metaphysical/epistemological basis, from which he derives the “good will” that exists purely from reason, the notion of duty, and the categorical imperative. in doing so, he places rationality on a pedestal and theorizes how one should act through the conceptualization of rational agents.
Unfortunately, this abstract notion of rational agents influenced those who came after Kant. This notion is just that — abstract and disconnected from reality. Aside from the reliance purely upon reason (analytic or synesthetic,) Kant’s theory abstracts away from constraints that exist within human nature. This mistake has manifested in Mill’s philosophy of Utilitarianism [3], conceptualizing human drive in an unrealistically abstract manner. It even shows up in Sartre’s belief in “radical freedom” and the seemingly infinite ways in which we can act. [4] All of these theories disregard intrinsic human constraints.
Dostoevsky, on the other hand, recognizes this mistake and addresses it. I’d argue that the following theme shows up most in his work: “Go ahead and forego the moral law imposed on you from nature. It’ll destroy you.” This is masterfully depicted in the psychology of Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment.” Laws and social norms can be avoided, but breaking the moral code of man has severe psychological consequences. This arrogance towards reality is explored more in “The Brothers Karamazov,” as each brother’s deceit punishes them.
Dostoevsky explores this idea most clearly in his “Notes from the Underground,” however. The protagonist brilliantly describes how a Utopia is impossible — because people will go through whatever efforts possible (and impossible) “to prove that men are still men and not piano keys.” [7] It’s simply not possible to abstract over our intrinsic phycological boundaries — “shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in bliss so that nothing but bubbles would dance on the surface of his bliss, as on a sea; give him such economic prosperity that he would have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with ensuring the continuation of world history and even then man, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer libel, would play you some loathsome trick” and destroy your Utopia.
It is constraints like these that philosophers so often ignore. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s realization has fueled others, namely Nietzsche’s conception of integrating the passions and Camus’s form of existential philosophy. In contrast to Sartre’s belief that man has no essence and no constraint on his action [3], Camus realizes that man has some essence and articulates this essence as that which breeds rebellion [8], sounding much like our inability to sit as piano keys, a.k.a. abstract “rational agents.”
The nature of these intrinsic constraints is extremely difficult to articulate. I believe they are impossible to fully know consciously. Perhaps they are able to be fully understood subconsciously. This is why I believe the literature of Dostoevsky and Camus to be so powerful — they convey the idea of these constraints and how they might function with reality in a way that cannot be rationally summed up and systematized. They can, however, be felt through their literature and a collection of other experiences.
If these ineffable constraints are understood, then we might be able to have autonomy. Then we might be able to act in a genuinely moral manner. Then we might be able to live in the disciplined freedom that we seek.
Perhaps that is why concrete craft is so powerful to us. Perhaps it is a concrete intimation of a half-understood reality that our experience is subsumed in. Perhaps understanding its constraints outside of ourselves functions to help us understand that which lies within.
Sources
[1] Compound Nature of the Culinary Arts
[2] “Republic”, Book V: 472–483. Plato. Retrieved 4/15/2022.
[3] “Utilitarianism”. John Stuart Mill. Published 1863. Accessed 4/15/2022.
[4] “Existentialism is a Humanism”. Jean-Paul Sartre. Published 1946. Accessed 4/15/2022.
[5] “Crime and Punishment”. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Published 1866. Accessed 4/16/2022.
[6] “The Brothers Karamazov”. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Published 1879. Accessed 4/16/2022.
[7] “Notes from the Underground”. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Published 1864. Accessed 4/17/2022.
[8] “The Myth of Sisyphus”. Albert Camus. Published 1942. Accessed 4/17/2022.
“Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work”. Matthew Crawford. Published May 28, 2009. Accessed 4/14/2022.
“The World Beyond Your Head — On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction”. Published 2014. Accessed 4/15/2022.
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