Essay Club: Ideas are Alive and You are Dead by Roger's Bacon
"Do unto ideas as you would have them do unto you."
(I will be hosting a live video chat about this essay very soon, and you’re invited! Scroll to the Housekeeping section at the bottom of this post for more details)
Sometimes you encounter an idea so fascinating that you really, really want it to be true. Sometimes you get lucky; but too often, interesting ideas are interesting because they’re also incredibly outlandish, and could only be true under the most unlikely of circumstances. This, I fear, is the situation in which we find ourselves with Roger’s Bacon’s essay Ideas are Alive and You are Dead (2021).
The essay itself is well worth a read, regardless of whether you agree with its premise. Roger’s Bacon (of Secretorum, also affiliated with Seeds of Science) has been writing on Substack for a few years now, and he has a unique talent for writing both straightforward, insightful thought pieces, and just-plain-weird-but-still-fascinating literary art. This one straddles the line between the two. In honour of Bacon’s oddity, today I’ll be doing something a little bit different, too. I will, as usual, discuss the content of the essay; but I also want to discuss its structure, as there’s something quite interesting about it, and I think it has the potential to inspire a new essay genre. This might be a stretch—but let’s explore it together and you can tell me what you think in the comments.
Ideas are Alive and You are Dead (2021)
Summary
Ideas are Alive and You are Dead invites us to imagine something that seems almost impossible to the modern mind: “Ideas are alien life forms with an agency and intelligence independent of any mind or substrate which they inhabit.”
I say almost impossible, but the way that we talk about ideas often hints at the truth of this premise. The idea came to me, or it took on a life of its own; we do not merely come up with our ideas, rather, we discover truths about the world that we always sort of knew, but didn’t know how to put into words. It’s like seeing an elephant for the first time. We all know they’re out there—we’ve seen pictures and heard stories about them—but to see, hear, and touch a living, breathing elephant is a very different experience. It forces us to accept the reality of the thing. In the same way, when we are visited by a particularly unique and potent idea, we can’t help but acknowledge that the idea was never truly our own.
Many great thinkers have written about this phenomenon. Bacon quotes Phillip K. Dick (“He did not invent [the idea] or even find it; in a very real sense it found him”), Stephen King (“The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow…”), David Lynch (“Ideas are like fish… to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper”), and several others. Of course, a few writers describing imagined encounters with an elusive idea-creature isn’t solid evidence of Bacon’s theory. But this is clearly a common experience—one that goes back thousands of years—and for this reason, it might be worth taking seriously.
What would taking it seriously look like? Well, if we accept the premise that ideas are akin to a separate species, we should relate to them like we would to any other intelligent creature. As Bacon says, “Our relation to ideas is an inextricable symbiosis, like that between plant and pollinator… honor and respect each other and all will flourish beyond their wildest dreams.” By cultivating values of “freedom, openness, honesty, courage, tolerance, and humility”, we can foster an environment in which ideas can flourish. In return, great ideas will help us to grow, too.
Bacon concludes by admitting that the evidence for his theory isn’t strong. It is merely an intuition, a leap of faith. But it’s a confident one—and just as it took us 2000 years to prove Democritus’ theory of atoms, Bacon is hopeful that we will one day prove his theory as well. Time will tell.
Commentary
When I was a child, I really believed that dragons existed. I knew that humans hadn’t encountered dragons in quite some time, of course, but I thought they might have gone into hiding, or maybe they had been hunted to extinction. It’s possible that I was simply more imaginative than the other kids; but now that I have children of my own, I’m starting to see how quickly our society steps in to eradicate magical thinking. The kids of today have no time for dragons, fairies, unicorns, or Santa Claus. No—by age ten, most children have internalised the rigid Materialism that is so characteristic of the modern Western mind.
I try to reject this kind of hyper-rational thinking wherever possible, and I’ve learned that it’s incredibly hard to shake. But if we can push through, what happens when we break free of our scepticism? A whole world opens up. This world is one where the physical is subservient to the mental and spiritual; where ideas have a life of their own, and can mingle with each other and ourselves as they wish. Gods, monsters, and magic abound. As Bacon tries to show us in his essay, life can become truly magical.
Bacon’s proposition is not unlike the claims made by certain philosophical Idealists, where mind (or spirit) is believed to be the foundation of all reality. Idealism fell out of favour in the 20th century, but in the 18th and 19th centuries it dominated the intellectual sphere. This led to one of the greatest artistic movements the world has ever known—Romanticism—and this was no accident. Great art simply can’t flourish under hyper-Materialist intellectual conditions. It requires a sense of wonder, a willingness to suspend one’s disbelief, a desire to create for Beauty rather than practicality, and a willingness to risk even one’s sanity in the pursuit of this ideal. Clearly, many creative types are still able to do this. But there was once a time when even hardnosed academics were tuned to this frequency, and I think one of the things that Bacon wants to achieve with this essay (and others) is to rekindle the flame of Romanticism in the 21st century.
How do we do this? Interestingly, Bacon’s essay is itself a step in the right direction. What he’s given us with Ideas are Alive and You are Dead is not a series of premises that lead to a logical conclusion (i.e., a traditional essay), but a handful of vignettes—quotes, metaphors, evocative images, personal reflections—that together invoke a feeling that ideas might have a life of their own. I’ve taken to calling this form the [REDACTED]1, because it transmits its message by generating a feeling out of fragmentary parts. Like an impressionist painting, the point is not to look too closely at any one part (vignette), but to step back and experience the full picture.
Bacon’s great intuition—at least, my interpretation of it—is that we can only achieve re-enchantment by feeling our way back. This essay, whether he meant to do it or not, seems to pave the way. The fact of the matter is there is no good logical argument to support the idea that ideas have agency—at least not right now—but it’s a hell of a story, and life becomes far more interesting when we allow ourselves these little fantasies. Why enslave ourselves to reason when Romanticism is so much more freeing? After all, if it’s good enough for David Lynch…
Housekeeping
What did you think of this essay? Did you find Bacon’s theory compelling? Is it all a load of codswallop? Does it even matter? Let me know in the comments! And if you enjoyed this, please subscribe below (also subscribe to Roger’s Bacon and Seeds of Science, obviously).
Live Discussion Details
In January I hosted the first live Essay Club discussion via freeconferencecall.com. It was a great conversation, and I’d love to see more of you at the next one. The next live discussion will take place tomorrow, 16th of March, at 7:00am Australian Eastern Standard Time.
To access the discussion, use this link (you may need to download the app): https://join.freeconferencecall.com/mindandmythos
April Essay Club
Next month’s Essay Club will be posted on the 19th of April. It will feature philosopher Galen Strawson’s I Am Not A Story (2015), which offers a challenge to ‘narrativist’ personality theorists like myself. I’ve been championing the narrative perspective for a few years now, so it seemed only fair to give the opposing view some time in the spotlight. Will Strawson be the one to change my mind? Let’s find out!
To label something is to put it in a box, forever confining it to a finite set of defining characteristics. As such, I have decided not to give this form a name. Roger’s Bacon is welcome to do so, if he wishes, but I don’t want to place restrictions on what this form is or what it can become. In the spirit of play, let’s allow this idea to find its own form in its own time.
Reminds me of another essay (I think it was on sub stack) arguing that consciousness is actually a fragmentary thing, coming from little idea/neuron loops that aren't necessary continuous with one another. For the life of me I cannot recall the essay (I really need to save things on sub stack)
I tend to be some sort of mathematical realist--if the model describes the data well enough, then whatever phenomena the data is from really IS the model instantiated in some sense. In that frame, I think that the idea of the essay is testable in the near future, with neuroscience progress. If we can somehow pinpoint ideas in neuronal data, then we collect a bunch of data on their dynamics. if they're modeled well by population dynamics/modern mathematical models for ecosystems and evolution and such, than I'd be willing to buy that they are an instantiation of life.
Maybe this would be possible now from a psych point of view. Get a ton of people, and have them keep track of their ideas as they pop into their heads, etc. But I think that this channel would be too lossy to really perform the experiment.
Anyways, may have totally lost the point here since this is very grounded in materialism and I very much like the romantic interpretation, but these are the ideas that came to life(?) in my head reading the essay and your response
Initially I was put off by Bacon's idea that my big ideas were not really my own...a selfish part me wanted all the credit. But, by the end of the essay, and more so your essay, the idea had endeared itself to me. The idea that I was part of something bigger than myself. A culmination of thoughts and ideas over time that had found the right place to come alive. I've often heard people talk about their ideas like they were their children "it's my baby" and the need to nurture then as so. Thinking on how the right connection of people over time need to come together for a particular child to be born, sounds much like Bacon's thoughts on how ideas are "born". Is there anything more connected to life than birth. Perhaps he is on to something?