*Concept subject to collapse in an ouroboros spacetime – but it’s not the end of the world
Live concerts. Genuine leather. Director’s cut. Authentic hanfu. A real van Gogh. Notre Dame before the fire. Sashimi sliced by a Japanese chef and dipped in grated wasabi, not horseradish in a tube. The Strand articles typed out by human hands (“I will find out if you do otherwise,” says the Editor-in-Chief, who shares my ChatGPT account and home address). These scattered examples illustrate one concept: the real deal. We go to great lengths to pursue it, driven by two forces: originality and origin. But digging deeper, we find that those are also what make the real deal a fake concept.
One: originality. Millions of people can watch Taylor Swift on their phones, but only the lucky few can bask in her one-and-only presence. A movie or song can have a hundred edits and remixes, but the artist’s own take carries a different weight. In a Chinese village, painters who churned out 100 000 van Gogh replicas yearn to see the originals. AI’s rearrangements of human words and art are scoffed upon, if not outright banned. The real deal is the original deal, the unique deal, the creative deal.
One problem: is everything not a rearrangement? The law of conservation of matter tells us that the universe is only made up of so much stuff – and so many types of stuff. This has not always been the case. Some ancient philosophers and scientists considered our reality to be continuous – infinitely divisible, ready to be chopped up and reassembled in infinite ways. But this was challenged by the discovery of Planck units – the smallest possible chunks of time, space, and other elements of reality. Some quantum theories also view spacetime as fundamentally discrete. If our world is made up of Lego bricks, then there are only so many ways to put them together, even though the possibilities appear to be infinite to human perception. In that sense, nothing can be truly created /a priori/ after the beginning of time. Taylor Swift in flesh or the strokes of van Gogh are made of cosmic building blocks, no less than their imitations. Accordingly, us producing art is simply rearrangements of particles rearranging other particles, and so is AI. In the subjective sense, some artefacts are arrangements and some rearrangements, but objectively, there is no way to tell them apart. We live in a combinatorial ouroboros of space.
Two: origins. Genuine leather is more expensive than phony synthetics, because that is how clothes used to be made. A hanfu set from Beijing beats a Mulan costume from Amazon, because that is how people used to dress. The French spent $760 million restoring their fire-ravaged cathedral, brick by brick, with medieval techniques. A culturally accurate chef who puts authentic ingredients together is a rarity among modern fast-food chains that sacrifice traditional recipes for efficiency. The real deal is the ‘OG,’ something through which we can touch our ancestors and nature – our origins.
Another problem: is there ever a first or last? Creationists and Big Bang theorists would agree on the former. If we follow this view, there is a beginning, but it is impossible to recover. There is no going back to the singularity – time and entropy flow in one direction. Monuments crumble, and traditions shift. Any attempt at preservation runs into a Ship of Theseus paradox. However, at the same time, everything changes, but nothing is gone. Given infinite time, the building blocks of the universe can regroup to recreate a new version of the past. According to the Boltzmann brain hypothesis, it is possible that even our consciousness is an illusion from entropic fluctuations. In alternative views, the universe does not even have a beginning. In Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, the universe goes through cycles of big bangs and expansion. The concept of origin loses its meaning; there is no absolute order of old and new. We live in a cyclic ouroboros of time.
A better thought to fall asleep to: no one is special in an ouroboros space, but no one is alone either. Romantically speaking, we are all made of stardust, united by what we are made of. No one is alien or beyond recognition. Similarly, nothing is ever new in an ouroboros time, but nothing is ever gone either. Those who have passed on – people, places and knowledge – will eventually return. In a transient and absurd world, perhaps the only real deal is connectedness and continuity.