Matrix Theory of Mind

A few months ago I listened to this episode of the Search Engine podcast in which PJ Vogt, the host, talks to Ezra Klein about the internet and media consumption in general.

In the episode, Ezra Klein shares what he thinks of as the “Matrix Theory of Mind”. Here’s my (slightly cleaned up) transcription of that part:

Ezra Klein: The Matrix Theory of the Mind is that… if only you could have that little jack in the back of your neck, into it would come the information.

PJ Vogt: Oh, like how in the Matrix they can plug in the jack and now they know kung-fu and French?

Ezra Klein: Exactly. A lot of people have the Matrix Theory of the Mind. The Matrix Theory of the Mind is this idea that you just download information into your brain and then you know it, that that’s what a book is doing.

When you hear these guys like Sam Bankman-Fried and others who famously say, like, there should be no books, it should be a blog post, like books are too long — what they’re saying is that they’re not information dense enough. Like you could just get the gist and then you’re there.

I’ve come to think that that’s not what any of this is actually about, that the time you have to spend with information, wrestling with it, being attentive to it — that’s where you draw connections, where you come to insights, where parts of you come into relationship with parts of it and something new emerges.

If you do creative work, that’s what you’re looking for, that kind of emergence of something new. And that’s about the attention, not just the information.

The same piece of text (or movie or music) read in a fractured way — for me: over 32 days in 15 or 17 minute chunks before I fall asleep — and that same book or same piece of culture consumed on an airplane, where I have no distractions, or in a movie theater — my relationship to that, what I will get out of it, what I will create from it in my own head are completely different.

This stuck with me. Not just because Matrix Theory of Mind is a great name, but because quite a few of the “this book should’ve been a blog post” comments I’ve come across over the years felt off. I couldn’t articulate why until I listened to Klein say the above.

Admittedly, some books are 15 pages stretched to 300. You read them and constantly wonder what the deal between the author and the publisher includes — minimum page count? this number of words? thickness?

But other books do need their 300 pages. Repetition, stretching, or taking time with it are essential to these books. Maybe to drive the same point home again and again. Maybe from a slightly different perspective, with a slightly different tone, with a different detail in focus on each repetition.

In 2016 I quit smoking after reading Alan Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Smoking — a classic of the genre. That book is unbelievably repetitive. If you haven’t read it, you might think you know what a repetitive book is, but you don’t.

When I read it, it took me until the second chapter to think: I get it. The book has 44 chapters. I kept on reading and Carr kept on making the same point, again and again, chapter by chapter. Each time I thought: I get it. But then he made the same point again and that time I thought: oh, now I get it.

I didn’t stop smoking after the second chapter. I stopped (and haven’t smoked since) after chapter twenty something.

Some books, I feel, need to be massaged into you; they can’t be uploaded through a jack in your neck.

That, to me, isn’t just a reminder to be patient, but also comforting. If I don’t understand something right after having been presented with all of the relevant facts, that’s not an indication that I’ll never understand it, but rather that I still need to wrestle with it some more.