Sisyphus Unbound

“According to some, the punishment of the rock had only one purpose: to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected moment, Sisyphus will devise something and he’ll come back to Earth...” - 2666, Roberto Bolaño

Of all the punishments in Greek mythology, few are as iconic as that imposed on Sisyphus. For ratting on Zeus, screwing around with Thanatos, and tricking Persephone, he was condemned to forever roll a boulder up a hill in Tartarus and having it roll back down again. His fate of endless futility earns him the sympathy of us moderns. But his tale also warns us of the hubris and uselessness of intelligence against authority, a message which is anathema to our revolutionary Zeitgeist. Is intelligence always a force opposed to authority? If so, which would win in a Hegelian slugfest? Or are they two sides of the same coin? And what of the different forms of intelligence? Let us seek to answer these questions intelligently.

Not everyone has given up hope on intelligence. In the excerpt above, Bolaño expresses his belief that intelligence will eventually find a way to triumph over authority. This stands in contrast with Camus’s view in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he claims that the intellect has already triumphed over authority because “there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn”, so “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” These are two different forms of faith in the intellect, the former materialist and the latter idealist. The materialist believes that any achievement by the intellect must be manifested in the physical world, whereas the idealist is happy to limit his conquest to the inner world. Of course, it is better to have mastery over both where possible, as lacking one often imperils the other.

What are the ways out for Sisyphus? It is hard to imagine an escape from Tartarus, which is as far below Hades as the Earth is below the heavens. But it is precisely this difficulty which makes it a task for the intellect. We can begin by listing all the resources available to Sisyphus. The only item in his inventory is a boulder. He is highly trained in rolling boulders up hills. Playing to his strengths, he could roll it over and over again until the hill, or more likely the boulder, is eroded. What seemed an endless task has an end after all, thanks to entropy.

Having rolled the boulder for millenia, Sisyphus should have levelled up many times by now. His main attribute gains would be intelligence and strength (Titian actually portrays him shouldering the boulder, which is way more conducive to fitness). Perhaps with his superhuman strength built up from a crazy regimen of uphill plyometrics, he could simply fight or run his way out of Tartarus.

These plans may be insufficient due to the security of Tartarus, which can hold even the Titans and Typhon. Fortunately, Sisyphus still has his vaunted intelligence and charisma. Can he bring them into play? Given his modus operandi of tricking his superiors, he would have been placed into some sort of quarantine, with no one allowed near the hill. But quarantine implies order, order implies enforcers, and for a man of his abilities, enforcers are opportunities. Even The Thinking Machine had to interact with the wardens in order to escape in The Problem of Cell 13. He could also call upon his neighbours in Tartarus for a generalised revolt, or even enlist his putative son Odysseus for the prison break.

The more difficult part might actually be what comes after Sisyphus escapes from Tartarus. If he returns to Earth, the heavens will spare no effort in bringing him back. His intelligence will be put to the test as he tries to evade his trackers, and he may need to assume a new identity like Jason Bourne. 

What countermeasures could the Olympians take? Perhaps they could fight fire with fire. Where was Athena, goddess of wisdom, when they were faced with the most cunning of mortals? There is a difference between wisdom and intelligence which is not merely hierarchical (as the data-information-knowledge-wisdom (DIKW) framework might suggest), yet surely wisdom, especially the practical type as venerated by the Greeks, includes some element of defence against the dark arts.

The problem of Sisyphus is a classic case of Olympian mismanagement. Here was a wayward talent they could have used to promote their own agenda. A petty white-collar criminal, Sisyphus could have been recommended for promotion to upper management, like in the movie Office Space, or made to serve as a special agent of the gods, like Hercules did, or even make full use of his talents as a one-man red team to test for weaknesses in security. Instead, they chose a punishment which served mainly to incapacitate Sisyphus for their own protection, since the unique circumstances would not allow his fate to serve as deterrence for most others, and which has questionable rehabilitative effect, especially if he thought like Camus.

This fallibility of the gods is hardly an isolated incident, and suggests that the fallibility belonged to the storytellers instead. This limitation is particularly obvious in stories involving super-intelligent characters, such as Ender, Tony Stark, Sherlock Holmes, and of course Sisyphus himself. Ashby’s Law tells us that the storyteller’s mind needs to have at least as many degrees of freedom as the mind of a super-intelligent character in order to predict it. This need not all exist in a single temporal snapshot as the writer can slowly chart out each of the character’s thoughts.

However, that may not be enough since intelligence is also the tendency to come up with good choices and evaluate them appropriately, so even an equally complex model may not capture the same repertoire of choices and sophistication of decision. Even a simple bounded game like chess is computationally intractable, so grandmaster and computer alike must apply heuristics when playing. This issue is amplified in real life, so quality of heuristics often trumps quantity of processing. The Enlightenment ideal of deriving truths from observation and first principles is painfully slow compared to heuristics and algorithms learned from experience and non-representational trial and error, although it has the potential for disruptive innovation and vastly greater payoffs

This account of intelligence allows for an estimation of intelligence at every stage of the problem-solving process, from perception to search to evaluation to solution. For all his proficiency in those steps, Sisyphus’s stupidity is blatantly manifest in an earlier stage – his choice of problems to solve. His hamartia is his lack of wisdom in the form of foresight. This is what I term metaintelligence – being intelligent about how you use your intelligence. A simple cost-benefit analysis would have dissuaded him from his tricks. Instead, his one-track mind borne of desire led him to persist with his goals even where they were certain to set up further problems in the future. After all, intelligence is also the ability to reframe problems, so that what seemed part of the problem may instead be part of the solution.

The Serenity Prayer teaches us that we should accept what we can’t change; we must also accept what we shouldn’t change instead of achieving Pyrrhic solutions. But this Sisyphean one-track mind and worship of technocratic intelligence is symptomatic of our times, which demands more and more intelligence to maintain Hackstability (Venkatesh Rao’s term for a future in which technological improvements and hacks are sufficient to prevent civilisational collapse but insufficient to trigger Singularity).

Intelligence is theoretically the strongest emergent force in the Universe as it can utilise the other fundamental forces to achieve whatever physically possible future it desires. There is no paradox in the fact that intelligence itself supervenes on these other forces and arises from entropy-generating processes in opposition, leading to stable entities with implied purposes such as survival and the means to distinguish between states amenable to those purposes and otherwise.

Being a force itself, intelligence can be harnessed. Authority is embodied in a state of affairs where physical power is mechanistically directed to its own maintenance. Of course, states of affairs can be redefined as problems to be solved, so foreign intelligences are potential threats to authority. That is why Heinrich Heine said, “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings”, because the ideas expressed in books originate in human beings, so each human being is a potential book.

Authority can seek to imbricate intelligence in its mechanisms of control, but autonomy of intelligence always remains a potential yet irreducible threat, since intelligence requires the autonomy to search for solutions. Authority has an uneasy relationship with intelligence, such as with Stalin purging his generals. Even where intelligence is concentrated at the very top, as with Plato’s philosopher-kings and Elliot Jaque’s requisite organisations (where minds should be hierarchically arranged by the time spans over which they can operate), lower intelligences remain a threat due to incomplete predictability.

Conversely, intelligence is almost always coupled to desire. In Marxian terms, the point of intelligence is not merely to understand the world, but to change it. An intelligent agent’s capacity to change the world is contingent on its physical capacities and also the activity of other agents. This is the point where intelligence is transmuted into will to power, with authority (power-over) both the means and ends of power-to. Even benign, paternalistic authority carries the stifling and punishing consequences of authority.

Are there forms of intelligence which are immune to this perversion? Authority focuses on the convergent phase of intelligence characteristic of hedgehogs, when competing possibilities are eliminated, leaving only a single solution, whereas rebellion requires the visualisation of alternatives found in the divergent phase of intelligence which is characteristic of foxes. Thus, those intelligences more tolerant of ambiguity, with what Keats called negative capability, as well as foxes with many ideas rather than hedgehogs with unitary worldviews, would presumably be less inclined to authoritarian means. Perhaps the civic duty of intelligence is to stay vigilant against authority, and against transforming into authority. Einstein rejecting the presidency of Israel, even though he remained politically active, springs to mind.

In the final diagnosis, Sisyphus was probably just addicted to problem-solving, as the hit of dopamine and endorphins after each successful trick transformed him into a problem junkie. For all his metis and technê, he lacked phronesis and sophia. It seems inaccurate now to retain Sisyphus as a symbol of intelligence. What else then could he symbolise? Sisyphus is a trickster par excellence, like Loki and Prometheus. Being both a king and a rebel, he is reminiscent of Milton’s Satan. And in Bolaño’s interpretation, his prophesied return makes him a once and future king like Arthur and Barbarossa. Yet as a ruler, he lacked the holistic instrumentality of Machiavelli. Nor did he possess the anarchic strengths of a Nietzschean Übermensch. Instead, his mode of resistance is aligned with that of Gandhi and the lately departed Mandela, though Sisyphus has yet to achieve similar results.

And what of the boulder? Sisyphus and the rolling stone was the first rock star in history, and the boulder was like a Stradivarius in the hands of a maestro. Sisyphus can also lay claim to being the first performance-artist-cum-sculptor, with his seemingly meaningless boulder-rolling and marks on the hill taking on aesthetic significance, especially if Arthur Danto was right about the end of art and everything potentially being art (the Olympians should have charged visitors). Indeed, the boulder has become almost a mark of distinction, signalling special attention from the gods like that faced by Raistlin in Dragonlance. Then again, the punishment has oblated his identity and obscured his deeds, such that the term Sisyphean now refers to the punishment rather than the person.

But how Sisyphean are the things we grant that appellation? Sisyphus cooling is a repetitive process in which atoms lose kinetic energy by moving up potential gradients, and then cooled by raising their electrons to higher energy states so even more energy can then be lost. Yet the process is not futile because cooling occurs. So too sports seasons and pedagogy, which have been variously described as Sisyphean at times, since trophies and educated students are accumulated in the process.

So what is truly Sisyphean? Sisyphus’s most famous victory came over Thanatos, in his bid to stay on Earth and out of Hades. He showed an insatiable thirst for life, applying his intelligence against Death and the Underworld. There is only one other profession which does so – that of medicine. Medicine is a case of repeatedly struggling against the inevitable, as the process of ageing acts on health like gravity on the boulder. Of course, just as we can now bypass gravity, we may one day overcome ageing and achieve youthful immortality. No less than Aesclepius, Sisyphus should be viewed as a champion of the healing arts!

Has all this thinking and writing been fruitful, or will this boulder of thought roll back down into nothingness? We have at least learned the tenacious intelligence of Sisyphus. In our struggle toward the heights, one must imagine us happy. On this most Sisyphean of dates, when the pages of the calendar roll back down, I wish you readers a Happy Sisyphus Day, and an intelligently-spent, non-futile year ahead.