Surreal jokes (draft)
Using a weird informal concept to explore semantics
Do you like Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Rene Magritte and Jacek Yerka, bizzare counterfactuals and weird puzzles, Borges and Italo Calvino? Do you like surreal prisons?
In other words, do you like the intersection of logic and absurdity? Do you like exploring variations of a single topic, layers of a single concept?
Then this post may be for you. Even though it talks about one of the most esoteric, surreal and ridiculous topics.
What's a "joke"?
A "joke" is a made up technical term. I'm not referring to the jokes like "why did the chicken cross the road?". If you see the word "joke" in this post, know that I'm referring to the made up term.
Here are some definitions of a joke:
A joke is contradictory possibilities combined in a single thing.
A joke is contradictory affordances. Or a meaningless affordance.
A joke is a useless versions of a useful thing. A thing with a negated purpose.
Imagine money in a mousetrap. You want to take the money, but don't want to get jammed by the trap. So, this is a joke: conflicting possibilities in a single thing, conflicting affordances.
Or imagine a door, drawn on the wall of a prison cell. The door implies a possibility to open it. But it's just a drawing, you can't actually interact with it. It's an illusion of an affordance. It's a joke.
Catch-22 is a joke.
René Magritte drew jokes. The Lovers, 1928: why kiss in bags? The anger of gods, 1960: a horse on top of a car moves faster, but that's useless. The Amorous Perspective, 1935: why hole in the door if you already have the door? The Room of Madame Sundheim, 1960: you don't need a house inside a house because you're already in a house.
Why are "jokes" important?
I think jokes are interesting for the following reasons:
A joke is associated with a stark subjective feeling and yet a joke has clear logical content (based on counterfactuals). Subjectivity and logic meet in a joke.
A joke has to be one of the smallest "molecules of meaning" (self-contained bits of meaning).
We can try to gain knowledge [about subjective experience and human sense of meaning] from jokes. Or we can test our theories [about subjective experience and human sense of meaning] on jokes.
You'll be surprised how diverse the logic of jokes can get! You may be interested in jokes purely because you're interested in logic. Jokes describe very peculiar types of counterfactuals.
1. Variations
I'm going to sound like a rabid lunatic while explaining all the crazy "jokes" below... hope you can follow their twisted counterfactual logic.
Twelve chair jokes
Imagine a normal chair in normal circumstances. This is not a joke.
Imagine a chair floating in the sky. This is a joke, because you can't sit on this chair despite the implied possibility.
Imagine a chair which stops existing when you sit on it. (Maybe it's very fragile or made of sand.) This is a useless chair, a joke. However, technically this situation doesn't contain any "useless chairs". Because when the chair exists, you can sit on it. But when you can't sit on the chair, it doesn't exist. This tricky logic is identical to survivorship bias.
Imagine a chair made out of someone's bones. The joke is that the mere existence of this chair implies that this "someone" can't sit on it, even though no physical barriers to sitting exist.
Imagine a room stuffed with chairs. No one can get in the room, because all available space is occupied by chairs. Those chairs make each other useless.
...
Imagine a chair which teleports you on another chair. It's a useless chair. But also isn't useless, because it allows you to sit. This chair negates the purpose of a chair, but also negates the negation. This is a clear meta-joke, a joke about a joke. A joke squared.
Imagine an invisible, immaterial chair. This is a joke — the chair is useless because of immaterialism. But immaterialism also means this chair doesn't exist, so there's no joke. Here the very reason of the joke negates the joke.
...
Imagine a chair in an empty world. In an empty world there's no difference between useful and useless chairs. No difference between jokes and non-jokes.
Imagine an alien in the shape of a chair. The alien can't sit on themselves, so this chair is useless to them. BUT if this chair didn't exist, the alien wouldn't exist too, and nothing ever would be useful to them. In this joke the concept of "usefulness" depends on a useless thing.
...
Imagine a chair which grows spikes when nobody is around. This chair is useless only when it can't be used. Just like a normal chair.
Imagine a chair occupied by a giant egg. The chair seems useless, because nobody can sit on it. But in the egg develops a person who loves sitting. When the person hatches, they retroactively consider this chair super-useful, because it was "reserved" for them.
Imagine a giant chair. You can sit on it (its parts), but can't "sit" on it in the greater meaning. Can't sit on the whole chair — your butt isn't big enough.
("Legend of the Centuries, 1950" and "La Femme assise. La Place au Soleil III, 1956")
Recursion of jokes
Let's take a look at The Human Condition:
The window is obscured by a painting. If we want to know what's behind the window, this is a joke.
But wait! The painting allows us to see what's outside.
But wait! The painting may not correspond to what's outside.
This is a joke about a joke about a joke. And the painting above also contains another nesting of jokes:
The window is obscured by canvas.
But it's a drawing, so nothing behind the canvas actually exists.
But it could exist, if the canvas weren't drawn in this spot!
Hegel's Holiday has some nested jokes too.
Conclusions
Let's take a break. What did we learn after our first intensive exposure to jokes?
I'm drawing the following conclusions:
Jokes have objective differences (different logical structures) and subjective differences. However, the logical structure of a joke is partially subjective. So, objective & subjective differences are interwoven together.
Jokes can be very diverse, so there's at least 3 truly unique jokes.
Jokes can be nested (recursion). I guess we can limit nesting to ~3 layers. Maybe it's an arbitrary choice, but it has a psychological justification. Human attention is very limited.
Nesting can be artificial and trivial or unexpected and natural. For example, in The Human Condition nesting of jokes happens naturally.
All types of jokes are "jokes about jokes": all types of jokes use recursion, contain a meta-level contradiction. Except for the simplest type of jokes.
2. Differences
In this part of the post I'm going to overview different ways to analyze jokes. Analyzing surreal jokes may feel even crazier than the jokes themselves. But that's just plain old analytic philosophy. On drugs.
Jokes as negations
Jokes can be modeled as "negations". The following "negations" are similar to some of the chair jokes above (plus three new jokes). I gave each negation a unique name for the ease of reference:
Nothing is just nothing. (new)
Norm doesn't negate anything. Norm is not a joke, but can be counted as one for convenience.
Negative negates Norm.
Reverso negates a negation.
Ghost negates its own existence.
Subverso makes Norm negate something.
Denier negates being different from Norm. (new)
Switcher is equivalent to Norm or Nothing at different times.
Contrarian negates that it negates anything. (new)
Predecessor makes it so Norm couldn't exist before its negation.
Mixer makes negations indistinguishable from non-negations.
Can we say anything substantial about differences of the jokes above?
Jokes about criteria
We can come up with a criterion for differentiating jokes. And that criterion can lead to jokes about the criterion itself.
For example, let's say our criterion is "if a joke negates a joke, those are different jokes" (C). Then:
Norm and Negative are different jokes. So far so good.
Ghost is different from itself. Which is absurd. Ghost undermines the usefulness of the criterion. So, Ghost is a joke about C. (The same is true for Contrarian.)
Mixer is directly incompatible with the criterion. So, Mixer is another type of joke about C.
Jokes about essential components
We can deduce a component which is essential to the existence of most jokes — and then find a joke about that essential component. For example:
Each negation presupposes the existence of something non-negated (Norm). However, Predecessor flips this logic backwards. So, "presupposition" is an essential component and Predecessor is a joke about "presupposition".
Each joke needs to, well, exist. "Existence" is an essential component and Ghost is a joke about "existence".
Each joke depends on the concept of negation. "Negation" is an essential component and Mixer is a joke about "negation".
We can observe that for a joke to be unique, it needs to be at least not 100% identical to already existing jokes. Switcher is a joke about that observation.
Many jokes in one joke
If you think about logical implications of jokes, you can notice that those implications are all very similar and yet confusing. For example, Reverso is a negation of a negation. But Ghost negates its own existence, which implies (logically) negating its own negation. And if we think about Reverso and Ghost harder, we can even conclude that they both imply a negation of a negation of a negation...
Thinking about logical implications of jokes is hard and unsatisfying. Jokes start to blend together, recursion becomes arbitrary. Complete chaos. But we can fix all that with "essential components". We can adopt this rule: logical implication of a joke should be composed only from definitions and a single essential component. Now analysis becomes much less chaotic. For example:
Let's analyze Ghost. Existence (essential component) of a negation can be modeled as "affirmation of negation". Therefore, negation of existence (Ghost's definition) is a negation of a negation. Ghost manages to create "negation of a negation" without making two references to "negation" and without negating anything outside of itself. So, Ghost is more compact than Reverso.
Let's analyze Denier. Being different (essential component) can be modeled as "negation of equivalence". Therefore, negation of difference (Denier's definition) is a negation of a negation. But you can't be equivalent to Norm if you negate something (by Norm's definition). Therefore, Denier compresses 3 levels of negation into a single one.
Let's analyze Switcher. It's essential for Norm to be different from Nothing. Therefore, Switcher de facto negates Norm. But to create this negation, Switcher needs to reference two jokes (Norm + Nothing) instead of one. In some sense, Switcher is the most convoluted way to create a negation.
Essential component allow to compress many jokes into a single one naturally.
Jokes about models
The same jokes can have different models. We had a close look at two types of models: physical models (about physical chairs existing inside a physical world) and logical models (about negations). We can use both types of models to deduce unique properties of jokes. We can discover jokes about physical models and jokes about differences between physical models and logical models. For example:
Subverso and Mixer are the only jokes which can be made from copies of Norm. To create Subverso, you can bury a normal chair (Norm) in other normal chairs, making it impossible to sit on the buried chair. To create Mixer, you can fill the entire world with normal chairs (Norms), destroying all life — and hence the difference between useful and useless chairs.
Modeling Mixer as a world 100% filled with chairs is not a normal physical model of Mixer, because there is a simpler and less crazy physical model. Therefore, the former model is some meta-joke about Mixer.
"Negation of a negation" (Reverso) can be equivalent to the absence of negation in a logical model. But we can have a physical model of Reverso where "negation of a negation" definitely isn't equivalent to the absence of negation. So, the latter model is a meta-joke about Reverso and the difference in model types.
In general, we can use any important model type to deduce something about jokes. Importance is judged subjectively.
Jokes about descriptive concepts
Consider those predicates:
useless/useful
dangerous/safe
evil/good
All those predicates can be equivalent to "negated/non-negated". (Any binary predicate can be.) We can use different predicates to explore differences of jokes. And we can make jokes about predicates.
For example, imagine a chair on the edge of an abyss. This chair is dangerous to sit on. However, the place itself is dangerous, so saying "this chair is dangerous to sit on" is misleading. This is a joke with double negation. But it's unique, because here we have two negations which negate the same thing (safety) — yet one of them neutralizes the other. You can't get such neutralization with the "useless/useful" predicate. So, this joke with double negation is also a joke about the difference between "useless/useful" and "dangerous/safe" predicates.
Descriptive sub-concepts
We can take a descriptive concept and split it into sub-concepts. For example, we can take the concept of "color" and split it into sub-concepts such as "red", "green", "blue". Then we can use essential components to prove that our sub-concepts are truly unique — by showing that they interact with essential components in radically different ways.
Let's take the concept of "negation". We can split it into two sub-concepts:
"negation which leads to a paradox"
"negation which doesn't lead to a paradox"
"Complexity", "implications", "meaning", "realizability" are essential components for negations. Paradoxical negations tend to be more complicated, have unclear implications and meaning, can be impossible to realize in reality . Paradoxes and non-paradoxes interact with essential components in radically different ways — therefore, the sub-concepts above are truly unique.
Sub-concepts (more)
Let's take a look at those two chair negations:
Chair which eats the person who sits on it. This chair negates the person.
Chair made out of the person's bones. This chair negates the person too.
Let's compare them:
First negation happens in the present/future. Second negation has already happened in the past.
"Negation" is an intrinsic property of the first chair. "Negation" is not an intrinsic property of the second chair ('cause the person still could sit on the second chair if they were alive).
First negation is not implied by the mere existence of the first chair. Second negation is implied by the mere existence of the second chair.
"Time", "intrinsic property", "existence" are all essential components. Chair negations above interact with those components in radically different ways — therefore, they correspond to a new pair of truly unique sub-concepts of "negation".
Sub-concepts (even more)
And we can keep splitting "negation" into sub-concepts. For example:
Reverso negates a negation (negation exists in the present).
Egg chair erases a negation from ever existing (negation propagates from present into the past).
Ghost negates a negation in a 100% paradoxical way.
Mixer negates in an obviously unique way (by making negations and non-negations indistinguishable from each other).
Switcher negates without using "negation" at all. Switcher also needs to change in time in order to create its negation.
All those negations illustrate provably unique sub-concepts.
Any unique sub-concept creates two clusters of properties. All properties in one cluster are different from all properties in another cluster — and there's a single reason of the difference. Unique sub-concepts create objects which are "absolutely different". Somewhat similar to the bouba/kiki effect.
Another perspective: a unique sub-concept is N properties connected by a semantic role — deduced from a semantic role.
Conclusions
My conclusions:
There are methods to compress many jokes into a single one naturally.
There are methods to prove (informally) uniqueness of a joke.
One method in particular stands out: finding "absolute differences" between jokes, proving that certain jokes are "absolutely different" from each other.
3. Jokes in perception
Refreshing
Let's refresh the three most important ideas we've learned:
Jokes have different types of models. We had a close look at two types of models: physical models (about physical chairs existing inside a physical world) and logical models (about negations).
Unique descriptive sub-concepts describe objects which are "absolutely different". A unique sub-concept is N properties connected by a semantic role — deduced from a semantic role. Bouba and Kiki is a weak example of this.
Essential components of jokes are the components present in most jokes. Essential components allow to a) compress multiple jokes into a single one and b) prove uniqueness of descriptive sub-concepts.
Models. Descriptive sub-concepts. Essential components. We need all those ideas to compare jokes.
Special models
"Chair models" and "logical models" are pretty boring. Let's consider a more interesting type of models — "surreal places". What's a surreal place?
A place which can be captured in a single picture. A place with simple architecture. A place where precise details of the architecture don't matter. Sagrada Família and Sydney Opera House are not surreal places, unless we ignore details.
A place which doesn't break the laws of physics and Euclidean geometry. A place which doesn't have completely inconsistent proportions of objects. (Rare exceptions are allowed. Levitation is allowed, sometimes.) Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach by Salvador Dalí and Waterfall by M. C. Escher and The Sun Sets Sail by Rob Gonsalves are not surreal places, unless simplified.
Paintings of Jacek Yerka and levels of platform games (e.g. Donkey Kong 2 and Spyro the Dragon) are examples of surreal places.
Jokes about places
There are jokes about surreal places. Examples are down below.
Oligocene Gardens by Jacek Yerka and Stone Hill from Spyro 1.
This place has a hole (I'm talking about the hole in the plane, not about the pond and the well). The hole is a negation of the place, because it creates the danger to fall down. However, the hole isn't deep, so there's no actual danger. Therefore, this place can be seen as a negation of a negation of a place. And this place is one of the most economic ways to create the double negation.
Archipelago by Jacek Yerka.
Most places are connected to land. But this is an isolated place. Which is bad, because isolated places don't make sense — you can't get into them and can't get out. (Remember Azkaban? Alcatraz? Château d'If? Saint Helena?) Moreover, parts of this place are isolated from each other, which is bad and doesn't make sense too. So, Archipelago combines two negations of a place. And Archipelago is one of the most economic ways to combine two negations of a place: you need only emptiness (ocean) and a couple bits of land.
The Castle of the Pyrenees by Rene Magritte is a funny joke, especially if we assume that gravity still works and the castle is gonna fall.
Differentiating places
So. Places can be jokes. Therefore, we can prove that some places are "absolutely different". Which means we can discover "absolutely different" objects of perception. Like Bouba and Kiki, but more interesting and more plentiful. Instead of just two objects, we can discover a whole "periodic table" of such objects.
White Plane 3
(The Lost Jockey; AI-art.)
Description. Imagine a lonely house in a vast empty field. This place is an example of White Plane 3.
Joke. The joke is that White Plane 3 consists of many negations. It requires a single house to be surrounded by emptiness (negations of houses).
Additional uniqueness. Most places don't consist of a single unit. (Which means "not consisting of a single unit" is an essential component of houses.) But White Plane 3 violates that rule.
Green plane 1
(Autumn In Madeira; Sen Landlorda; Western Wind; AI-art.)
Description. Imagine a place with houses at the center of an empty field. The empty field is surrounded by a fence. This place is an example of Green Plane 1.
Joke. Green Plane 1 is a joke about borders. (Most places have borders. Therefore, "border" is an essential component of places.) The joke is that the border is bigger than the place — it captures the place, but also captures some irrelevant land.
Blue Plane 1
(SONNET; CABINS; Breeze Harbor; Vision over the Gulf of Genoa; LETNIA SYPIALNIA; BEZSENNOŚĆ; AI-art.)
Description. Imagine a field surrounded by houses. This place is an example of Blue Plane 1.
Joke. The joke is that Blue Plane 1 turns "emptiness" into a place, by giving "emptiness" an inhabited border. Blue Plane 1 turns negation of a place into a non-negation.
Additional uniqueness. Blue Plane 1 is a place where the border plays the most important role. In some sense this whole place is nothing but the border. Also, Blue Plane 1 is one of the most interconnected places, because it has distant parts which affect the value of each other. ("Negation" and "non-negation" are values; "the center of the place" and "the edge of the place" are distant parts.) The same can be said about White Plane 3.
Orange Plane 1
(Zeppelin; Under the Landscapes; KOSMICNZA STODOŁA; AI-art.)
Description. Imagine a field surrounded by a fence. One half of the field is densely packed with houses. Another half of the field is empty. This place is an example of Orange Plane 1.
Joke. The joke is that Orange Plane 1 combines two places with opposite content — a densely packed village and an empty desert — into a single place.
Additional uniqueness. The whole field in Orange Plane 1 counts as a unified place. Most places have a "uniform distribution of content" inside of them. So, "uniform distribution of content" is an essential component of places. But Orange Plane 1 and Blue Plane 1 directly contradict that idea by mixing opposite content.
Grey Plane 0
(There is peace in the Block; The First Days of Spring; AI-art.)
Description. A field filled with many copies of the same place. But those copies merge into a single entity. This place is an example of Grey Plane 0.
Joke. The joke is that copies of the same place create a new place — but those copies negate each other (by merging into a single thing) — and yet they still create a new place.
Sub-concepts of places
We got 5 places with empty areas. But in each place the empty area is imbued with different semantic content:
In White Plane 3, empty area consists of many negations. Empty area there is also the largest.
In Grey Plane 0, empty area consists of many copies of the same negation. The area there is not even empty, it just can feel empty (because it's filled with copies of the same thing and the copies blend together).
In Blue Plane 1, empty area is not a negation at all.
In Orange Plane 1, empty area is a negation mixed with non-negation. Empty area there also conflicts with the non-empty area.
In Green Plane 1, empty area is a meta-level negation (negation of a method of defining a place).
Empty areas in White and Orange planes create the strongest contrast. Empty area in White Plane isn't contained inside a border; empty area in Blue Plane covers all the space inside the border. Empty area in Green Plane doesn't really belong to the place. And so on. The list of differences goes on.
We've split one descriptive concept ("empty area") into 5 unique sub-concepts. Those sub-concepts are simultaneously impossible to describe and very easy to describe. You just need to know how to notice and analyze jokes.
Sub-concepts of songs
The same way we can seek "absolutely different" plots of songs. For example:
Why Does This Always Happen to Me?, Happy Birthday, I'll Sue Ya, You Don't Love Me Anymore and Do I Creep You Out by Weird Al. What's the uniqueness of those songs? They create a narrative out of the most particular facts/events. As a result, they don't define a specific situation (the situation is spread out in time or space) and connect unrelated or distant events.
Imagine, Isolation, Help!, I Don't Wanna Face It and Instant Karma! by John Lennon. What's the joke of those songs? They establish a situation with two or more parties which don't want to connect. (Completely different people; a progressive couple and a backwards town; an independent self-assured person and their friends; a misanthropic egoist and humanity; a prideful jerk and the human race.) Then the songs negate this disconnect. The joke is the negation of negation of connection.
Mortuary, How Can You Sleep?, I am the Rain, Let Me Be Your Armor and Fallen Down by Assemblage 23. What's the joke of those songs? In them the global situation unites two different situations and characters in two conflicting roles. An imprisoned victim and a free villain; suffering victims and an easy living villain; a delusional person and a straight shooter; a normal person and a parasite; a judging person and a fallen person.
Suspicious Minds, Always On My Mind, Don’t Be Cruel by Elvis Presley. What's the joke of those songs? They emphasize that there are two different perspectives on the same situation. (In most songs only one perspective is emphasized.)
We can argue about equivalence of the songs' sub-concepts and the places' sub-concepts. For example, Weird Al's and John Lennon's songs have the strongest connection between elements. And the same is true for White Plane 3 and Blue Plane 1. So, maybe there's an equivalence?
4. Subjective experience and Deduction
Consider the following argument:
Can you ever have subjective understanding of why a subjective feeling X is strongly related to a subjective feeling Y (i.e. "X + Y" has special significance)? Even though the thing which creates and connects the feelings is a black box.
Yes, you can. If you couldn't, all of your subjective experience would be disjointed and constantly surprising to you.
How can such subjective understanding be possible?
It can be possible if your mind has a very fast way to deduce that "X + Y" and "X - Y" can't be the same thing. Deduce from what? From the most general experiences and thoughts, conscious or not. (Such deductions should eventually be translatable into natural language.)
Therefore, I think that subjective experience is based on "fast, simple and abstract deductions". There should be a bridge which almost connects subjective experience and conscious thought.
...
Think about that. You have a vast range of possible experiences. And on some level you understand what each of the experiences means. For example, you're watching a movie with a unique atmosphere — and on some level you do understand why this atmosphere is triggered (even though you can't put it into words). Or maybe you're talking with some subtly irritating person — and on some level you do understand why they're irritating. Otherwise you'd be busy constantly questioning your own experience. And your experience would be much more useless and uninformative overall.
Universal, provable & sufficient relationship
"Negation" is a universal relationship between all experiences and all parts of experiences. Without it all experiences would collapse into a single experience without parts. "Negation" is relevant on all levels of abstraction. This is a trivial, vacuous observation. Less trivial observations:
Any meaningful negation has to be provable. Not "A and B may be different", but "A and B has to be different". If a difference is not a provable fact, you can just ignore it and never be punished by reality. (relevant: Private_language_argument#Meaning_scepticism)
Negations are sufficient (with a little help of other concepts) for creating complex relationships between experiences. We've learned that by analyzing jokes.
Ordering, counting, recursion
Consider this:
You have limited memory. And an amount of information much bigger than your memory.
Can you learn such information? Yes.
But only if you can apply "ordering -> counting -> recursion" to the information.
For example, imagine you have an infinite amount of objects. You can learn them only if you can put them into a structure (order them in some way), locate your place within that structure (do some form of counting) and apply the same knowledge across different parts of the structure (use recursion/induction). For simplicity, let's call all of those three things "ordering".
Сonclusions
So, the main conclusions:
There should be ways to deduce differences between subjective experiences. Subjective experiences should be based on "fast, simple and abstract deductions". (eventually translatable into natural language)
"Negations" are universal and provable relationships between experiences. They're also sufficient (with a little help of other concepts) for creating complex relationships between experiences.
Experiences are useless if you can't apply "ordering" to them. And if you can describe how subjective ordering works, your model of subjective experience is "complete" (from a practical standpoint).
Studying absurd counterfactuals (which provoke logic & feelings) is one way to explore subjective deduction and subjective negations.
But how can we explore subjective ordering? Can "negations" naturally lead to ordering?
The Lost Jockey