LOGICOMIX - Serio Comics 23

LOGICOMIX written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, drawn by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, published by Bloomsbury

LOGICOMIX written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, drawn by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna is available from Goodreads, indie retailers at Bookshop.org, the publisher Bloomsbury, at Skylight here in LA, and Amazon.

What Is The Foundational Quest For The Basis Of Mathematics?

From the late 19th century to 2009, LOGICOMIX is based on the story of the so-called "foundational quest" for the basis of mathematics and employs the life story of one of its prominent figures Bertrand Russell as a narrative device.

What does the foundations of mathematics mean and why was it important?

Well, let’s just say that there are certain things we take to be true 1+1=2 for instance.

These can be called axioms.

And yet Bertrand Russell and his logicians wanted to make sure these foundations of mathematics were indeed true.

This means, if you take a more comic aspect of the seriocomic approach, he took it upon himself (with a collaborator) to spend 10 years to write 362 pages to prove 1+1=2.

The graphic novel also follows the other great mathematicians and thinkers of the era “as they agonized to make the foundations of mathematics exact, consistent, and complete.”

Kind of like agonizing for 10 years to make a narrative story about the gun debate exact, consistent, and complete ;)

What is Logicomix also about? The Quest of its Authors to Make the Book!

The authors and artists of the book are also a major part as they debate the reasons why they are undertaking the quixotic goal of making the book itself.

The New York Times held it up as “proof that graphic novels can be about anything.”

And it’s popularity, making The New York Times Bestsellers List, and having over 19,000 ratings on Goodreads, which is more than A Contract With God from last week.

Has made it an example to view as a reason to be optimistic about my own.

How Logic/Reason and Madness/Mysticism are Related

The book notes through many examples, not just in Russell’s family tree and life but also in other thinkers involved in the quest for foundational truth, a curiously strong relationship between logic/reason and madness/mysticism.

As he works on his magnum opus, Russell has the opportunity to meet a forerunner in his field and is shocked that his work is no longer about math and his office is no longer at a college but about religious conspiracy and from a mental asylum.

In other examples, younger brilliant rational minds like a protege who comes to visit Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, devolve/evolve, depending on your perspective, into philosophical and mathematical mystics who prefer paradox over logic.

Those who have read my other Substack, Shuffle Synchronicities, or some of my other books, are probably aware that I have quite often teetered on the same brink.

Descending into a bit of a madman at times.

And other times evolving into a bit of a mystic.

Within my own 10-year foundational quest to quixotically write the definitive narrative story about the gun debate…

There was also a year-long quest, when work had stalled on the gun project as a screenplay/film and in the wake of my father’s death, to write daily without stopping during the year of mourning, the longest sentence ever written and then published.

Link here!

The latter of which yielded not a record nor fame but perhaps a deeper understanding of other more important things about self, others, the world, and the cosmos.

And probably a few new illusions ;)

But also a new plan to realize the gun project in a simpler form…

A graphic novel.

How Such Hubris/Ambition Can Lead To Humility/Humanness

Similarly, though Russell’s hubris/ambition damages some of his interpersonal relationships.

Including the deterioration of his relationships with his first wife as well as his partner in his 10-year logic book.

But the humility that comes from realizing that there is much failure/inadequacy even in his success/achievements.

Helps Russell grow more human and appreciate there’s much to gain from engaging with new life and love.

Russell also finds other ways to engage in the affairs of the world beyond abstract reasoning and becomes an advocate first of peace and pacifism during World War 1.

And then later during World War 2, he evolves again to become an advocate for something less polemical, an individual self-determination of the war/pacifism issue.

How Maps Are Not Reality

One of the central themes that the creators uncover is related to how Russell’s protege Wittengstein helped evolve him from a pure rationalist to one sensitive to ambiguity.

Wittengstein’s theory, in a sense, is that logic is entrapped within language, which itself is a representation of the world, a map, and not reality itself, so it cannot have a foundational truth.

I had a similar breakthrough which allowed me to finish the graphic novel when I finally shot a gun for the first time years into making the book.

The reality of participating in the activity I had only theorized about fully upended my previous purely polemical anti-gun and pacifist theories.

I wrote about this experience in my first Substack Shuffle Synchronicities.

(Shuffle Synchronicities is a practice I discovered for myself at least while writing This Book Is The Longest Sentence Ever Written And Then Published, where you can set an intention/observe meaningful coincidences in the algorithms of platforms like Spotify or Instagram. I then wrote about it daily for a year, which was covered by NPR.)

The shuffled-to-song after the gun range was no joke/no lie a poem by Jorge Luis Borges called "Del Rigor de la Ciencia" which is about this very theme of map/reality, see this old post:

In this Borges paragraph long short story, translated to “On Exactitude in Science” he writes about a community who tries to make a map that is almost as realistic as reality

Which was based on an idea by Lewis Carroll in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

In which a map grows to encompass not an inch per mile but a mile per mile

The joke of course is that we can never truly map reality back onto a map

This was one of the starker realizations I had about this project after shooting the gun

You can never map the whole experience of shooting a gun

Let alone the experience of guns for everyone in America

Let alone your own experience of a relationship

Onto an artifice

No matter how long you try

Another way ultimately Russell and others contributed to the world

In the storyline about the creators of the book and what to include, they decide to show that without Russell’s quest for foundational truth in math there may not have been the return to axioms, which became the basis for a return to algorithms.

Algorithms are at their most simple forms rules by which a human (or a machine) can follow and get the ‘same’ result each time.

It was further pioneered by the next generation of mathematicians like Alan Turing.

Who used these algorithms to codebreak and help end the war.

Turing also prophesized that these algorithms would be the basis for computers and artificial intelligence, which one of the authors calls the quest’s true hero.

Is Logic’s Hero Becoming Graphic Literature’s Villain Now As Well?

I wonder if the authors of the graphic novel were already imagining as they finished their book in 2009, that the Russell to Turing logic to computer lineage would ultimately have tremendous effects on their own form of work due to AI?

Graphic novels themselves can now as of the 2020s probably already be made without much human labor.

Using something like ChatGPT perhaps as well as MidJourney.

You could guide systems of AI to both write and draw a complete book.

In much less time than it took Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, drawn by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna to make LOGICOMIX.

Or me and Gabriel Wexler to make SHOULD WE BUY A GUN?

In Fact, It’s Already Been Done!

More than once…

What Does That Mean For Authors/Artists Like Me/Us?

There’s always going to be the argument that humans will make better art than AI.

But I often find myself frustrated by the belief in art having to be evaluated as good or bad, better or worse.

I prefer to enthuse and learn, not judge or critique.

And I continue to wonder about whether the purpose of art is between art-maker and art-audience.

In which case art-audiences will one day perhaps be better served by algorithmic art-makers that are better art-makers than humans.

But maybe instead.

Art-making is to inspire more art-makers.

For audiences to receive and then learn the benefits of art-making for themselves.

The agent I signed with last Friday has already asked what I might want to work on next.

I have a lot of ideas.

One on the Enneagram. One on Tennis.

But one that continues to interest me.

Is to continue the study of Shuffle Synchronicities.

Because what it also seems to prove is that there is an irrational acausality in deterministic algorithms.

A mad mysticism in its logical mathematics.

Thus, we are not strictly the victims of tech overlordism.

But are the possessors of the potential for mythical moments of curatorial cure.

Something that my forerunners in my grandiosely imagined intellectual family tree like psychologist/philosopher Carl Jung and his Nobel Prize physicist partner, Wolfgang Pauli, were already groundworking the same time as Russell and Turing…

I consider synchronicity as a psychically conditioned relativity of space and time.

-Carl Jung

From his book Synchronicity (with Wolfgang Pauli)

Thanks for reading Serio Comics 23!

LOGICOMIX written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, drawn by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna is available from Goodreads, indie retailers at Bookshop.org, the publisher Bloomsbury, at Skylight here in LA, and Amazon.