Caringosity Killed The Cat

Can Machines Learn to be Curious?

“Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone’s mind. It makes me get out of bed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at me that day. Curiosity is such a powerful force. Without it, we wouldn’t be who we are today. When I was younger, I wondered, ‘Why is the sky blue?’, ‘Why do the stars twinkle?’, ‘Why am I me?’, and I still do. I had so many questions, and America is the place where I want to find my answers. Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives. We have become explorers and scientists with our need to ask questions and to wonder. Sure, there are many risks and dangers, but despite that, we still continue to wonder and dream and create and hope. We have discovered so much about the world, but still so little. We will never know everything there is to know, but with our burning curiosity, we have learned so much.” — [Clara Ma, winning essay for NASA’s 2009 Mars rover naming contest]

curiosity(n.)

late 14c., “careful attention to detail” (a sense now obsolete); also “skilled workmanship;” also “desire to know or learn, inquisitiveness” (in Middle English usually in bad senses: “prying; idle or vain interest in worldly affairs; sophistry; fastidiousness”); from Old French curiosete “curiosity, avidity, choosiness” (Modern French curiosité), from Latin curiositatem (nominative curiositas) “desire of knowledge, inquisitiveness,” from curiosus “careful, diligent; inquiring eagerly, meddlesome,” akin to cura “care” (see cure (n.)). — [Etymonline entry for Curiosity]

The problem with Curiosity today is that everybody claims to love it. Schools claim to instill it (in between rote memorization curricula and punishing standardization that seems designed to eradicate any real difference). Tech companies build pantheons and competing mythologies predicated on the word, and corporate recruiters praise the “curious mind” as if curiosity is the one thing one needs to avoid the structural disease that is twenty-first century poverty. And why wouldn’t it be? In today’s fast-paced, future-oriented world, curiosity provides candidates that bear little onboarding cost and nothing to manage; the perfect employee! Even when used cynically, which is honestly most of the time the word gets used in conversations about employment or education, the word manages to keep its little halo. Curiosity and our superego-fueled society play exceedingly well together.

The word didn’t always bear the positive meaning its taken on today, however. For much of Christian Intellectual history it meant something close to the opposite! A dangerous appetite, a misfiring desire that swerved on its way to becoming a virtue, and instead became a vice. A restless, morally suspect itch to expose what doesn’t need exposing, to know that which one has no right, or reason, to know.

To be clear, I’m not campaigning to restore the old doctrine of suspicion concerning Curiosity with this piece. It is true, however, that the suspicion is merited. Curiosity is not simply the purely positive, gentle, earnest love-of-learning (in an institutional setting) that society pretends it is. There is a dangerous surplus in curiosity that, once we see it, can actually help us push back against the dehumanizing regime of Utility masquerading as plenitude and abundance.

Curiosity can be characterized as an excessive desire for useless knowledge, as a drive to disclose the world for its own sake; even, and especially, when there is no practical benefit or rational reason for doing so. Curiosity has been at odds with Utility since the dawn of, well, whenever we want to start the clock; and no matter how many slide decks and slick haircuts try and marry the two; curiosity will always preserve, and in fact depend on, the dangerous surplus of uselessness. Utility demands a reason; it wants to know the world, sure, but it only wants to know if it knows “what for?” What function does this serve? What return can I garner from this? Utility wants to manipulate, to extract and control; Curiosity does not answer to this logic. Curiosity wants to know for no good reason, and often, the more absurd or useless the object of Curiosity, the more intense a conflagration it becomes. Curiosity wanders off in search of that which hasn’t been slotted into a teleology of Profit, Prudence, or Purpose; while Utility stays firmly rooted in the reasonably justifiable. From a utilitarian perspective, Curiosity appears irrational, wasteful, even stupid! From the perspective that I’ll describe here, Curiosity looks an awful lot like an essential Negativity, and possibly one of the deepest truths of Human Subjectivity.

The predominant ideology of the day tells a nice and neat little story about how and why the modern world works the way that it does: rational actors respond to markets and incentives, firms compete for profit, resources get allocated efficiently, surplus value soars, and Robert’s your mother’s brother! It’s a good story, too. It tells many truths. The thing is, there’s a bit that gets left out, and that bit is the one that threatens the stability of those markets themselves, and all the states and institutions and grand narratives built on top of them. Rather than rational, enterprising young entrepreneurs going ahead of the masses and opening up the world; a cavalcade of disordered, unruly, excessive idiots runs ahead and discovers the world for no good reason, and then the priests of capitalism come along behind and clean up the mess and spin their narrative, and the rest of us are none the wiser. Capitalism gets all the credit, and the truly brave and courageous, or rather the foolhardy and curious, get placed in neat little boxes at the back of the Great Shelves of History.

Augustine, Aquinas, and the suspicion of useless knowledge

Augustine gets there first. Book X of the Confessions identifies Curiosity as Concupiscentia Oculorum—the Lust of the Eyes—and bundles it with the Lust of the Flesh and the Pride of Life, the three great temptations. Here vision is doing more work than it usually gets credit for; Augustine isn’t cautioning folks against looking at things, he uses sight as the privileged figure of knowing itself (not all that dissimilar from Lacan’s usage of the eye as the anchor of the Imaginary). Throughout History, sight has often been treated as the primary sense, the fantasy of unmediated access to the object of perception makes it conveniently suited to stand in for the wider appetite: the desire to disclose, to know the world, through whichever sense is ready-to-hand. Touching, hearing, smelling, tasting; they all count and come in under Curiosity—making “experiments of the flesh,” as Augustine puts it.

Augustine is careful to separate Curiosity from pleasure. He isn’t condemning people for liking pretty-looking things. Pleasure wants the harmonious, the calm and safe and purely affirmative. Curiosity, on the other hand, seeks out precisely that which runs counter to harmony. Curiosity chases things that are ugly, obscene, actively painful, or even supremely trivial and ultimately unimportant, all for experiment’s sake. Curiosity will drag a person to the ends of the earth for some useless bit of knowledge, all because that knowledge was sitting there, unlooked-at and as-yet unknown. And this is not because Curiosity is simply stupid (there’s a far more complex stupidity at work here) or that there’s some pathology behind it and the curious person secretly gets off on pain. Curiosity doesn’t answer to the economy of pleasure and aversion at all.

Augustine also indicts theatrical spectacle and natural philosophy alongside Curiosity. As though gawking at a gladiator match and investigating the “hidden powers of nature” were the same sin in different clothes; the same restless appetite dragging the soul toward grotesque entertainment on one hand and toward things “beside our end,” which “to know profits not.” on the other. Things which “to know profits not” is where the indictment grows fangs. Forget pleasure, forget satisfaction, forget lust even! That was never the charge. The accusation is uselessness, measured against the proper end of a human life, and no interesting cases get a pass just for being interesting. That Curiosity doesn’t save you is Augustine’s beef, it scatters your attention all across the world, but it isn’t redemptive in the slightest!

Aquinas keeps the suspicion, and the overall framing. Question 167 of the Summa Theologiae sets Curiositas up against Studiositas. Curiosity the vice vs Studiousness the virtue. He doesn’t try and reject Aristotle’s premise that people, as a rule, want to know things. The appetite for knowledge is fine. It’s how we manage the appetite that matters. The disordered, unruly force of Curiosity slips its measure and drives one, at the expense of duty, into matters above their station or through means that are unclean. Studiousness is the quest for knowledge on a leash, Curiosity is when the leash snaps and the dog gets out of the yard.

Augustine and Aquinas arrive at the same point: Curiosity can’t be reduced to Utility. That irreducibility is precisely why it’s dangerous to whoever is in charge of ordering things. Curiosity chases knowledge without checking-in with Utility, and before anyone’s had a chance to decide if it’s even a good idea in the first place; like a kid halfway up a tree with no plan to get down, or that proverbial dog chasing his proverbial car. From the perspective of these thinkers, Curiosity runs counter to Utility, and therefore is a dangerous vice, because it seeks knowledge for its own sake, not for the sake of god’s glory or for the subject’s salvation.

It would be easy to just categorize these guys as traditionalist nonsense or reactionary, anti-science bs; to claim that we don’t need to reckon with their thought because they are the very dudes who would’ve loved to personally persecute Bruno or Galileo and go on about our day. But, let’s be honest, that’s wack. In fact, I think we should highlight the excessive nature of Curiosity, the wastefulness, the sin of it all. Their position of Curiosity as vice is far more honest than the one we take today with regard to Curiosity, where it fits neatly into the superegoic logic of enjoyment and abundance.

The Christian residue in Heidegger

The suspicion toward Curiosity doesn’t die out in modern philosophy so much as change costumes and exit through the side door. It turns up in Heidegger’s treatment of neugier in Being and Time—Curiosity as one of the structures of everyday fallen existence; along with Idle Talk and Ambiguity. Once curiosity becomes “free,” admonishes Heidegger, it concerns itself with seeing not in order to understand, but “just in order to see.” It leaps from one novelty to the next, never sitting still long enough for understanding to sink in. If you’ve ever watched someone refresh a feed forty times in ten minutes without absorbing a single thing, Heidegger starts to sound less like philosophy written in the nineteen-twenties and more like a Joe Rogan podcast guest talking about GoodLifeMaxxxxing or some shit.

There’s a real criticism here, to be fair to Heidegger. There is a shallow, dispersive mode of curiosity, addicted to The Feed, the update, the novelty. Always concerned with the next thing, never the thing-in-front-of-itself. Heidegger’s curiosity, being “everywhere and nowhere” maps on to contemporary platform life with an accuracy that’s a little tough to stomach. Whatever you have to say about Heidegger, and there is much to be said; he was an uncannily sharp critic of The Feed nearly a century before it existed.

There is, however, something that Heidegger inherits from this Christian Intellectual heritage that Heidegger himself would likely deny. Take out the particular vocabulary, and Heidegger’s complaint is strikingly similar to those of Aquinas and Augustine. In all of them there is a soul dissolving into appearances. For the earlier thinkers, these souls have slipped their measure and should be focusing on salvation. For Heidegger, this soul (or Dasein) is avoiding confrontation with its own Being and mortality. The particular objects change, the overall shape of the objection remains the same. Which is why I think it’s fair to say that Heidegger is, at least in this instance, Christian all-too Christian (shoutout Mikey!). Augustine’s tribunal is Salvation, Aquinas’ Virtue, and Heidegger’s is Authenticity. They might swap out the bailiffs and the barristers, but they run the same trial anyway.

The thing is, if we read Heidegger against Heidegger, we can distill an argument in defense of Curiosity. Dasein is being-in-the-world, and Care is the fundamental structure of that being. Disclosure isn’t something bolted on after the fact, but a constitutive element of that Being being in their World. Curiosity shouldn’t be reduced to a fallen lust for novelty, rather, it should be read as a radicalization of Care; staying open to the world’s disclosure even when all the practical benefit has gone and there is no for-the-sake-of-which beyond the Care and the World itself.

This reading gets stronger if you bring in later Heidegger’s accounting of Technology. Enframing, or Gestell, is his name for a mode of disclosure where the whole world shows up as standing reserve—nothing but resources, ordered, optimized, waiting to be used up. Curiosity, in the sense I’m building here, cuts against this logic. This version of curiosity discloses the world with no interest in manipulation, extraction, or control. Idle curiosity flits from thing to thing, fair enough; but Existential Curiosity doesn’t scatter, it fixates, obsessively, well past any reasonable, rational point, and seems to be one of the more intense forms Care can take.

This is where I want to separate Curiosity as such into multiple species. Sure, there is the superficial curiosity, already warped by idle talk and spectacle, forever doomed to circulate in ambiguity and non-committal novelty. But there seems to be a serious, more primordial form of Curiosity as radical Care, Existential Curiosity if you’ll indulge me; the type of Curiosity that doesn’t need an instrumental alibi, that refuses to answer to any higher authority, that blows right through concerns about Utility and Authenticity and Salvation and Function and latches on to the world-as-disclosure like nothing else has ever existed.

Curiosity as Drive. Loewenstein and Lacan

If Curiosity names a disclosure exceeding Utility, we still need to explain what sustains its apparently irrational persistence. Why does the subject continue seeking knowledge after practical justification disappears?

George Loewenstein offers a more contemporary investigation into Curiosity. In his nineteen-ninety-four paper, that’s become something of a regular in the discourse, he proposes the information-gap structure. According to his accounting, Curiosity makes itself felt when a person encounters a gap between what they know and what they want to know. The emphasis is on the gap. Information can go missing and nobody might ever notice, it happens all the time (shoutout to the Internet Archive and other digital preservation projects). It isn’t until one becomes aware of certain information’s missingness that the flames of Curiosity are ignited. Curiosity is an affective relation to a Lack that’s been recognized, not an abstract deficit sitting unnoticed.

This helps explain some of Curiosity’s weirder habits. Why can one missing, absolutely useless detail drive you insane while a hundred useful facts sit there untouched? Why does Curiosity arrive with so much force, only to vanish the second the answer appears? If Curiosity were merely a healthy love of learning, none of this would make much sense. We would pursue knowledge according to its importance, collect what benefits us, and move along like responsible little information processors. But that is obviously not what happens. Curiosity grabs whatever gap catches its attention, regardless of whether knowing the answer will improve anything at all.

The inverted-U curve bears this out, for those who need a graph before they’ll believe anything. Total ignorance rarely makes us curious because there’s nothing there yet, no structure through which we can recognize what’s missing. At the other end, if we already know nearly everything, the last little scrap might not be enough to get us moving. Curiosity catches fire somewhere in the middle. You know enough to see the hole, but not enough to fill it. The Lack has acquired a shape, and now it won’t leave you alone.

With this Loewenstein starts sounding accidentally psychoanalytic. Curiosity isn’t drawn toward some enormous, featureless Unknown. The Unknown as such is too big and amorphous to get a grip on. We get caught by a particular absence, something missing that we can name, point toward, and suffer over. That’s also why Curiosity is so easy to weaponize. The cliffhanger, the teaser, the clickbait headline, the suspiciously cropped screenshot: each gives the Lack a nice clean outline and lets us torture ourselves with it. We know perfectly well what’s happening, and it still works. Knowing that the trap is a trap does very little to stop us from sticking our heads inside.

This is where Lacan enters the chat. He provides the juice and the sauce for us to move from curiosity as appetite-for-information to Curiosity as structure of Subjectivity. For Lacan, Desire aims at a series of objects in relation to a Lack, while Drive circles the gap itself and gets its satisfaction from the movement around the absence, never actually aiming at the thing it’s circling. Seen in this way, Curiosity ceases to be just a desire for trivial information, and becomes a localized form of Drive, a compulsion to circle a gap in knowledge. This accounts for why Curiosity is so good at surviving satisfaction, the minute you close the gap, it’s already off and on to the next. The Subject isn’t learning, isn’t accumulating knowledge in a way that would satisfy any accountant or auditor; it’s repetitively creating new relations to Lack.

Jouissance deepens the picture. Jouissance is enjoyment beyond the Pleasure Principle, an enjoyment that includes excessive pain and frustration. Curiosity behaves in this same way, just check in with yourself the next time it’s three in the morning and you’re still on your phone checking stuff that’s only making you feel worse if you don’t believe me. We are all driven to pursue things that destabilize us, wound us, torture our very souls, and offer no material benefir; all this not despite our discomfort but in fact because we are uncomfortable, we simply cannot not know. This is jouissance, the painful enjoyment of finding out, it doesn’t matter what, just so long as it’s something we know we don’t know.

Curiosity is excessive and wasteful. It’s a force of disclosure that foolishly expends itself in order to push a little further into the unknown, for no better reason than that the unknown was sitting there. For Utility, this looks like stupidity, plain and simple, no argument. For the Subject, however, it’s productive in a different, deeper fashion; one of the ways a subject actually builds itself, bit by bit, out of its own attachment to that which exceeds it.

Curiosity as the motor of Techonomic dynamism

Once Curiosity is understood as excessive, drive-like, and not particularly interested in behaving itself, the claim that it powers techonomic dynamism starts sounding less ridiculous. Utility is good at improving things that already have a recognized purpose. Give it a target, a market, a metric, and a quarterly deadline, and it can really cook. What it cannot explain is why anybody wandered into the territory in the first place, especially when the territory looked useless, embarrassing, or completely insane.

The clean story says that somebody identifies a problem, calculates the available incentives, secures funding, and invents the future. Sometimes that probably happens. More often, some obsessive person becomes attached to a question that nobody else can see the point of, wastes an unreasonable amount of time on it, and accidentally opens a door. Only afterward does Utility show up with a clipboard and ask whether the door can be monetized. Curiosity makes the mess; Utility arrives later, puts everything into labeled containers, and gives a keynote about disciplined innovation.

None of this means Capital is irrelevant. Capital decides which curiosities get laboratories and which get pursued in garages after somebody’s shift ends. It accelerates some lines of inquiry, starves others, scales discoveries, builds infrastructure, and turns strange little breakthroughs into things millions of people can actually use. That matters. But acceleration isn’t origination, and distribution isn’t Desire or Drive. Capital can attach a rocket to Curiosity once it starts moving, but it can’t fully explain why Curiosity got up and wandered off in that direction to begin with.

This is the part that the mythology of Innovation has to hide. By the time the official history gets written, the weirdos and dead ends have been cleaned up, the accidents look inevitable, and one well-lit Entrepreneur stands onstage as though he personally dragged the future out of the Void. Behind him sit the hobbyists, obsessive theorists, reckless experimenters, and crazed mathematicians (like in that Russell Crowe movie), all following questions that made no economic sense when they started. Curiosity opens the World for no good reason. Utility moves in afterward, stabilizes what it can, throws away what it can’t understand, and sells the rest back to us.

The relationship is therefore lopsided. Utility can capture a disclosure, organize it, improve it, and build an empire on top of it. What it cannot explain is the original fixation. Why this question? Why keep going when there is no payoff in sight? Why spend a life pursuing something that may never become useful at all? That stupid, excessive attachment belongs to Curiosity. Modernity runs on it constantly and would prefer to call it almost anything else.

And what happens when all the human thought has been exhausted, when we’re nothing but the machinic remnants and revenants of our former selves? Do our electronic great-great-grandchildren continue off into the galaxy, discovering their own struggle of Uselessness and Utility all over again, or do they just burn out somewhere past Neptune and make way for the dolphins, the crabs, the octopuses?

Intelligence and Subjectivity: Distinguishing Machine Intelligence from Human Intelligence

All of this is directly related to how Intelligence itself is defined. In contemporary discourse, Intelligence is tied to the instrumental, the functional. The most widely accepted definitions state that it is the capacity for achieving goals or completing tasks within an environment—the more complex the tasks and the more efficient the solution, the more intelligent the agent is (as if Intelligence can be so easily quantified). There are ripples, modulations, caveats, and provisos; but you’d be hard pressed to find anything that strays too far from this utilitarian point of view. There are people working on Machine Intelligence who concern themselves with curiosity, but it turns out that it’s just an engineering hack, a knob one can turn with Exploitation at one end and Exploration on the other; nothing resembling a Drive, nothing that would make Lacan, or even Augustine, bat an eye.

Recommendation systems make the problem especially obvious. They don’t open a World so much as narrow one around you, feeding your past behavior back in increasingly concentrated doses. You watched this, clicked that, lingered over something else for eight seconds, and now the machine has assembled a little statistical coffin made from your previous choices. Curiosity appears inside this system, certainly, but only as another signal to capture. The machine records the opening, predicts what might fill it, and keeps the Churn moving.

This doesn’t make Machine Intelligence fake or unimpressive. It makes it instrumental. The machine can take a detour, but the detour remains answerable to a reward structure, an objective, or somebody else’s idea of successful behavior. Human Curiosity becomes interesting precisely where that answerability breaks down, where the Subject keeps going after every sensible reason for going has disappeared.

Human intelligence is inseparable from Subjectivity because it’s inseparable from Lack, from the Desire-Drive Complex, from Jouissance. The human Subject isn’t an information processor with throwback branding. It’s a divided being, moved by excess, by contradiction, by questions it never quite manages to resolve and, at bottom, doesn’t actually want resolved. Human Intelligence, in this account, includes the capacity to be stupid in a very specific sense—not just making errors, persisting in the non-utilitarian. Following a detour you already know is useless and staying on it anyway, well past the point of any reasonable return. Curiosity might be the most precise name we’ve got for this particular, stubbornly subjective slice of intelligence. The part that refuses to optimize even when it clearly could.

Which is why curiosity is a better marker of Human intelligence than Utility. A system that optimizes flawlessly but never gets attached to a useless disclosure can be genuinely astonishing in its capability and still, underneath all that capability, remain entirely non-subjective. It doesn’t dwell in Lack, it doesn’t suffer or enjoy the particular shape of an information gap because it doesn’t have an opening for the gap to fit into in the first place. It can simulate curiosity’s outputs, endlessly, convincingly, without ever once occupying Curiosity as a mode of being.

The popular idea of “AGI” tends to blur this distinction out almost entirely, resting on an assumption that’s rarely stated outright: that enough scaling and flexible problem-solving will eventually tip over into something recognizably human, given enough parameters, enough compute, enough time to cook. But if human intelligence is structurally tied to curiosity-as-drive, more utility doesn’t just evolve into subjectivity past some threshold everyone’s waiting to cross. You don’t get there by adding, no matter how much you add. Digital subjectivity, if it’s even a coherent thing to want in the first place, would need something qualitatively different—machines that form and pursue their own useless questions, capable of excessive disclosure that isn’t tethered to any external reward structure someone else designed for them. Machines that can be stupid, wasteful, and curious for their own sake and nobody else’s, with no one checking the ledger.

If our machines ever become Subjects, it won’t be because they got more efficient. It’ll be because they embraced this excess somehow, learned to be curious in the strong sense, stupid in the productive sense, and wasteful in a way no regime of utility can tolerate, or even fully see coming. Until then, the difference between artificial intelligence and human intelligence stays bound up with subjectivity itself, all the way down. Human intelligence isn’t only the capacity to solve problems. It’s the capacity to disclose a world beyond any reason you could actually give for doing so, and to keep doing it anyway, reason or no reason, forever, or at least for as long as we’re around to keep at it.

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Shoutout to the The Rest Is Science podcast, with Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens. Their recent episode on curiosity is what sent me looking for the gaps this piece tries to fill-in. These ideas would be stillbirths were it not for ongoing daily conversations with Michael Downs of The Dangerous Maybe, the work we’re doing right now on Superego, Intelligence, Subjectivity, and Fault Line Theory is what my thought is grounded in. This is a heavily condensed version of this piece, which blossomed to over ten-thousand words over the last couple days; I am aware that I make assertions about History without backing them up and I play a bit fast and loose with some terms—what are you gonna do? I hope to have an opportunity to present the unabridged version of this in the future.