“Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.” - Martin Scorsese
“I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us unless it’s inside a frame.” - Abbas Kiarostami
We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didion observed, through stories, through “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” Stories make experience intelligible, both to ourselves and to others.
Storytelling is as much a process of exclusion as of invention (think of how many “projects” are left out of the dichotomy in the opening line of this essay). Include too many details or digressions and we risk losing the plot, inviting the very chaos we seek to banish. But include too few such particulars and we risk boring the audience, including the one in our own heads. We begin to seem like stock characters, or trolley cars travelling down an inexorable and predetermined track. Good stories, and perhaps good lives, exist on this tightrope between pattern and chaos.
I’ve observed this craving for narrative order when describing the trajectory of my own life. In adolescence and early adulthood, I was fairly single-minded about my path: I wanted to write and direct movies. Each choice I made — making short films, going to film school, “doing my time” as a script reader and production assistant, writing film reviews for an online publication — was intelligible within this narrative. Being into film was something I was known for; it made me legible to others.
But then the trolley went off the rails. A few years after graduating, I went back to school to get a degree in cognitive science. Nothing about this choice made sense in the narrative, particularly given that I had not at all given up on my dream of making films. Some friends understood the decision, but others seemed genuinely upset by it. This was especially true of those who knew me as a teenager, when the clarity of my interests distinguished me from my peers. It was as though my deviation from the script, after such strict adherence, cast doubt on their faith in scripts in general.
To me, though, the decision made perfect sense. It’s not that I didn’t have doubts (I had many), nor that I could perfectly explain my plan (I couldn’t). Rather, it made the kind of intuitive, bottom-up sense of one’s being coming into alignment, one’s whole self coming online. David Foster Wallace once said of his transition from philosophy to fiction writing: “writing [my first novel], I felt like I was using ninety-seven percent of me, whereas philosophy was using fifty percent." In my case, film was using something like fifty percent, cognitive science another forty-seven, and the work I hope to do at Frame Problems gets me up near a hundred.
So about that name.
The frame problem began as a technical challenge in logic-based robotics. The details are unimportant, but the essence is this. Suppose you have a robot that stores a set of facts about the world it lives in. When it acts, it has to update those facts to account for how the world has changed based upon its action. But how does it know which facts need updating without explicitly representing and checking the near-infinite number that don’t? Such a procedure would take too long to compute. Charged with retrieving a mug from the cupboard, our robot would be paralyzed as it contemplated the effects of its actions on the price of tea in China.
The narrow technical version of the frame problem was eventually solved, but cognitive scientists soon realized that it pointed to wider questions about the mind. To act in a dynamically changing world, we need some way of limiting the scope of our reasoning and perception, some way of zeroing in on what is relevant without having to consider all that isn’t. This turns out to be a deep and difficult problem. The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has gone so far as to argue that this capacity for “relevance realization” is the very essence of intelligence, from the simplest acts of perception to the highest expressions of wisdom.
Vervaeke has become convinced that an understanding of relevance realization may point the way out of the crisis of meaning afflicting western societies. He’s not alone: the writer and computer scientist David Chapman, who has written thousands of illuminating pages on the meaning crisis, proved the computational intractability of the frame problem as a PhD student in the mid-80s. Chapman’s proposed solutions to the meaning crisis originate partly in this technical work. And no less a meaning crusader than Jordan Peterson has this to say of the frame problem and its significance:
The “frame problem” encountered by AI engineers producing sensory systems for machines provides another indication of perception’s complexity. This profound problem – the infinite search space for perceptual representation – looms over all other current psychological concerns. We live in a sea of complexity. The boundaries of the objects we manipulate are not simply given by those objects. Every object or situation can be perceived in an infinite number of ways, and each action or event has an infinite number of potential consequences...The world does not present itself neatly, like rows of tins on a shelf. Nature cannot be easily cut at her joints. We frame our objects by eradicating vast swathes of information, intrinsically part of those objects and categories, but irrelevant to our current, subjectively-defined purposes.
As Peterson suggests, we do not simply behold a pre-given world and decide to take actions within it. Rather, as he argues later in the paper, we perceive a world of meaning, dependent upon but not reducible to the objective world of matter. It is this transmutation of matter into meaning that allows us to bypass the frame problem and act successfully in the world. Our perception is limited, motivated, and dependent upon our embodiment -- and it could not be otherwise. In a more-than-metaphorical sense, we can’t see what’s in front of us unless it’s inside a frame.
When I learned about the frame problem some months before going back to school, it produced a familiar exhilaration in me. It revealed that, behind the world of my experience, there lay a vast background of chaos and complexity, at once threatening and full of potential. I say familiar because a similar experience motivated my early interest in cinema. When I first saw behind-the-scenes footage from my favorite movies, I was awed to discover the elaborate machinery of production lying behind the self-contained world of the narrative. As I studied filmmaking, I was awestruck once more by how all of this machinery comes together to produce a seamless experience of meaning.
I retained the ordinary filmgoer’s entrancement with the story inside the frame, but gained the filmmaker’s awareness of the world beyond it. Crucially, I came to understand that behind each film lies a temperament, a personality, whose preoccupations determine what’s in the frame and what’s out. Just as a story refracts reality through the intentions and emotions of a protagonist, a film refracts reality through the intentions and emotions of a director. The director selects, from among the infinite ways the story could be told, the particular way that it is. At the risk of belaboring the metaphor: he resolves a kind of frame problem.
The metaphor of the frame problem, however loosely interpreted, has given me a way to bring my divergent interests under a single banner, to impose a narrative line upon apparently disparate images. It has made me more intelligible to myself and, I hope with this essay, to others. The same impulse that drove my interest in cinema and cognitive science motivates the work I hope to do on my channel and blog: the impulse to peer behind the curtain, beyond the frame.
But the metaphor also speaks, or so I’d like to argue, to an interrelated set of problems we face collectively. This has been called the meaning crisis, as mentioned above, but also the meta-crisis, the crisis of postmodernity, and the breakdown in communal sensemaking. We’ve simply stopped believing in many of the stories we once told ourselves, and we don’t yet know what will replace them. As a consequence, we don’t know what to pay attention to, what is worth valuing, and where we might be headed in the future. It is these kinds of questions that I’d like to grapple with, directly and obliquely, on this blog and YouTube channel.
The lens I bring will inevitably be shaped by my biases and preoccupations, as well as the quirks of my personal history, some of which I’ve detailed here. What a director directs, as Alexander Mackendrick remarked, is attention, and attention conceals as much as it reveals. It couldn’t be otherwise. We can’t live without frames, without stories, and needn’t try. But we can strive to remember that these stories aren’t final. They aren’t fixed. And in their breakdown, we discover new possibilities that we could never have seen before.