Incomplete/Unfinished

How are we to process an incomplete or unfinished work? Art, literature and film all present us with partial works, yet our reaction varies. Some works remain incomplete due to tragedy or neglect, while others are intentionally non finito. We demand some incomplete compositions completed, while others remain sacrosanct testaments to the creator. Join Robert and Joe as they discuss the nature of incomplete works.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind from housetop dot Com.
Three brothers named Franklin, Emmett, and Bill are together in
prison for a failed case of rail robbery in Oklahoma.
Their plan had been to make off with all the

(00:23):
packages from a US Post Office mail car, which they
reasoned would have some expensive merchandise on the way to
the west. Instead, they got tracked down by US marshals
and sentenced to thirty years in a federal penitentiary. On
the one year anniversary of their incarceration, the prison gets
a new warden. This warden, everybody says, is a soft
hearted academic social scientists type, and instead of harsh punishments,

(00:46):
he brings in new accommodations for the prisoners. One is
a newly stocked library and a collection of board games.
How sweet. One day, Bill, the youngest of the brothers,
brings his brothers a spirit board from the board game card.
He suggests they use it to ask how they can
escape the prison. Laughing, the older brother, Franklin, balks at
this otherworldly nonsense, but Bill convinces them to play, and

(01:09):
so the three brothers put their hands on the plant
of the spirit board. After several minutes of asking questions
and getting no answers, the plancher begins to move, ever
so slowly at first, but then gaining speed, and it spells,
I want to talk to Bill, so Franklin laughs, but
Bill is dead serious. He takes the board away in

(01:29):
the corner by himself and spends the rest of the
day with it. The next morning, out in the yard,
Bill is shot by guards while trying to climb over
the fence. Stupid, Franklin says, why would Bill have thought
he could make it? A month goes by Immett. The
middle brother brings the spirit board back, and he suggests
they use it to see if they can contact Bill
to ask him why he did such a stupid thing.

(01:52):
They do im it speaks to the air, Franklin shits quietly.
After several minutes of nothing, the plancha finally starts to
move its else I want to talk to Emmett. Emmett
takes the board by himself to the corner and spends
the rest of the day playing with it in silence.
The next morning, Emmett has wall cleaning duty on the
guard towers, and in the middle of this he tries

(02:13):
to jump from the tower over the fence and breaks
his neck. It was so high, why would he have
thought he could survive? Immediately afterwards, Franklin goes to the
prison library and retrieves the spirit board for himself. He
takes it to a quiet corner. He says, what have
you been telling my brothers? The plant you under his
fingers begins to move, and unfortunately that's all there is

(02:37):
of the story. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. What
happens next? How can we leave it there? The just
the ragged ends of the story. We're bleeding all over
the place. What are we supposed to do? It leaves
us hungry for more? Joe, Uh, So, I wrote that story,

(02:58):
so that may have been a horrible story. I was
trying to inflict the pain that people feel when there
is a story that's set up that is not completed.
I know we all have this experience. You ever have
one of those great uh TV shows that gets one
season going, everybody likes it, and then it gets canceled
and you never know what what was going to happen? Yeah?

(03:19):
I seem to recall having the same experience with Stephen
King's Golden Years back in the day. I don't know
what that is. It was like a TV show that
he did about this guy that was getting older or
getting younger. It's been a long time, but they have
the David Bowe's song is the theme song. And uh,
it just it did not do well and it did
not get picked up, and I have no idea what happened, um,

(03:41):
and I never will. Wow, it's a horrible feeling. Yeah,
I mean, even if the material is not that good,
it sticks with you. You you want to follow it through.
You want to have the complete experience of that story. Right.
So this episode We're gonna do today is about the
concept of incompleteness and unfinished ideas in art, in science,

(04:04):
and in psychology in general. But this was actually inspired
by a couple of events that you attended when you
were recently in New York City. But I think we
were actually in New York City around the same time,
the same week, Yeah, separately, and you I think you
left right before I arrived and we didn't actually realize
that this was happening. But but yeah, I was. I

(04:27):
was in New York for the World Science Festival, which
I tried to attend at least every couple of years.
And uh, I attended a fabulous discussion titled to Unweave
a Rainbow, Science and the Essence of Being Human. And
by the time this publishers, I believe the video is
actually available for everyone else. I'll make sure that we
include a link to it on the landing page for

(04:49):
this episode. UH. And I also attended a wonderful exhibit
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled The Unfinished Thoughts
Left Visible. This is crazy because when I was New York,
I all I went to the met but I did
not see this exhibit, and that drives me crazy, not
only because I was unable to finish seeing everything at
the DUM and thus my museum experience is left incomplete

(05:11):
and unfinished task, but also because this exhibit sounds really cool.
Oh yes, indeed, it's um It features a features a
vast gallery of incomplete works um by a number of
just really famous artists, and each work exposes something of
the artist process, uh, the realities of the artistic process,
and something of the the timescape in which each one

(05:33):
was produced. So um, yeah, it's a fascinating exhibit. It's
as as of this publication date, it's still ongoing through
most of this year, So if you're in New York
or you're making it up that way, go check it out.
But also, the the online presence for the exhibit is
is pretty strong as well. Any piece that we mentioned
here and all the ones that we do not mention,

(05:53):
they are all viewable at the METS website. Cool. So
I guess this episode is probably going to be a
little bit looser than many of them. Yeah, that's the
way I'm kind of envisioning it, that it's going to
be more sort of back and forth and just talking
about ideas here because both experiences, both the World Science
Festival panel and the exhibited to MET, really got me

(06:14):
thinking about the nature of incompleteness and finished unfinished works
and the human experience. So yeah, I thought we'd dive
dive into the topic of it here um and just
see where it takes us. Will we will get to
some more you know, sort of scientific material towards the
end in case, in case everything feels a little too
lucy doocy to you. Alright, So here we are. Let's

(06:37):
talk a little bit about human obsessions with completeness, and
the sort of unfinished nature of our lives. It's kind
of a weird paradox, isn't it. Yeah, why is it that?
It drove me crazy? When I was in New York
at the same time, I was going to museums. I
went to Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
the American Natural History Museum. All fantastic. At the met

(07:01):
and the Natural History Museum, I was not able to
see everything in the museum in a day. Yeah, They're
gigantic museums, and that drove me crazy. I felt like
I was going insane because I was like, I've spent
a whole day here, I haven't even gotten through half
of it. Uh. But if I had gone to a
museum that was composed entirely of only the things I

(07:21):
was able to see at those museums, that would have
been a wonderful experience. Yeah. It was just the knowledge
that I hadn't finished it. I mean I even find
that towards the end, even the stuff that I have
time to to look at and try to absorb, by
the end of my my visit, I have I'm feeling
enough of a cognitive drain that I know that I'm

(07:43):
not properly assimilating all the information, So really I need
to always make it a point to just hit the
stuff is most interesting to me first and pray that
I don't run across something even more interesting later in
the visit, especially on the way out when you have
no time to see it at all. Yeah, So part
of this is of course just just you know, as

(08:04):
far as the broader human experience goes, it's just a
quest for like an understanding of the world. Uh, you
want to know where you are, you want to know
what's around the corner, and in a larger sense, you
want to a concise cosmology. We want to know where
we came from, where we're going. We want to know
how the world works and how we can exploit that
information to better carry out all those biological objectives that

(08:27):
we have mandated in our genes. But of course we
can't know all that, right, We're never going to know everything. Yeah,
we can fool ourselves into thinking we know all the
necessary information and it given time, such as what are
the main exhibits we want to see at the met
But then we turn a corner on our way out
and we realized there was something we wanted to see, uh,
and we just didn't know it was there. But that

(08:48):
same kind of obsession with having a complete picture, complete
view that comes in in art to get what's that
old expression, who is it who said that? You know? Uh,
poems or novels, maybe whatever it is, they're they're never
really finished, They're only abandoned. Yeah, yeah, that's and that's
I think that's an accurate statement to bring up. Yeah,
even even a work like that, which is a contained work,

(09:11):
a self contained universe in many senses, with a definite beginning, middle,
and end. Uh, even those are arguably all incomplete. Um.
And of course all any of this is completely out
of step with our experience of reality. Our lives are
in a constant state of incompleteness. You know, we're all
half finished. Stories, are relationships, or values, are beliefs, They're

(09:33):
constantly in flux. And we have this this maddening, more
you know, empowering, depending on how you look at it,
ability to believe in multiple things that totally contradict each other.
So as much as we crave a complete narrative, as
much as we crave a complete cosmology, our own inner
experience is just a jumble that best we're able to

(09:54):
to to sort of deceive ourselves into thinking of as
part of a more complete war. Okay, so how does
this tie I can see how it ties into the
met exhibit with unfinished works of art, but how does
this tie into the discussion you saw at the World
Science Festival. Okay, So the talking question was to unweave
a rainbow science in the essence of being human, and

(10:15):
it featured a three way discussion between physicist Brian Greene
is also one of the founders of the World Science Festival,
neuroscientist Miguel Nicolaylis, and writer Leon weasel Tier weasel Tier.
So their their conversation wove in and out of this
very notion of basically with a focus on on science
and non scientific understanding of science and religion, science and philosophy,

(10:41):
talking about each one's ability to try and create a
complete picture or even just to go after a complete
picture of what the universe is, what the human experiences.
Weaseltier in particular took up the more the pro religion,
pro philosophy argue in here um and he just makes methods.

(11:03):
Yeah yeah, and he brought it up, you know, basically
and saying that you know, this is this is the
best way to trump what is the best way to
trump uncertainty in our lives? You know, we have science
and we have religion. We need to feel that our
lives or an outcome of something, so we want to
turn to something that has a complete answer. But of
course there's that we run into obvious problems there. First,

(11:24):
Let's stake science, right, um, sciences we understand it on
the show, and I think his most listeners understand it
is not a complete understanding of the universe. I think
one of the quickest ways you can tell someone is
not scientifically literate is when they say something like, oh,
scientists think that that science gives you all the answers. Uh.

(11:44):
That that is not what science is about. It is,
in fact, always uncertainty. Uh. And anybody who thinks like
that probably doesn't interact with science very much. Right and
and Weaseltier put a nice little summary over this discussed
by discussing an intern of science and vulgar science, saying
that you know, real science is questing after the answers

(12:05):
and is inherently incomplete, whereas vulgar science is more of
this sort of idea of science, this bumper sticker Um,
I love science level of scientific understanding where it's really
more like a religious understanding of science. It's just dogma's
science says we know X, rather than thinking about the
method itself. Right. But then in terms of religion, he

(12:29):
makes a distinction between religion and vulgar religion. The idea
here being that just as vulgar science believes that science
has all the answers and shouldn't be questioned, and is this,
you know, bumper sticker understanding of it, you also have
this version of religion that thinks, oh well, it's it's
written on a tablet somewhere, it's all taken care of,
it's all explained. Whereas you know it, at higher levels

(12:51):
of most faiths, you're going to encounter a lot more
consideration there is. I mean that when you get into
theological discussions of how this model of faith interacts with
the human experience and with our daily lives, it's gonna
be a little more nuanced and particularly and and possibly changing.
This is weasel weasel tears yea weasel tears argua. So

(13:13):
that religion also has a sort of quest for meaning
version that that leaves a sort of radical openness in
the same way science does. Yeah, radical openness. I think
that's a that's that's a good way to put it.
Uh So, so I really liked his argument that you
can find that radical openness on both sides. UM. Now,
as far as art goes there, there was actually some

(13:34):
direct references to Art in this talk. Uh. Miguel Nicolaylis,
who who's a very interesting neuroscientists by the way, involved
in a number of different UM projects that involve using
an exoskeleton device to assist severely paralyzed patients. Imagine he's
come up in your work. Yes, I've read about him

(13:54):
with with mind computer interfaces. Yeah, so he's he's a
great guy to here talk about sort of the limits
of the human mind. Sorry, more accurately, I should say
brain computer in Oh yeah, I mean with mind you
get into different territory. Yeah, And in this discussion, Nikolaalis
is definitely taking the brain approach, and uh and weasel

(14:16):
t here is more of the mind spokesman, I guess
you could say, but Nikolaals brings up this idea that
that art was once very precise. So you go, you're
going through the mat or any art museum. You're looking
at the older pieces and what not, the really old pieces.
But you know, so certainly Renaissance work, you're all representative. Yeah,
you're seeing very almost photographic paintings of what people look like. Uh. People,

(14:41):
the artists are trying to create an image of the world.
Is everyone else sees it universal truth? Right? But then
we reached this point when artists want to paint their
own experiences of something rather than the universal experience of
the thing. Um so uh, you get into these areas
such as um uh. Well. On one specific example that

(15:03):
that was brought up was William Turner's steamboat painting. I
see you have a picture of this in here. I do,
and it's it looks kind of like a bunch of
hair going down the drain. Yeah, it's uh, if you
could say that, it's definitely kind of brownish, blackish, bluish
swirls with an illumination in the middle. And knowing that

(15:24):
it's about a steamboat, you can look at it and
you can see a steamboat, but it is not a
has no photographic clarity to it. In fact, it's in
fact it utilizes what is often referred to in art
as non finite intention something that is intentionally unfinished. Um.
And and sometimes that's like an obvious state of unfinished,
like portions of of a canvas or are not filled in.

(15:45):
But other times it's about the detail, like stuff is
left vague, stuff is left without that level of photographic detail,
because it's more about the the subjective experience of the
thing as opposed to an objective truth. I like this
Michuel Miguel Nicholales quote you have in here, where he
says all art is a collision of sight and conception
of reality. You could also say in the same way

(16:08):
that all vision is a collision of external and internal.
I mean vision is part photons but also part psychology exactly. Yeah.
So this puts an interesting spin on on the the
idea of incompleteness and completeness and what we experience. As
weasel Tier brought up as well, there's there's no perfect
objectivity here, there's no view from nowhere. It's all an

(16:30):
amalgam of what comes from inside what comes from outside. Uh.
And in this we kind of get into It reminds
me a lot of Plato's theory of forms, right that
you have these there's an ideal version of something say, yeah,
you know, a sculpture of a woman, or a or
a or a chair or a you know, a governmental system,
whatever your your dream happens to be. There's an ideal

(16:53):
form that exists outside of our reality, and all we
can do is quest after it, but we can never
quite achieve it, right, all the stuff we've been countered
or imperfect strivings towards that ideal. Right, and if so,
if everything is imperfect, um, if everything falls short of
the the ideal from the realm reforms, then does it
matter where we stop. It's almost like if whatever you

(17:17):
do is going to be incomplete, like it's better to
try and figure out where is the artful level of incompleteness,
you know, like men, sometimes it's better to be to
keep things vague, right then to to absolutely list everything
that you know and therefore list the things that you don't,
If that makes sense. Yeah, But I could also see
how that same embracing of incompleteness could in the wrong

(17:39):
ecology of the mind lead to a sort of nihilism,
where well, what does it matter finishing anything? What does
it matter attaining goals? Now, from a neuroscientific point, Nicola
Lists said he want on to point out that the
brain and all of this is not a passive decoder,
of course obviously, Yeah, that that is an obsolete view

(17:59):
the brain as a quote, self adapting complex system, and
this is all built atop physics, of course. But but
he pointed out that you know, he he connects brains
to machines for a living. That's that's pretty much an
exact quote on that. Uh. And there's a there's a
tendency to discredit the unique aspects of human consciousness in

(18:19):
all of this. So if you try and work with
the brain as if it's a digital computer, it doesn't work. Well.
You have here is a probabilistic turing machine, a hyper
computer that's an order above digital computers or normal touring
machine that relates to some to something we talked about
in our P versus NP episode with probabilistic machines versus
deterministic machines all all of our computers today or deterministic machines. Yeah,

(18:44):
And so as such, any experience of beauty, it all
depends on experience as a As Nicolas points out, a
functional brain involves exchanges at various levels. So there's no truth,
there's only this just this best approximation of the truth
that our minds can make. So even our mind states
are ever changing, ever evolving, and of course ever incomplete,

(19:05):
and therefore it makes perfect sense that that incompleteness is
sometimes part of the design, as in these incomplete works
of art. Well, let's take a look at some of
these incomplete works of art. So there are obviously a
lot of different reasons that you could have a work
of art that isn't finished. I mean, we're we're talking
here about this nonfinite technique where it's intentionally sort of

(19:26):
left unfinished in order to convey something. But there's a
lot of accidental unfinished nous too, right, Yeah, And some
of these are pretty obvious like that, Like you can
easily imagine, oh, well, if this work was incomplete at
the time of the artist's death, and that happens a lot.
They just don't get around to finishing it and it
never gets done. Um. But then other times that's they
abandon it. It was just kind of a sketch to

(19:47):
begin with, Maybe they never intended to finish it. Other times,
especially with with with with portraits, Uh, there's a financial
disagreement with a patron, there's a political disagreement, personal issuing
in about that mole on my lip, yeah, or you know,
or or illness or death ends up taking the patron

(20:08):
or at least the subject of the painting out of
the picture and just can't picture it finish it. Um.
And it was one of the interesting things in that
the exhibit, too, is just how often you sel patron
problems with with artists that would go on to just
be too you know, complete famous names like you wouldn't
think of this individual ever having a situation where their
painting is rejected like two or three times by the patron,

(20:31):
But but it occurs. I believe that that in particular,
there was one by Gustaf Clint uh and uh and
you just you don't think about someone saying, I don't know,
goof staff, this just doesn't look great. Can you take
another another crack at it and then get back to me.
All of our listeners out there, you who are graphic
designers and have this frustrating experience over an over, that's
not what I want. Yah, take comfort in this, Yeah,

(20:53):
in the company of Clint. Yeah. No matter how how
skilled you are during your life, you're gonna be You're
gonna have your your work returned multiple times. It's only
after you've you've died that everyone will take every little
scrap of paper that you did a doodle on and
start selling it. Now, one of the examples you included
here in our outline for for this is really interesting.

(21:15):
I was not familiar with this painting, but I think
it is gorgeous and awesome. I love it. Yeah, Okay,
So the painting and question is the Puniment Punishment of
Marcia's also known as the Flaying of Marcillas by Italian
Late Renaissance artist Titian. And I had seen this one
before because it's grizzly, and that tends to be my

(21:36):
main entry point into classic words of art is if
they're violent and weird. And this one has like a
number of of fauns and staters standing around, and so
somebody being there's in they're inverted and they're being flayed alive.
So Marcias is actually a sadder, right, He supposed to
be like a fawn kind of creature who who gets

(21:56):
into a he has he has beef with Apollo, right, Yeah,
that they for some reason have a contest of playing music,
I believe, is that right? Yeah? And Apollo wins, and uh,
and whichever whichever contestant wins gets to do whatever he
wants to to the other one. And I guess what
Apollo wants to do to this poor sat Or is
flay him alive? It's um. You know, you see this

(22:19):
a lot in in Greek mythology, right, You have an
individual who challenges a god to or accept the god,
accepts the god's challenge to some sort of a competition,
or they just end up in a in some sort
of a spat with a deity. Always a bad devil
went down to Georgia. Yeah, like devil went down to
Georgia's like that actually ends up okay. But if that,

(22:40):
if the devil went down to Georgia was a was
an ancient Greek myth, he would have you know, wound on, Yeah,
and the devil would play him with a pill. Right.
That was it was, That was the That was how
their cosmolo she worked. So this particular painting is one
of several that Titian produced later in life that displays

(23:00):
horrific scenes of murder, misery. Um. And here recreated all
of these with the intentional imperfect detail. So I guess
the idea is that the mind can't quite take it
all in because it's just so grizzly, just so depressing,
just so mind rending, lee awful, that things kind of

(23:21):
blur out. Yeah, I think it accomplishes that well. Now,
there are obviously different ways that paintings can have an
unfinished style, and I think this one is considered unfinished
just in the level of sort of resolution of detail.
It's blurry, it's not like there's a missing corner or something,
but there's stuff like that too. Yeah. Yeah. And and
another key example and one of my favorites from the piece,

(23:44):
because it definitely gets into some discussions here we can
have about literature and film and other media, but it's
it involves another work by Titian. Uh, And what we
have here is an unfinished portrait of an unknown lady
and her daughter, probably mens of Titian's family, but it
was it was left uncomplete, incomplete at the time of

(24:05):
his death. So what happened, Well, this particular painting was
setting around and then um, somebody came along and decided
to finish it for him, somebody who maybe wasn't as
good an artist as definitely not as good as good
maybe I'm probably thinking of it, you know, as you know,
somebody else working in the studio and underlying came along

(24:27):
and says, oh, well, look this is almost completed. Um,
but I feel pretty talented. I'm gonna take this, complete
it and then I can sell it. Right then it's
going to be a value. And so the painting was
altered in the studio to depict Tobias and the Archange
del raphael um. So it doesn't look up pictures of this, Yeah,

(24:49):
the original one that's kind of striking, the redone one?
What could it looks insipid? Yeah? It clearly even to untrained,
you know, mostly untrained eyes such as my own, you
can tell that there's a big dip in quality. It
goes from you know, looking like an unfinished masterpiece to uh,
just another paintings. Yeah, just another painting of an angel

(25:11):
and a boy, uh, just standing there. Uh. So it
wasn't until the second half of the twentieth century, uh
that they were able to restore and this is kind
of this is kind of crazy, restore the completed work
to its original incomplete status um, which is which is
lovely because what does this say about our first of all,

(25:32):
about our desire to complete works, But then about our
feelings regarding a completed work, especially if it's completed by
someone other than the artists. Well, I feel like this
is very different between an artist who is still living
and an artist who has been dead for a while,
Because once an artist has been dead for a while
and becomes part of art history, I think maybe that

(25:54):
there is a different motivation and interacting with each of
their works. It's less to experience a single completed work,
but to get a complete and true view of the
artist's career, in which case the unfinished work that's a
true reflection of the artist is more a part of
this completeness paradigm we want than a truly finished portrait

(26:16):
that doesn't look like that artist style. Yeah, because in
many cases an incomplete painting it it gives us insight
into their technique, how they went about creating these particular paintings,
Like what did they complete first? What? Whether did they
do the background? Did they do the foreground, did they
do some sort of you know, scaffolding blueprint underneath it?
You know, it's all tremendously interesting when you're trying to

(26:38):
figure out who this artist was and how they conducted
their craft. Yeah, but tying into what I just said,
I mean, that's sort of lets us know that there
are different levels of completeness we seek. Do you want
completeness at the individual works scale, or do you want
completeness at the artist's biography scale? Or do you want

(26:59):
complete this from a historical periods understanding scale? You know,
you want to see this as part of the Italian Renaissance.
I don't know what all the eras of paintings are,
but uh, you see what I mean. Yeah, But like
a literary example that I can't help it come to
is that of Frank Herbert's Dune saga Oh Boy, which

(27:20):
we discussed a little open talking about today. So this,
the Dune Saga was of course left incomplete at the
time of Frank Herbert's death. Now, how many books did
Herbert himself, right, what is it? Five or six? I
don't have the list in front of me, and I
they begin to kind of bleed together from me towards

(27:41):
the end, but he wrote several. But then, yeah, the
saga itself was left incomplete. He had notes, and then
his son Brian Herbert and co author Kevin J. Anderson,
they picked up the work years after his death and
finished the Saga based on his notes, and of co
wrote a ton of other Dune notes. I mean, at

(28:02):
this point Brian Herbert has written at Brian Herbert and
Kevin J. Anderson have written more Dune books than than
Frank Herbert ever wrote um which is which is interesting.
But it's also one of these areas that is very
divisive because you have Dune fans that you know, refer
to themselves as orthodox Dune fans. They're only going to
read the the Frank books, only the prophet himself, right,

(28:24):
But then you have but then you have plenty of
fans who embrace the Brian Herbert Kevin J. Anderson books
in this expanded view of the universe. But but yeah,
at the at the at the heart of it, like
the complete saga is not a Frank Herbert creation. It's
a Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson creation. Like

(28:44):
it becomes a different thing right by by completing it,
they have sort of transformed into something else. But also
is a franchise ever completed, That's true. I think of
our age of Star Wars, what if George Lucas were
to have gotten to a point where he said, Okay,

(29:05):
maybe imagine an alternate universe George Lucas makes nine Star
Wars movies or whatever, and then he says, Okay, we're done.
Um I would the fans be okay with that? Or
would they keep wanting more Star Wars stuff? Well, I
mean it seems to me that now that we're in
Disney's hands, there is going to be Star Wars until
the end of time, right, there will never not be

(29:27):
new Star Wars stuff. Yeah, but but yeah, what what
would have happened if he was if he just did
the three movies and said him done? Or what if
or what if something had happened and he didn't get
something past the Empire strikes Back? Like what if Empire
Strikes Back had been a bomb? Just no, But nobody
loved it at the time, and we only grew to
love it, say in recent years we said, hey, this

(29:49):
is a masterpiece. What I wonder what the next installment
would have been? Like, what would have happened if we
had actually followed Luke through and and you know, actually
figured out kind of come back the rebels were going
to have. Lucas's son would write it and well, why
it often does seem like it's an hereditary enterprise. Didn't

(30:10):
the same thing happen with Tolkien after Tolkien's death, didn't
his son takeover? Well, that's an interesting example to bring up,
And I, you know, I don't. I don't know a
lot about that because my Tolkien experience is basically um
basically revolves around just the Lord of the Rings and
the Hobbit. But I understand that a lot of of

(30:30):
his of the subsequent work has been sort of a
mix of like it's been a little bit literary. It's
kind of like commentating on and well, yeah, I think
he's edited together took some of his father's notes and
edited them into books or something. Yeah. But then there
was that there was like a complete saga that came
out and I never read it, Pose of the Children
of Hurine or something, no idea, but certainly that you

(30:54):
could see that as a as a as a as
an example with this though it would have been more
I think clearly in a example, I say, you know,
he had not actually finished The Lord of the Rings
and someone had to come along and finish it. And
we we do find other examples of fantasy saga's uh
ending up incomplete. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, for example,

(31:14):
was actually completed by Brandon Sanderson. Uh. And this was
by the deceased author's design, like he picked the individual
to finish these books. And UH, I have not read them,
but I was reading about them. I was actually talking
to our coworker Tyler, who has read them. And UH.
It seems like most of the reactions to this are
far more positive. There's less um schism among the Wheel

(31:38):
of Time fans. Um. Most people say that the new
authors style you know, shines through and some applaud has increased.
Increased pace is willingness to tie up loose ends, which
of course is important when you're trying to finish a saga. Uh.
Some add point out that maybe he didn't have the
knack for descriptions and detail that Jordan had, But for

(31:59):
the part, it seems like everyone embraced this completion of
the incomplete work. Well, I know what all of you
are yelling at your ear budget now, germ right, it's
all about what's going to happen with Game of Thrones,
A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. Martin's currently
incomplete UH series of novels and the slightly more complete

(32:25):
HBO series based on those novels. Yeah, so the show,
the TV show you probably already know this, but the
TV show Game of Thrones is actually outpaced, uh Martin's novels.
It's ahead of the novels that it's based on. He
has not released the one that he was planning on
releasing that would contain some of the same stuff as
the current season of the show Winds of Winter, I believe. Yeah,

(32:47):
and so, so how old is George R. Martin. He's
sixty seven years old and he's taking about ten thousand
years to write each book. So people have I mean
not to be I wish him great health and long life,
but people do speculate, like what if he dies before
he finishes writing these books? Yeah, and everybody wants to
know the end? Yeah, I mean, I mean the reverse

(33:08):
is also true. I feel with any book or film series,
what if I die before I get to complete watching
or reading this thing? I mean, so it's it's coming
from that place of us craving completeness in our works.
But yeah, if he if he dies before completing the books,
will fans uh you know, embrace whoever the chosen writer

(33:28):
is to to finish it. How will we feel about
the the the the the HBO series as it completes
the soka before the books? What if? What if the
what if the book series remains incomplete, um, you know,
for the foreseeable future. What if artificial intelligence has to
finish it later on? You know, Oh, it won't do

(33:49):
a very good job, will it. Uh? Well, I mean,
who knows. Maybe maybe, as long as it can make good,
solid descriptions of Western oast food while you know, laying
out with a bunch of political details, I think you
can do a good job. I am firmly of the
opinion that any artificial intelligence good enough to write an

(34:09):
entertaining and compelling work of fiction will eradicate the human species.
Now this being said, you know, there are plenty of
examples of incomplete works out there, and and most of
them it seems like we're pretty okay with them. We're
probably getting more into that territory of an incomplete work

(34:29):
by a master who has been dead for a while.
But some of the works that come to mind A
hundred and twenty Days of Sodom by the Marquis assad
Billy Bud, the Mysterious Stranger The Pale King by David
Foster Wallace. Um The Mysterious Stranger, of course, being um
Mark Twain's story. And I believe they're like three different drafts. Um,

(34:53):
all of them are kind of incomplete, and you can
sort of cobble together a finished product from that, but
it's still ultimately incomplete. You know, Charles Pickens The Mystery
of Edwin Drew, that's an unfinished work of fiction. That
and crazy that it's unfinished because it's a mystery. Oh so,
so nobody knows? How how ads you don't know the
solution to the mystery? Well, in the musical version of

(35:15):
the Mystery of Edwin Drew, it actually allows the audience
to select the ending, So the audience gets to vote
on who the who the murderer turns out to be?
And then what about music? Are there musical? Is there
a musical equivalent to an either an incomplete or intentionally
incomplete work? Well, yeah, I think there are. I mean,
I I'm a big fan of the going back to

(35:37):
my nineties catalog, the album B thousand by Guided by Voices.
A lot of the early Guided by Voices songs, uh,
they sound like half of a song, like so the
song will come on and it plays one verse and
one chorus and that was about, you know, seventy five
seconds long, and then it moves on to the next
song and it never comes back. That's just it. That's

(36:00):
all there is. And this was published during the artist lifetime.
I mean, so it's it's not a matter of them
of some coming along and saying, oh, here are some
recordings around finished it, let's make a few bucks off
of it. It's just what the song is. Huh. Okay,
So that would but that would seem to be more
than an intentionally incomplete um mode of creation then, But

(36:20):
like the sketch as art, I think that it creates
a good effect. I mean, one reason I think I
love that album is that no song gets tiresome. None
of them last long enough for you to like really say, okay,
I've heard the chorus four times now. It just doesn't happen.
And so every time a song is over, you kind
of wish it was still going on. Interesting, and I'm

(36:41):
sure that our listeners out there will come up with
the numerous examples of unfinished art, fiction, music, etcetera. To
share with us. We're gonna take a quick breaking when
we come back, we're gonna get into the psychology of
this why our brains while our why our minds crave
that complete work? All right, we're back, So Robert it

(37:08):
what why do we crave completion enclosure? Why do we
have to see the end of a thing? Well, that's
the big question, right, I mean, because, as we've discussed,
our lives are these unfinished stories. But then we read
these finished stories and then we sort of think about
our own lives in terms of a story, and we
imagine ourselves as the central character in this story. Um.

(37:33):
One uh. One description that I think helps shine a
little light on it is that from a cognitive point
of view, we're all quote, information seeking, prediction loving cognitive systems.
So this gets into the whole idea that we're trying
to survive in this world, and in order to do so,
we want to understand our our situation. We want to
know what came before, we need to know what comes after.

(37:55):
So this particular quote comes from Flora Lichtman, co author
of Annoying The Science of What bugs U and Uh.
This is a book that deals with the number of
just you know, all the various pet peeves and what
sort of the psychological or scientific underpinnings where them happens
to be. But one thing that she particularly brings up
is that overhearing another person's phone call is inherently engaging

(38:19):
and mindlessly irritating because we're tuning into an incomplete conversation,
we can only hear part of it, and then we
have to just maddeningly guess at what the rest of
it consists of, indeed, like what the point of the
entire call happened to be to begin with. Yeah, so
that's crazy because I I would tend to think that
because of that, in completeness, hearing half of a phone

(38:42):
call is way more distracting than hearing a complete conversation
going on in the room with you, with both parties,
And I wonder if that's born out well indeed, Yeah,
there's a Cornell University study that actually looked into this idea.
Uh Andy. They conducted it by taking a conversation, garbling
half the words so that the subjects only heard half

(39:02):
of the conversation, and they found the overhearing half a
conversation a half a log, as they referred to it,
is more distracting than other kinds of conversations because we're
missing that other side of the story and we can't
predict the flow of the conversation because if you overhear
somebody just you know, a couple of people talking about
a TV show you don't watch, say you, you can

(39:22):
very quickly realize, oh, they're just talking about this episode
of the show. I know exactly what they're talking about
it and about and I don't care. I can I
can see exactly how this is going to play out.
But what if you just here, oh yeah, yeah, he
he dies in that episode? Uh huh? And then you're like,
what what what show did I have? Is it a
show I watched? Did they just spoil me? Do I

(39:44):
dare listen more? Because what if it's a show I
haven't watched yet? And then you just start screaming no spoilers,
no spoilers like a madman. But yeah, so I'm very
basically of our brains require complete information because you know,
at risk of getting into uh um in perfect comparisons
to a computer, our brains are that hypercomputer that that

(40:05):
needs data input in order to choose its next move.
And if we're getting incomplete data in there, it just
starts going a little Haywire. Right. Yeah, So another psychology
concept that I think might be relevant to our our
relationship with incompleteness and unfinished things is something we've actually
talked about a little bit on the show before, the
Zygarnic effect, which we mentioned it briefly in our two

(40:28):
part episode about the science of Tetris, and it played
into that because we were, I think picking up on
somebody else had made this point and we were we
were sort of repeating the idea that um Tetris has
something to do with the Zigarnic effect. Now, the Zigarnic effect,
it's a phenomenon that was identified by the Russian psychologist
bloom Movie Zygarnic. She lived nineteen hundred to night, and

(40:53):
it posits that we tend to have better recall for
unfinished tasks than we do for finished ones. Uh. And
so that, of course that would figure into Tetris because
Tetris is never finished. There's no end of the game.
It is a perpetually unfinished job. They just play to
tell extinction playing. So, yeah, what a Tetris and gambling

(41:17):
have in common. There's only one way for it to
be over, and it's when you cannot conject when you
have lost uh so, yeah. So a standard evaluation of
the Zigaronic effect would go something like this. You get
test subjects and you ask them to complete a number
of mental and or physical jobs, for example, solving jigsaw

(41:37):
puzzles or stringing beads. So if they're solving jigsaw puzzles,
there might be details on the jigsaw puzzle that they're solving.
Maybe it's a picture of a bunch of dinosaurs writing
on jet skis, or you know, whatever it is. And
in half of the tasks, the subject will be allowed
to finish, and in the other half, the subject will
be interrupted and asked to move on to another task

(42:00):
before the one they're currently working on is completed. And
then they get asked to remember details about both types
of jobs. And you can express this differential recall as
an I see ratio the number of details remembered about
incomplete tasks versus the number of details remembered about completed tasks,
and Zigarnick herself found this ratio to be more than

(42:22):
one point. Oh, people had a better memory for incomplete
and unfinished things. But why so a number of different
interpretations have been offered throughout the years that you people
have said that ambition plays a role in the extent
to which people have differential recall. Here people positive, well,
maybe interruption by the experiment or causes a feeling of

(42:43):
irritation that heightens the emotion, and that heightened emotion causes
a greater recall. Who who knows exactly what it is?
There are a lot of interpretations, but there have been
many subsequent evaluations of this effect throughout the years which
have sort of complicated the picture because we don't all
always remember incompleted tasks better so, according to the Dictionary

(43:04):
of Theories, Laws, and Concepts in Psychology by John A.
Rock Aline uh studies have indicated that the Zigaric effect
is less likely to take place if the subject is
quote ego involved in the task, and more likely to
take place if the subject thinks the task is ultimately possible,
of possible to achieve, or possible to finish. And hill

(43:27):
Guard in nineteen sixty six found that the I S
memory differential is short term, like it lasts for only
a period of less than twenty four hours, and apparently
it also doesn't work for all types of tasks. Now,
there's one study I looked at from nineteen nine one
by uh, Seifert and Padalano called memory for incomplete tasks

(43:48):
a re examination of the Zigarnic effect, And so essentially
that said that zigarnics original findings have been both replicated
and not replicated by subsequent studies, so that that seems
to suggest there's a sort of complex effect going on.
The different variables are interacting with it in different ways,
and the results have been explained a lot of times

(44:09):
in terms of social psychological variables. But Seiford and Patalano
attempted to replicate these effects adjusting variables affecting cognitive problem solving,
like the nature of the interruption what happens when somebody
comes in and interrupts you, or the time spent during
processing the job, and the set size of the the
number of tasks. So in the first experiment they did,

(44:32):
they found that in solving word problems, interruption after a
short interval of active problem solving actually lead to better
memory for completed tasks than uncompleted ones. Actually the opposite
of Zigonic if you don't spend much time on the tasks.
But this kind of makes sense, right, Uh, Intuitively, that
sounds right to me if I'm not spending much time

(44:54):
on a problem, I'd remember the problem better if I
finished it. Uh. And and they sort of acknowledge that
that that seems kind of obvious, but all right. And
the second experiment replicates Zigarnic. They found that if you
allow subjects to take as long as they need and
then abandoned problems they're unable to solve, it does hold

(45:15):
that they have a better memory for the ones that
they weren't able to complete. Uh. Thus, here's piece of
evidence that our recall is better for things for unfinished
tasks that we gave up on than for unfinished task
we were sort of ripped away from by circumstances. So
I send this zigarnic effect presents a complicated picture. It
depends on the subject, It depends on the type of task.

(45:36):
But another difference is that it applies to tasks and
like problems to be solved or jobs to be completed.
And I wonder if our relationship with art, fiction, music,
et cetera, and the way we've been talking about is
like this when we're the audience, And thus does the
Zigarnic effect in any way have any sway over our

(45:58):
participation with work of art? Yeah, I can't help but
think that it does. Because on one hand, I'm thinking
about the experience of reading a book. So if you're
just like a couple of pages into a book and
you set it down, like generally, it's pretty easy to
not pick that book up again, to just leave it
on the table or on the shelf. But if you've
read a half or you know, or even you know

(46:20):
a good two thirds of the book, there's often that
just maddening uh compulsion to complete it, even if you're
not digging it anymore. It's like, I've put so much
time into it, You've got to finish it. Or I've
encountered that with TV shows before. TV shows that you
know go multiple seasons and I'm not going to name
any in particular, but but they go multiple seasons and

(46:41):
then you really are losing interest. But there are the
remaining mysteries. There's you've got to know if they make
it to their their destination, and you keep watching just
out of the that the need to finish it. Yeah,
I I can totally agree. I mean, I think I'll
call out one TV show lost put its hooks in

(47:02):
me this way. I This is a controversial position. A
lot of people who like the show will probably want
to tear my head off. But I don't think Lost
was actually all that great of a show, you know.
I think that it had a lot of storytelling problems, uh,
and some of its characterization was kind of shallow and
and obvious looking back on it, But it had its

(47:24):
hooks in me. I couldn't stop. I had to keep
going to see the completion of this narrative because they
had set up tons of unfinished problems in it. The
show was just a litany of of setting up a
problem that was not resolved, and and you'd continue thinking
that it would be resolved. I'll leave that up to
you two if you ever want to watch the show

(47:46):
to find out if these things are resolved or not.
But I will just say that personally, I've found myself
very frustrated in the end. You know. It's interesting to
think of this in terms of TV, because that's the
classic TV model is very cyclical. A classic sitcom formula
involves a complete reset at the end of each episode,
so there's there's no zigaronic reason to come back and

(48:10):
watch it the next week, except that you're going to
get the more or less the same experience, experience, everything's
going to reset to the same place, and there's virtually
no overarching narrative that you need to concern yourself with. Yeah, though,
I think we should also be aware of the possibility
that we are just misapplying this concept and that it
really has to do more with jobs you're working on

(48:32):
than than participation with narratives. But I don't know. I mean,
i'd be interested to hear from you psychologists out there, like,
do you do you think the zigaronic effect, in any way,
to whatever extent it does hold true for humans, applies
to our participation with works of art and and external narratives. Indeed, now,

(48:54):
at the same time, is there anything that is we're
discussing all this if we're taking in incomplete stories, complete stories,
cyclical and linear stories. Um, the brain is writing tons
of incomplete stories itself. Of course. According to philosopher cognitive
scientists Daniel Dennett, the human brain, as a computational device

(49:16):
is constantly processing all sorts of information at different rates
and in different locations, and this produces what he refers
to as multiple incomplete narrative drafts, and these are all
just continually synthesized into a coherent but highly unstable narrative equilibrium.
And it's within this unstable narrative that we devote our

(49:38):
sense of of we we develop our sense of eye
and self. I really love Daniel Dennett's analogies for cognitive
cognitive philosophy and philosophy of mind. I feel like that
they're often very helpful. Yeah, it's it's it's interesting to
to to to look at this argument, and especially after
just talking about TV, to think of our basic variance

(50:00):
of ourself and our immediate reality is like a flimsy
TV narrative that's cobbled together from a number of bad
scripts that did all land on the showrunner's desk and
they're like, all right, a little of this one, a
little of that one. Uh, let's run with this script, Joe.
And then and then everyone's saying, well, this doesn't really

(50:21):
make sense. There's some big story problems here. Who is
this main character. It seems that on one hand that
he thinks he's some sort of a hero, but then
he's this and as well, and then just run with it,
just let's film it and call it a day, And
that's kind of what we do. But it's sort of
like a script for a lost episode is just got
tons of it's got a polar bear there, and you're like,

(50:41):
surely I'm going to find out where this thing came from. Yeah,
I mean at the end, it is still this continual journey.
Um and uh And I mean maybe that's part of
it too. We we like our stories, We like our
fiction the most when it is in the journey phase,
when it's incomplete but has the promise of completion. Well,
how many examples can you think of where where there's

(51:03):
a narrative that's as much fun once you've finished it
as it was to be in the middle of it.
It's a rarity. I mean, that's the work. That's the
mark of a really great work of fiction, right, is
that you know all the twists and turns, but you
just want to experience it again because you want to
experience that world, You want to experience those characters. Um.
Because there are plenty of lesser works, I guess you

(51:25):
could say, and ctently that's a that's very subjective, but
they're lesser works of fiction out there that once you've
once you've taken the journey, once you've ridden the ride,
you know the twists and turns you have no desire
to write it again because it's just gonna feel kind
of flimsy afterwards. Uh. Though sometimes that first ride is amazing,
but it's just impossible to to experience it again. Quite

(51:48):
the same way. I'm thinking particularly of of films and
works where you end up with a very unreliable narrator.
You have sort of sort of like a without getting
a despoiler's like a memento uh experience, or a fight
club experience or um, what was the uh, the switch
Switchblade romance horror film that came out years ago, the

(52:11):
French one High Tension, Yes, high tension. Um, great film.
The first viewing, that's all I'll say. Yeah, but that
great That first viewing was it was tremendous. So yeah,
great film in my opinion, just not the kind of
ride you want to do over and over again. But
back to incompleteness. Completeness. We we crave a linear story,

(52:31):
and we have a tendency to chafe at anything that
doesn't give us that. The The offending work might be
a non linear book or nonlinear film. It might be uh,
an intentionally incomplete or unfinished work. University of California Santa
Barbara Professor h. Porter Abbott calls the preference for linear
storytelling a fundamental operating procedure of the mind. So essentially

(52:54):
it breaks down like this. At three years of age,
our brains began to compartmentalized sensory information in the world
around us into an ongoing narrative which each of us
then places ourselves at the center. It's set the kind
of story that the same thing that Daniel Tennett was
discussing earlier. And uh, there's a there's an interesting paper
that looks at this two thousand fifteen Yeshiva University paper

(53:16):
the Power of and of the Picture, How narrative film
captures attention and disrupts goal pursuit, And this was published
in Plos one. So, in this particular experiment, participants were
that they viewed either an intact version of an engaging
twenty minute film Bang You're Dead by Alfred Hitchcock, or
a version of the same film with the scenes presented

(53:38):
out of order. And so they called this the contiguous
condition versus the non contiguous condition, non contiguous meaning out
of order exactly. Yeah, I don't, I don't think. Both
are available on the DVD release but maybe the blur
rate right, so that they were in this experiment, they
weren't told that this was about you know, narratives in
our experience, they were told that this was about gun

(53:59):
violence and film, and then they had to raise their
hands anytime someone said gun in the film. So those
who view the linear film, they were far less likely
to follow these orders because they were essentially just ensource
sold by the fiction. Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me.
And so these results illustraight the idea that that we
have an innate preference for linear narrative, though there is

(54:22):
of course a you know, an artful balance to maintain there,
because we can all think of non linear narratives that
work to varying degrees, sometimes exceptionally well. And of course
I think that the very fact of linear narrative that's
so compelling is that it promises a conclusion. It's exactly
the thing that makes it seem linear. Yeah, you want

(54:42):
to see the hero, when you want to see the
villain get their come up, and you want to the
line segment is the shortest distance between two points. If
you don't have a second point, you're in trouble. Right now,
all of this being said, Uh, we have visual works
of art that have metten story to them. We also
have works that represent decisive segments of an incomplete linear narrative,

(55:06):
and the viewer has to sort of has to fill
them out with his or her own mind, deciding how
we came to this place and where we go from there. Um.
Like one example that comes to mind here, and this
is not something that I saw at the met um
is uh uh ilya repins haunting five masterpiece, Ivan the
Terrible and his son Ivan. You've seen this one before, right,

(55:29):
I don't know if I have seen it before. Maybe
I have, but I'm looking at it now and wow, yeah,
it's a that is some pathos in a painting. Yeah,
it's it's Uh. It's Ivan the Terrible having brained his
son with believe a hammer or recepter, I can't remember
the exactly. It's based on a historical occurrence. Uh. And
he's just staring up his cradling is bleeding adult son

(55:52):
and just staring with these haunted eyes into the middle distance.
So we we know that it depicts an historical occurs
We we know that this depicts one murder of Ivan's
own son, and we know how to fit it within
a rough linear narrative. But it's not like we have
a sequence of paintings filling out the rest of the narrative.
We have this one potent, potent segment, and it forces

(56:15):
us to envision everything else. And we see that in
works of fiction too, right to capture our imagination with
an incomplete glimpse of a wider, maybe weirder world, And
that's often I think it certainly is for me. I
assume it is for other people. A point of specific
pleasure in fiction is the sense that you are getting
a feeling for a much broader world or a much

(56:38):
broader story through a kind of key hole. Yeah, a
little narrative people into the world, and that that feeling
of there being so much more is one of the
great pleasures of fiction. Yeah. So, I guess like some
of my closing questions here um for this segment would be,
how do all of these factor into our understanding of

(56:59):
income leader unfinished works? Why are some fragments sort of
ideal mental seeds while others are larval forms that we
have to to grow. Why are some partial work sacro
sanct and why are others? Why are others things that
just must be completed by skilled hands at all costs.
And granted there's you know, there's consumer elements here, their

(57:19):
market forces involved, as well as just personal taste. But
but there, you know, there's this interesting division between the
works that that can and should remain incomplete and those
that just have to be fleshed out. We have to
have the complete specimen. I think it's a fascinating question,
and I don't know if we've come across the answer today.
I mean, it's it's obvious that our brains are very

(57:42):
strongly driven by narrative. Narrative is very highly motivated by
the desire for completion enclosure, uh that that we do
tend to via the sigaronic effect. Whether that applies truly
to fiction and art, I mean, it's certainly clear that
we tend to return mentally to things that are unfinished. Um. Yeah,

(58:04):
I don't know. Well, it's an open question, and we
certainly invite our listeners to uh to attend to it
as well. Yeah, and if you feel compelled that they're
absolutely must be an ending to the story of the
three brothers in the prison, feel free to write that
and send it in. All right, So there you have
it uh incomplete, complete works, unfinished works. Let us know

(58:27):
what you think. As always, you can speak us at
at stuff to about your Mind dot com. That is
our homepage. That's where you'll find all the blog posts,
podcast videos, links out to our social media accounts such
as Facebook and Twitter. And then Joe, if they want
to make direct contact with it, perhaps with an ending
to your story fragment from the beginning, how can they
get in touch with it? Well? Of course, as always
you can email us that blow the mind of how

(58:48):
stuff works. Got for more on lest thousands of other topics.
Isn't house stuff works dot com any big st