Where This Lives

Like Ahab to the Sphinx, Bowman to HAL. Experience to human output, human output.

APPLICATION

Ahab and Bowman are both undone by the same error: the refusal to accept that the object of their pursuit has an existence and logic independent of their will. Ahab’s certainty about the whale and Bowman’s certainty about HAL both produce the same narrowing, a collapse of options down to a single obsessive path from which no deviation is thinkable. The strategic decision making failure here is premature commitment under conditions of genuine uncertainty. Both men had options. Both foreclosed them in favor of a narrative of inevitability. The question of where something lives, in the self, in the world, or in the interaction between the two, is not only philosophical. It is the question that determines whether a leader can still see the options that remain open, or whether they have already, like Ahab, lashed themselves to the thing that will take them under.