Why do people insist that the book is ALWAYS VASTLY SUPERIOR to the movie? Come on. Some movie renditions are good. Occasionally, they're just as good. It has also happened that the movie is better. Hasn't it? It's silly to insist on ALWAYS rules like this, trying to sound clever.

When you chant that the book is ALWAYS VASTLY SUPERIOR, you do several things on a socioaffective level that you may not be reflecting on closely. Most obviously, you're taking the opportunity to share that you have read the book. Because books still tend to carry more intellectual prestige than movies, this in itself could be simple self-aggrandizement. Still, room for sharing, of course, and what's the worst that could happen - someone thinks you're annoying, or feels down about not reading more themselves? (Real feelings! And ones I've experienced! But limited in scope.) Next, with ALWAYS you not-so-subtly claim that books are the VASTLY SUPERIOR medium. Clever you. Third, you position yourself as a connoiseur fit to judge such sweeping claims. Oh my knees tremble. Fourth, you put yourself with the "us" who say such things, so you give yourself a community. Fifth, you may be brushing aside the opinions and feelings of others about a fundamentally subjective question. Sixth, you self-assuredly show no sign of humility about the probably vast quantity of books and movie renditions out there that you have not yet encountered. Aren't you so charmingly confident.

Listen, it ends up being a very personal and even situational thing. For example, everyone thinks the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings adaptations are about as good as anything can get. I thought... they were ok. Really not bad. Quite decent. Even good. Sometimes excellent. But they mostly did not capture how I felt about the books as a kid. That's an issue. For me. I hate the way the orcs look, for example. They look stupid and Hollywoody. The battle scenes are pretty boring and take up too much time, relatively speaking. It doesn't quite feel like a travelogue in a mysterious land full of secrets in runes. Again, for me. And so on.

You might say that's because the book is ALWAYS VASTLY SUPERIOR, and that might be an adequate explanation for you. I'm not particularly criticizing the movies, either. I do feel they're better than I have much right to expect, and I admire and wonder at the work and care that went into them, and don't begrudge them any success or praise.

Meanwhile, take an "unfilmable" book like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and a film adaptation that plenty of people panned (Terry Gilliam's, so far the only one). You know what? I like the movie better than the book. On some level it's just a morally irreponsible story, but I think the visual feast and actorly fireworks are even more extraordinary than the delirious travelogue. I don't have to justify it. And I'll admit I saw the movie first, then read the book. But it could still have gone the other way: I could have thought, damn, this book is so much better. Instead, I thought it was a little flat after I'd already seen the whole idea play out multiple times. There were some extra reflections, and those were nice, but... who cares? Does introspection make the book ALWAYS VASTLY SUPERIOR? (I'm an almost unnaturally introspective person; maybe it's like pomegranates at a pomegranate orchard.) It hardly surprises me that some introspections didn't make it to the screen. The question then becomes: are these so great and worthwhile that they override my feeling that I miss the movie? To be sure, I'm not claiming the filmed version is better. I'm saying that, for an attempt to film an unfilmable book, it vastly exceeded my expectations, to the extent that I personally prefer the result, given the choice between the two. Here, the difference was not less than, but greater than usual: not just a book, but "unfilmable." This isn't supposed to happen!

Or what about an example like Jurassic Park? I saw the movie first, and given that Michael Crichton had directed films based on his stories before, and the novel was filmed, you have to suspect that he wrote the book with the silver screen somewhere in the back or front of his mind. This story's the opposite of unfilmable, then. It's a completely groundbreaking movie, climbed straight into history books and newsreels and documentaries. Everyone in my 5th grade class was stunned by it. In fact, it seemed everyone was stunned by it, period. Yet I remember my dad reading the novel maybe two years earlier, and he left it in a hotel room half-way through. He said, this author has brilliant ideas, but he doesn't quite know how to execute them. He didn't feel like finishing it. Fast-forward a few years, and I read the book myself, after seeing the movie repeatedly and loving it, thinking there was nothing else like it. Guess what? I enjoyed the book at least as much. I couldn't put it down at all. Does that make the book better? Not necessarily. I'd still say the film is the more extraordinary achievement. But, damn, that book was fun to read as well. I didn't really know what my dad had meant.

Let's try Solaris. I've seen the Tarkovsky, the Soderbergh, and the uncredited adaptation Event Horizon. I saw those three movies before I read the book. And I enjoyed all of them a lot, actually. And... drum roll. The book still blew me away. For me, the book here is king. But that doesn't diminish my appreciation especially of the Tarkovsky movie. It's just so radically unlike anything I've seen before or since. It is not at all what I'd imagine a film of Solaris to be. And it's wonderful. But, again, I enjoyed all three of those movies and want to see them all again. And I want to read the book again. Is the book better? Maybe. Here I'd say it probably is. As astonishing as Tarkovsky's Solaris is, I think a better movie could still be made, at least in theory. And I definitely enjoyed the book most.

I've been reading Dune. As a child, I saw the much-maligned Lynch version many, many times. A quarter of the way through the original, I'm really enjoying it. This is understandably one of the greatest classics of science fiction. But there are things in the movie that are wickedly well done. The book is not better in all respects. And I'm reading an audiobook. Despite all the boos from critics for the Lynch movie, this award-winning audio production very clearly takes after the movie, in terms of its sound design and some acting choices. Movie - flopped, disgraced. Audiobook - Audie award. Yet the audiobook emulates the movie without being (to my mind) nearly as good. (If I didn't read so much on long walks, I'd much prefer to read all of the story in ebook form. But I don't say that because the audiobook is always lesser than the pure text, or because this particular audiobook is poorly done. Some audiobooks add to the text in a way that I would claim is even objective - check out Joss Ackland's reading of The Screwtape Letters!) Sure, the novel contains many more little details and contexts, so far. And I appreciate all of them. But let's be blunt: quite a few of them are prosaic. At least in the first quarter of the story, which I can address, David Lynch and his team made what I would say are excellent calls about what to put in and what to leave out, given budget and time constraints, and what to embellish. Now, much as I love the (yes, definitely flawed) movie, I'm more than willing to say the novel is a greater achievement, and better (in the sense that stands the test of time), not just "better." But I must say, all the most exciting scenes, I can see and hear them in my head from the movie, and they came out really damn well. And, again, the extra details (UPDATE: this changes) are often pretty bland. Frank Herbert himself felt much more positive about the movie than the critics. He said he inevitably had some issues with it, but they'd done a great job. I'm going to be pretentious and simply side with the author, here. What he said, as I've just found out, is how I'm feeling. Doesn't that make me special and smart.

It's a personal thing, though. Wouldn't it be easy to say the book is ALWAYS VASTLY SUPERIOR and leave it at that, smugly. No, it often is - which makes sense, because when a movie is based on a book, that's usually because the book was extremely successful in its own chosen medium. Conversion to a new medium is inherently risky, and conversion to a shorter length is inherently lossy. Yet it can succeed.

Art doesn't have to be realistic. Some will expect realism and judge for lack of realism. Others will not mind. Yet others will appreciate departures from the ordinary or even the believable.

With art and morality, it's similar. Some will expect morality and judge for lack of it. Others will not mind. And others will appreciate amoral or immoral angles for a variety of reasons.

For example, it is true that the good guy does not always win. Many will allow this concession to realism to supersede simple morality. But there are other supercessions. Art can strive most to be aesthetic, emotional, moral, realistic, intellectual, novel, technical, or something else. There is no one right goal.

I'm tired of the cliche of games being all up to you. You make the rules, you make the story, you are the hero, you save the world, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you. Good Lord how tiresome it can be from a certain angle.

I don't want a game where I decide everything. That's called life and art, and even then, I can't decide everything.

In a game, just as in any other art I find and appreciate, I am constrained by the choices of an artist (or several). If I weren't, I wouldn't be interested.

Gigantic worlds that take hundreds of hours to explore are not appealing to me, they are off-putting.

Maybe others are trying to replace their lives wholesale, or maybe that's a judgmental - and, besides, inaccurate - way to see it. Regardless, I don't want total freedom. When I do, I write a poem or improvise some music or go on a walk and reflect and daydream about whatever catches my fancy. Or I just dance to a tune where no one can see (or form an opinion). Games don't help free me in that way. An inordinately long game in a "real" world "up to me" is a proposition that sounds like prison, actually.

Games do offer choices, and that is interesting. But they cannot leave everything up to me, and when they claim to, they are lying, and I don't know why that lie is so appealing to so many. Ok, I do, sort of. It's just I don't look to games for that part of life. Games offer flow, they offer puzzles, they offer unsolvable paradoxes, they offer movement and delight and discovery. But a space in which everything is up to me? That's a blank page. That's silence you sing with. That isn't a game.

If life has taught me one thing, it's this:

We live in the same reality. We might as well recognize it.

Don't let anyone tell you objectivity is egotistical or wrong or impossible. It's none of those things. Even when those things are involved, it's none of those things.

What riches are more valuable than seeing the truth?

Show me those riches and I'll show you a truth that matters more.

Most people if you talk to them are not actually dualistic. They separate the physical from the psychological, the psychological from the mental, and the mental from the spiritual. We all draw these lines differently and often use different words, and some of us dismiss certain categories entirely, yet explicitly. For example, if I say I don't believe in an eternal soul or anything like it, and I'm convinced it's "biology all the way down" and consciousness is an illusion, then I am still separating the spiritual out in order to deny it.

Psychologists differ from most of the public in their willingness to explore and question and expand on these boundaries. And I think we often put the lines in different places. For many people, "mind over matter" is sufficient detail when struggling to push through the struggle. And if that works, it's valid enough. For others, to distinguish the psychological from the mental would be bizarre and artificial. They could even cite evidence and dissect it. But overall I think psychologists have a deeper and more nuanced sense about the spectrum or spectra that live where most people see monism or dualism or simply religion.

Brain activity is physical. To say about any activity that it "physically changes your brain" is borderline meaningless. If you remember something, your brain has been permanently altered. Even if you learn it and forget it, your brain has been permanently altered. For that matter, I doubt you can experience anything at all without some permanent alterations, whether you form a memory or not. Our candles burn down. The clock ticks. All known experience is accompanied by brain activity without which it would not transpire. Your most spiritual experiences are - probably - almost certainly - also physical. If you had enough and small enough and advanced and coordinated enough nanobots swarming your system, any of your subjective experiences could be tweaked, and so could, in all likeliness, any of your decisions. It isn't unlikely that the physical process by which you make conscious, free decisions could be tapped into, and your free decisions directed externally. The irony is that if this were true, those decisions might be about as free as they were before.

Most people would regard that view as monistic: it has replaced all the mental and spiritual questions with physical ones, or, at least, it hypothesizes that in the end, the hierarchy is flat and they all amount to the same reality, which objectively exists, with physical extent.

You can believe it's "biology all the way down" and the spiritual is all ultimately part of physics and still look at life and see these: physical, psychological, mental, and spiritual. Because you might disagree with me on those, and on their boundaries, I'll tell you, for the sake of discussion, what I see this way of slicing up the pie to mean. It's maybe informal. I'm not even sure that this is how I usually divvy up. But I am confident that I think obsessively around this topic and examine it more closely than most people you will meet.

The physical would be something like a wart on your foot. It's caused by a virus, which itself barely qualifies as living (if at all) and is widely regarded as possessing no mind, consciousness, or will. If you are not conscious of the wart, it is still there. If you are conscious of the wart, it is also there. That the wart might upset you or make you laugh or change your behavior, or that your behavior might include putting on a wart removal patch or going to get it cut or frozen off, does not make the wart a psychological entity itself, or any less physical. In this aspect, the wart is largely like a rock or a distant galaxy. Even if thinking about the wart differently could get it to go away, that would be through immune system activity acting on a physically real viral infection and eradicating it. Now, I could have started with rocks, but I wanted a more illustrative example. A wart lives in living tissue and is itself alive. However, it is fully physical and not psychological in nature. Looking at the moon and wondering at its beauty does not make the moon psychological, and the same goes for the ugliness of a wart. Most medical questions are physical, unless they are about behavior, emotions, communication, etc.

The psychological level, then, you will notice, is contained in the physical, but separated from it by practice. For a parallel example, vegetation would include fruits and nuts, but when we say vegetation, we typically don't mean fruits and nuts. Similarly, perhaps nuts are themselves fruits (it depends how you define both), but when we say fruits we don't mean nuts, and when we say nuts we don't mean fruits. When we say movement, we specifically mean something a little unlike a TNT explosion. If it were a TNT explosion, we'd call it an explosion or a blast. If we say it's a movement, even though a blast really is movement, we are pretty strongly implying an action other than a blast. It's worth going into detail about levels of specificity and the exclusions we imply when we use them, and it happens that this (mostly) is how I see the four categories I've mentioned. It's worth putting in seams.

Psychological versus physical is important in practice, because what's physical generally doesn't change just by noticing it or thinking about it. They are not exactly mutually exclusive (and one, I'd personally argue, is fully contained in the other, though I'd leave a little room for surprises on that front), but they are qualitatively and practically different. For example, motivation is psychological. By one definition, without motivation, you will not do anything: if you do anything, motivation is always part of the equation, as motivation is that inner fire that nudges or persuades us to move at all. We may influence motivation different ways, but we do not ultimately control it directly, nor do we exactly bring it into being or know how it works. Motivation exists before us, before what we understand as our identities and choices. We can shape it but not stipulate it. If I am not motivated to get up and go out for tacos, then, by one definition of motivation, there is no way I will do so. Pushing or being pushed to go, to move from a state of no motivation to acting, would involve the introduction of some form of motivation. Without the motivation, no motion.

In this sense, heartbeat is physical - it happens however we think about it, though we can intervene and influence it, much as we could choose to move a rock, or knock one aside while carrying a sofa through the garage door. Heartbeat is physical, but dreams at night, shared memories, humor, jealousy, anger, pride, anxiety, care, romantic love - these are psychological. They are primarily mental phenomena that are however somewhat spontaneous and somewhat outside of direct conscious control. This is the realm of feelings, but also of much of mental illness, and an underpinning of top performance in any field.

There is also, I would argue, the mental. This is the level of engagement with thought that is at least somewhat distinguished from feelings. For example, searching for the solution to a sofa stuck in the garage door, or for a mathematical proof, is a consciously initiated process that most of us would accept operates outside the realm of feelings. It doesn't matter whether you are upset or assured - a solution will either work or not, on its own merits. This would seem to harken back to the physical, but then, let's not forget, so does the psychological - we've already claimed these are all somewhat like babushka dolls.

Finally, many of us would claim there's a spiritual level. This is the level, perhaps, of consciousness itself, or, if you believe in it, of free will, or of the eternal soul. It's what's heightened by meditation or art or an epiphany or the birth of a child or loss of an elder. It is of course related to mentation, feelings, and the atom-ridden brain tissue that may support all these other levels. It's the level of responsibility, determination, higher love, mind over matter, good and evil, compassion, and so on. These all tie into the other levels, or even derive fully from them, but they take on another significance at the spiritual level.

This isn't an original division at all. All I'm really doing is personally codifying the pieces of a popular tarot spread: body, heart, mind, soul. These of course are not original to the tarot world either. I don't know who came up with them. But I do think it's a useful way to put seams in the map.

More to the point, I believe psychology is often about, and psychologists often preoccupy themselves with, these distinctions. That is, maybe I can't fully control my motivation to get out of bed rather than hit snooze, but it can certainly be instructive to say: this is a mind problem, not so much a mechanics problem. I can get out of bed, joules-wise. I know how not to hit a button with my hand. Though my motivation has a physical basis, the issue isn't much like the sculpture outside the building that no one person is bulked enough to rip out by hand. This isn't about rudimentary skill or raw activation energy. It's psychological and therefore probably susceptible to influence by the mental and the spiritual. It's liable to change from day to day or depend on how I interpret the issue. The problem may still be incredibly difficult. It could prove more difficult to solve than many purely physical problems. But it's useful to categorize it as psychological foremost, and then dig into what details you can uncover.

I invite you to look at any problem you have, big or small - and maybe the bigger one is more fun - and examine it from each lens: physical, psychological, mental, and spiritual. I think you'll find they're all relevant, and you'll probably feel that one is the most appropriate category. But after putting it in a bin, don't forget the others. Every human problem has tendrils in each one of these regions, and we solve the tangle by investigating and experimenting.

The most difficult problems are usually - not always - best approached from multiple defensible angles, rather than going all in on one attack at a time. For example, the snooze problem might dissolve after steps taken on each of the four levels above. Or a heart problem might be neutralized with two or three dozen little health and lifestyle changes that, together, are more powerful than any single known step.

Convincing others and finding the truth are like drafting and editing. The different modes appear separately. Yet one rarely lives entirely without the other. And there are moments of blending them about equally, and effectively - real moments, but difficult to bring about intentionally.

Negentropy is a physics term that fell out of fashion. It's the opposite of entropy. If the latter is "chaos" or "disorder" or "decay" (not exactly, but usable impressions) then negentropy is "order" or "efficiency" or "usable energy." My understanding is that entropy is better seen as uncorrelation, negentropy as correlation. If the moving parts in a gadget get out of sync, if a gear slips, or if systems decouple entirely, that's a boost in entropy, which is the number of independently moving pieces (or else how independent they are - entropy sort of means "units of independence").

The Big Bang is the ultimate example of negentropy, because everything was correlated together into the same point, form, location, time: little to no freedom as to where anything was. Before exploding in all directions (a vast increase in entropy which still continues), it was the ultimate in focused energy - aka, negentropy. The image below (from an article at The Conversation called "A concept from physics called negentropy could help your life run smoother") goes in reverse - entropy on the left, negentropy on the right. The tangle on the left is more difficult to describe exactly than the neat alignment on the right, which is why entropy is associated with information. You could store data in different types/patterns of tangle. You can't really store any data where there's only one allowed pattern. No options means no message. But firmly coordinated energy, as on the right, is also how to make things happen. To call it "also necessary" is a big understatement! Batteries supply negentropy. So does food. So does the sun.

JamesBrey/iStock via Getty Images

Writing with the letters of the alphabet gets more "tangled" (or entropic) than leaving a pristine sequence of identical dots. That's how language carries messages - via the entropy/tangle. But the letters versus dots example isn't about how simple a dot is compared to a letter. Choosing letter after letter from the alphabet to construct a message also involves more tangle than pasting a picture of the Mona Lisa over and over and over: as with the dots, you can't send a secret message with identical copies of the Mona Lisa in a perfectly uniform row. The key is in the choosing, moment to moment. When you can choose, you can leave a message. If all your cards are the Mona Lisa and you must play, and there's only one way to play any card, there's no message when you play Mona Lisa. That's negentropy: everything lined up perfectly, so inflexible that no meaning can get through. However, the unity can be used as a battery or pair of tweezers. (More on this in a moment.)

You might notice that the tangling on the left (in the picture) takes up more room, and it seems easy to imagine it moving while the lines on the right stay stable. No coincidence! Both space and time are ways Nature tracks interrelationships that are more elaborate and involved than "all is one" (pure negentropy, perfect correlation in all things).

That's a simple (maybe overly simple) but intuitive explanation for why matter and energy seem to stretch space and time, or even generate it. The universe needs space and time for interactions between pieces that aren't all unified. If they were all fully unified, causality wouldn't occur, and the universe wouldn't need space or time. And it seems weird and unrelated to the social process theme in the article, but black holes show that connection. Maximum data storage capacity and computing power (components of all interaction), according to black hole physics, depend on the quantities of mass-energy and spacetime. Furthermore, a certain amount of space can only hold a certain amount of stuff (mass-energy in a pattern), even if that stuff is bunched into a small piece of that space. Information and spacetime, if you believe cosmologists, are intimately connected and almost the same thing.

While this admittedly goes far beyond any expertise I can claim, spacetime seems to relate to the number of patterns available to stuff, which relates to the amount of stuff (and not, as you might think, to some preexisting background emptiness unfolding or "watching" through time regardless of what's in it). Matter, energy, patterns, space, and time interact and depend on each other. Spacetime seems to be how Nature allows multiple possibilities for arrangement, and then allows some of them to happen. Arguably spacetime warps and stretches around and inside a big blob of stuff (like a black hole) because the pieces of energy can't all ever fully unify, and keep making more space for themselves, and more timeline.

Anyway, look at the picture again, imagine the movement on the left (and maybe a little vibration on the right, as nothing is ever in complete stasis), the left being entropy and right being "negentropy," and that's a good mental model to get started.

Technically negentropy isn't negative entropy, but very little entropy, which is why the term fell out of fashion. It's a misnomer to call it "negative." Yes, an energy source can be used to tidy things up and reduce local entropy: the entropy of the energy flowing in is relatively close to 0 but still positive. This is a lot like ice-cold water, which always carries some heat (even ice would), yet freezes your hands. Cold water is hot compared to dry ice, yet it will cool your warm hands down - that's similar to the "negative" in negentropy.

The photons in a laser beam are highly correlated - so, nearly 0 entropy. They're almost just a bunch of the same photon copy-pasted over and over (remember the negentropic Mona Lisa game?). And they're all going the same direction. If that neat laser is used to jostle atoms one by one into a neat row, then, well, maybe this won't surprise you: in that tiny area, the low-entropy laser is, just there, reducing entropy. The atoms get less scattered. So the effect appears as if a negative entropy were acting.

But that's just how it seems. If you melt scissors or tweezers, you've increased the freedom or entropy of the metal atoms (the metal "relaxes" and flows around) so far that you can't use the tool. But the scissors' metal has some positive entropy either way. Neither scenario resembles all the metal scrunched into one point like the moment of the Big Bang, and even scissors have a lot more individualistic shape than a laser. Now, the opposite of scissors crushed to form a black hole (negentropy) would be an expanded vapor. That would be lots of entropy, perhaps maximum entropy. Even if you melt scissors, the metal atoms gain freedom, yes, but the metal certainly hasn't vaporized and evenly coated the whole universe, like oxygen filling a scuba tank (that would maximize its entropy). So it's by virtue of a low-ish entropy that scissors have a definite, non-uniform appearance - some specificity, shape, and clear unity. The atoms are correlated into a scissors pattern.

With this low amount of freedom (the metal is still gently vibrating, which gives some freedom), you can rely on the atoms to be in certain regions, and can rely on the scissors to hold their shape so that work can be done. Similarly, the laser carries positive entropy, just not much, and its low quantity of entropy, ie, the predictability of its shape, can be used like a scalpel or tweezers. When we talk about laser focus and its ability to cut precisely, we're talking about using negentropy.

Another perhaps helpful comparison is centrifugal force (how things seem) versus centripetal force (almost the opposite - the physically real, operative force, which is pulling, not pushing). Negentropy is a way things can look, whereas entropy is always positive as far as we know. That in theory was true even at the moment of the Big Bang, when the entropy of everything was at its minimum.

Just about everything we find interesting is a pretty balanced blend of entropy and negentropy. That's often called "complexity." Things that grow and develop are complex.

The sustainability problems of modern industry and society can be understood in terms of entropy, negentropy, complexity, etc. It's a useful lens.