A neglected argument against the existence of God is that he could not last long. For if omnipotence requires omniscience, and omniscience implies an absolute incapacity for surprise, God’s life must be absolutely boring, an immediate summons to death. Even if to kill himself is the one power he cedes to man his perfect knowledge must be totally paralysing because there would be no reason not to do everything in a moment, extinguishing the meaning of any continued existence.

If that is not how God works, then that, at least, is how he made us. Man’s capacity for action is dependent on a neural system that is fundamentally driven by error: the mismatch between prediction and reality. One can simulate the effect of removing the error by switching the system off, as happened to a group of heroin addicts in the 80s who were inadvertently exposed to the toxic substance MPTP. The outcome was catatonia: a perfect stillness born not of an incapacity for action but of the complete removal of any necessity for it. Absolute knowledge turns us into statues, just like the statues our gods can only ever be.

The case I am describing is, of course, pathological: one cannot eliminate prediction error, only fail to detect it. But the pathology need not be biological. One can attempt to eliminate prediction error in life by making life itself artificially, spuriously predictable: by turning it into a machine, a form of cultural pathology. A machine, in the most general sense, is something that invariantly transforms a set of inputs into a set of outputs so that knowledge of the former is sufficient to predict the latter, a kind of embodied tautology. Unlike a tautology it exists in time and place, consuming spatiotemporal continuity. We have come to surround ourselves with machines and their products, so much so that rare yet trivial deviations from the predictability of the machined, as in philately, perversely acquire value. We attempt to interpret ourselves as machines, insisting on biological, evolutionary, mechanistic explanations of thought and behaviour even when they are patently inadequate. And, though no period in history supports so impoverished an analysis, we attempt to understand society and culture as a mechanism of which people are more or less predictably related parts, pieces in a grand game whose rules are knowable. Real mystery is everywhere supplanted by fake certainty.

Were all of this spurious banishment of mystery merely the byproduct of true understanding, of greater knowledge of the world, one might accept the pathology it represents as inevitable. But it isn’t. In the domains of the arts and the humanities, even in much of the domain of science, we are so far away from mechanistic explanations that any attempt to give them can only be vicious reductionism, a dishonest attempt to simulate order where the complexity remains unfathomable. Why do we do it? To get satisfaction on the cheap: this is—in the world of thought and action—the equivalent of sentimentality in the world of the emotions. The sentimentalist wants his emotions without paying for them, the mechanical reductionist wants his knowledge without making the effort of understanding.

The pathology I am describing is not confined to the analytical and the political: it infects the creative. Its symptom in the world of design and architecture is “functionalism”, the doctrine that beauty is to be found in fidelity to function. The implication is that everything around us is defined by its use, that we inhabit a world of tools, our own lives presumably being limited to making use of them. And use being generally a simple thing—knives cut, lamps light, shovels shovel—design thereby becomes simple too. Indeed, simplicity becomes an end not a means of the aesthetic; “minimalism”, the child of functionalism, is born.

Now a great deal of functionalism and minimalism, especially in relation to interiors, cites Japan as an inspiration. That it should be so is profoundly unsurprising. Simplicity, sparsity, a natural conformity of form to use are easy to find here. And—Japanese life historically being shaped by strong functional constraints of space and materials—it could hardly be otherwise. But these constraints were not chosen, they were the outcome of circumstance: not the same thing, just as a scar is not the same thing as a tattoo even if the psychological envelope might be kindred. To simulate constraint, as to simulate a scar, is cheaply to self-dramatize the battle. Traditional Japanese interiors often make no distinction between doors and windows, either is a sliding panel. Is this really because the Japanese see a special virtue in keeping rooms isotropic? Their palaces have grand enough entrances, why should their homes be any different? The constraint here is in physical, not in ideational space.

The point is easy to elaborate. But rather than show that Japanese functionalism is misunderstood we should examine an aspect of the Japanese that goes much deeper, cuts proximal to all the “isms”: to the fundamental desire artificially to shield ourselves from mystery. For that is clearly absent in Japanese architecture, indeed its impulse is to revel in mystery rather than dispel it. If so then none of the “isms” claimed to be inspired by it can have any real traction. The key feature here is the attitude to illumination.

Now one of the most striking features of the visual system is that it can respond to an extraordinary range of light intensities: there is no camera in existence that can match its power. Indeed, the human eye is very far from a mere camera: its purpose is not to convey an image but to enmesh us into the visual world, a process of which creating conscious images is only a fraction. Form, colour, movement, emotional content are all conveyed in separable neural channels that interact with illumination in complex ways. There may be an optimal level of illumination for resolving text or inspecting the form of a figure, but no such simplification can be made for the full spectrum of human life. Illumination intensity is not like the amplitude of sound, a variable one can simply “divide by”, it is more akin to tonal complexity in music: one would no more wish to restrict its dynamic range than one would want to reduce the variety of expressive musical forms.

Yet lighting in the contemporary architectural vernacular—I am referring to interiors—commonly seeks to flatten the visual dynamic into the three dimensional representation of a photograph in a real estate catalogue. Its tools are either numerous, evenly-spaced downlighters or else bright, central, monolithic lights that shatter what little shadow there is into nothingness and transform the room into a forensic scene. A strange, neurotic dichotomy emerges between bland, even lighting that saps all individuality from the forms it illuminates, and strident, “feature” lights whose effect is to draw attention away from the room and rewardlessly focus it on themselves. Either way, the visual experience is narrowed into a tight aperture for which there is space only for inspection: life becomes merely a kind of audit.

Why must it be so? Must everywhere be optimized for the reading of a tax receipt? How is it that the following lines, on the western toilet, from Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows” should have come to sound so alien to our ears?

“That burst of light from those four white walls hardly puts one in a mood to relish Soseki’s ”physiological delight”. There is no denying the cleanliness; every nook and corner is pure white. Yet what need is there to remind us so forcefully of the issue of our own bodies?….The cleanliness of what can be seen only calls up more clearly thoughts of what cannot be seen. In such places the distinction between the clean and the unclean is best left obscure; shrouded in a dusky haze.”

Tankizaki’s widely misunderstood essay goes on to elaborate the complex interaction between illumination and the perception of the objects that surround us, for example attributing to the shift to electric lighting the substitution of porcelain—a far inferior product—for lacquerware. But the point is encapsulated with perfect clarity in the discussion of the alcove:

“Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into it forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquillity holds sway…Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void.”

Where is the functional or minimalist here? The alcove serves no function, and is an obviously aminimal departure from a plain wall. Its meaning is precisely in the absence of function, in the complete aminimality of the unknown. The alcove is not a void, it is an emblem of the unknown, of the inevitable, unassailable mystery of life. To place it in the home is to acquiesce in the unknown, to accept that life consists not in the eradication of mystery but in becoming a natural, living part of it. That is not to say that no corner should ever be brought into the sunlight, that curiosity is an ill-bred resistance to ignorance, but that we need to be at ease with the unknown, to dissolve the anxiety that places us continually at an unwinnable war against it. That is the core message of the Japanese interior, and it is striking that what others have read in it should be its exact opposite. But then we do not really read these days, do we, we merely transform, machine-like?