Literary & Scientific Convergence

After I published the last post on friction and meaning I used Google news to scan some headlines and saw an article that caught my attention on ChatGPT. Now I’m not sure if the reason this showed up is algorithmic (because I posted about this yesterday), but either way the article was a fantastic scaffold to build on what I already said.

In Matt Greene’s essay, there’s an image that captures something I’ve been trying to articulate for weeks now—something about AI, language, and the strange thinness that creeps in when friction disappears from our lives. Greene writes: “What if a lake was only its surface?” 

It’s a literary metaphor, but it’s doing the same conceptual work that thermodynamics does when it talks about gradients collapsing into equilibrium. Greene isn’t writing about physics, but the physics slides into place behind the image almost perfectly.

A lake with no depth is a system with no internal gradients. Nothing moves. Nothing circulates. Nothing lives. It’s a shape without metabolism. And Greene’s point is that language—particularly AI-generated language—can drift into that same surface-only state: smooth, grammatical, reflective, but with nothing underneath that requires effort, interpretation, or reciprocal intention.

It is the literary description of thermodynamic equilibrium, just told through the medium of metaphor.

Literary Depth = Thermodynamic Gradient

When Greene describes that uncanny “surface-only” texture of AI writing—“I’m left with a texture; or to be more precise, a lack of it.” —he’s describing a loss of depth, not in the emotional sense but in the physical sense: a collapse of gradient.

Depth in language behaves like depth in water:

• it has layers
• it has currents
• it hides things
• it requires exploration
• it resists you
• it pushes back

The metaphor is not accidental. Depth is literally work potential. When a lake has depth, gravity organizes it. Heat, light, minerals, and life move through it. That movement creates complexity.

The same is true of communication. Meaning lives in the movement between minds, the back-and-forth that Greene calls “the generosity we afford interactions.” 

When an utterance has no depth, nothing moves. There is no interpretive current. No friction at the banks. No silt kicked up from the bottom. No surprise. No resistance.

It is flat water.

The Literary “Surface Lake” and the Physical “Heat Death”

Thermodynamics has a blunt name for a system with no gradients left: heat death — the end state where nothing interesting can happen.

Greene’s “post-meaning” is a cultural version of that same endpoint.

When he says: “We lose the ability to meet someone halfway.” he is describing what it feels like, from the human interior, when the gradients collapse. The work required to cross the space between two minds vanishes. And when no work is required, no work can be done.

Meaning becomes still water.

That’s not literary fatalism—that’s physics.

What Literature Gives Us That Physics Can’t

Physics can diagnose the structural problem:

No gradients → no complexity → no life.

But literature gives us the interior experience of that collapse:

• the oily texturelessness Greene describes
• the eerie smoothness of a conversation that isn’t actually mutual
• the strange feeling of parsing meaning from something that wasn’t trying to say anything at all

Where physics gives us prediction, literature gives us sensation.

And when both disciplines are describing the same shape, something important has come into view.

The Deep Point

The friction principle I wrote about earlier wasn’t just a psychological claim—it was a structural one. Greene’s essay simply gives us a more human language for the same physics.

A conversation—like a lake—needs depth to support life.

To carry motion. To resist us just enough.

Here scientific and the literary language are, for better or worse, saying exactly the same thing.