Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman explains why human perceptions of an independent reality are all illusions
"The Case Against Reality"
A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.
Dear BCH,
Thanks for the two articles.
Although I'm still steeling myself for the laboriousness of "Two Slit" quantum mechanics, this Atlantic piece is a cakewalk.
And a delightful one.
When I first began "playing" with the sensorium and how it affects perception -- Marshall McLuhan got me going back at U of Toronto with his cornerstone reference to "sensory ratio" -- I posited the existence of an infinite number of senses, using as my speculative point-of-departure the fact that most fish have a sixth sense called "the lateral line system" that enables them to envision their submarine environment in murky-turbid-pitch-black water by interpreting "water pressure changes" between their bodies and invisible objects according to the "pressure gradient" caused by the distance between them and said objects. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_line
I went on to speculate (whimsically, but using whimsy to "prove" the point) that IF there were an infinite number of senses -- and a Single Being were endowed with them all -- then "reality" would "appear" completely full of sense-perception with no "empty space" separating "things" for purposes of "movement."
Movement and change -- the inseparable "twins" that make Time possible (or vice versa, or both) since "time is that within which change takes place" -- can only "happen" because the illusion of time, as someone said, "prevents everything from happening at once." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
Similarly, a limited sensorium "opens"/creates a navegable illusion of time/space rather than a sensorially-enhanced perception of time/space that is so paralytically jammed-with-impressions that all perception happens at once so that "Reality" -- at least as expressed in Time-Space "disappears" since there is no possibility of movement, and therefore no posibility of change, and therefore no Time.
In this view, "creation" could be God's way of opening time/space so s/he can "take some exercise" and come to know "itself" as "actuality" rather than motionless "potential," and furthermore, know "itself" through the sensory tentacles that "we" are. What McLuhan -- referring to technology -- would call "the extensions of man."
In the end, this interpretive vantage looks a lot like the Christian concept of The Incarnation, The Word made Flesh.
"God so loved the world that he sent his only child into it..."
Ya gotta love The Magnum Mysterium.
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." (I encourage you to "key word" search for "mystery" at Einstein's Wikiquote page: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ: "Research As Adoration"
In Hinduism, reality as we know it through our human senses is called lila meaning "divine play." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila_(Hinduism)
The play's the thing!
Looking forward to Monday and The Grand Finale to Carta A Un Psiquiatra!
Paz contigo
Alan
On Sat, Dec 3, 2016 at 3:23 AM, BCH wrote:
Alan: Previous communication with BCH:
Dear BCH,
As much as I liked many things about Arrival -- including its remarkable evocation of "first contact" and what first contact would/could be "like" -- I felt an overall frustration with the movie.
Mostly, I attributed my frustration to not "getting" -- or at least not "getting enough" -- of "the breakthrough insight" into "first communication."
Part of this was due to my supposition that extra-terrestrials who are as sophisticated as "The Newly-Arrived" would have been able to communicate with life forms whose view of time/space was "garden variety" linear.
It's like a musician who understands "diminished fifths" (and other musical esoterica) who doesn't "get" the chromatic scale.
I have inserted intralinear comments in your email below.
Paz contigo
Alan
PS Here is a Deist interpretation of Arrival (as I see it strongly influenced by Christian theology) that may be of interest - both by way of fruitful provocation, and also to make you wince. http://21stcenturywire.
On Thu, Nov 24, 2016 at 8:02 AM, BCH wrote:
Ok. I saw it yesterday. There were tons of thing I liked about it but left curiously unsatisfied and have been trying to figure out why.
What I liked about it:
1. It's terrifically adapted science fiction. Like "Interstellar," "Contact," "2001" and a handful of other films, it takes science fiction concepts and ambiguities and fearlessly rolls with them.
2. It bears a closer relationship to Christopher Nolan's "Memento" than it does Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
3. Someone has said that all alien contact stories are derivative of either "War of the Worlds" or "ET." Villeneuve has managed to make a film that is based on neither of them. The aliens don't come because they want to help us (although that's a byproduct of why they come) or because they want our women and our hot tubs, but because they must -- it's part of their history.
4. Villenueve has managed to tell a time travel story (of sorts) without encountering time travel paradoxes. He does this, interestingly, by making the narrative temporal point (the time at which the story is told) completely ambiguous. Some years ago on facebook I reported:"According to Hawking and Mlodinow, one consequence of the theory of quantum mechanics is that events in the past that were not directly observed did not happen in a definite way. Instead they happened in all possible ways. This is related to the probabilistic nature of matter and energy revealed by quantum mechanics: Unless forced to choose a particular state by direct interference from an outside observation, things will hover in a state of uncertainty. Alan: I often ponder the interface between "objectivity" and "subjectivity" and have come to realize (at least to my satisfaction) that subjectivity actually predicates existence (at least as we know it). The linchpin of my view is that by withdrawing all consciousness of all sentient beings from Universe you end up (at least in any way that has any human meaning) with a Universe that is complete potential, none of it "meaningfully" enacted. From this point of departure I have come to see that a "personal relationship with God" may arise from this chthonic sense that without a "person" in the equation, nothing emerges from "potential" into the enacted-meaning of human beings' relationships with the underlying (but meaningless) potential of "sheer objectivity."
For example, if all we know is that a particle traveled from point A to point B, then it is not true that the particle took a definite path and we just don't know what it is. Rather, that particle simultaneously took every possible path connecting the two points.The authors sum up: "No matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities." Alan: You seem to be referring (in my terms) to the difference between "vague potential" and one "specific enactment of potential."
Allowing me the liberty of reversing that it seemed to me that the aliens' perception of time (and thus Louise's) was of being always in the present (in the circle) and "remembering" both the past and future.Villenueve allows us to believe at the beginning of the film that we are in the middle of the story when, in fact, we are at the end. All of what we believe to be flashbacks during the film are, in fact, remembered flashforwards. (Thus the resemblance to "Memento.") Louise' surprise at meeting the General is because it has come to her, unbidden, as a memory.
What I didn't like:1. Villenueve's universe is deterministic. The aliens do what they do because they must do what they do. In some sense this becomes a cop-out. The humans bust their buns to decode the aliens' coffee cup stains but the aliens make no effort to talk to the humans using human writing (which they must understand because they understood it before they came.) Then again, a movie where the aliens show up and say "Look, dudes, we're gonna give you all this stuff because we'll need your help in 3,000 years so listen up" doesn't make much of a film. Alan: I'm okay with the "need your help in 3000 years premise. For me, it's satisfying.
2. Ultimately, Abbott and Costello are humans in zipper suits. When Louise goes by herself and talks to Abbott, it says clearly that "Costello is in death process." That's a temporally based sentence that would not be possible from the purely Heptopod perspective. Abbott has to "remember" its own death and thus is _always_ in "death process." Alan: Interesting observation... but, for me, not a deal breaker.
3. Amy Adams just doesn't bring this off. Certainly it may be that playing out the emotions would give away The Big Reveal (which I picked up when she from her comments about being single -- but that's just me.)I wanted a performance less passive and with greater gravitas so that when the lightning bolt hits, she shares that sensation with us. Alan: There was an odd oscillation between "the momentous" and "the flip."
Why I'm unsatisfied:
I'm still working on this. Other than Amy Adams' performance I think the film needed another act. I'm not sure what that would be. There is, to me, a missing connection in the circle. (The film is circular, the alien script is circular, there are circles everywhere in the film...) I don't know what it is, yet. Alan: I don't know how it work dramatically but it would be theoretically interesting if "the arrived" had the ability to teach/impart "circular-time perception" perhaps only to "a chosen few" endowed with a pre-existing but dormant gift. Maybe a sequel?
--B
No comments:
Post a Comment