What if everyone died?

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There’s a particular conundrum I’ve been musing over but it’s hard to capture it in words. I guess I would say it comes down to this question: what is real?

For example, I’m sitting here at Starbucks. Is this Starbucks real? Well, I think the physical materials of the Starbucks are real; I think the wood of the table I’m writing on breaks down to molecules that are real, and from there to atoms, and presumably from there to quantum particles etc. I think those are all real physical elements (though I think there are some schools of philosophy and quantum theory that might dicker with even that seemingly obvious point of view. Let’s ignore them for now.)

What about the idea of Starbucks? The concept of Starbucks as an enjoyable coffee bistro, a place that welcomes both happy hipsters and urban professionals, a place that plays eclectic but inoffensive music, a locale with great coffee and astoundingly bland food… is that real? Obviously when I say, “I’m going to Starbucks,” no one questions its reality, but this idea of Starbucks is not really real in the same sense of the physical materials that make up an individual Starbucks store.

So how do we define reality? Let me approach this a little differently. What if everyone on earth died? What would be left? I think the Starbucks I am at would still be around (for a while) but the idea of it would be gone. In fact, all ideas would be gone. There would be no more communism, sexuality, chaos theory, social justice, individual rights, copyright protection, evolution and on and on. All ideas would be gone. We would just have stuff and time.

(I haven’t really said whether or not all animals or even all life on earth are gone with humanity in this scenario so maybe some of these ideas would survive in the minds of animals but, again, let’s ignore those issues.)

This unreality of ideas seems pretty obvious. However, most of the joys and miseries throughout history and the modern world are derived from these unreal ideas. For example, I was a big fan of Spider-Man as a kid. The sight of his red and blue costume excited me. But Spider-Man is not real. The Spider-Man comics are real, in so much as they are created from real materials (paper, ink etc.) but the idea of Spider-Man is completely held within the minds of humans.

I love music but, Jesus, what could be less real… sound waves in the air that create certain psychological perceptions when experienced by the human brain?

In some sense, a weight lifts off your shoulders when you realize this. None of the bullshit people are constantly yammering about – politics, culture, art theory, sex games, gender wars etc. – really exists. These are simply the ideas mankind has constructed and agreed to bicker over. If we are all wiped out by a radioactive space comet, these ideas will fade away… well, that’s not really correct; they can’t fade away because they were never there in the first place. Let’s put it this way: their impermanence will be revealed.

And yet these things, these ideas, actually feel more real, or at least more meaningful, than what actually is real (materials and time.) Again, these ideas are what provide most peoples’ joys and pains.

Even the idea I’m touting here, that ideas are not real, is not really real.

Ain’t that a motherfucker?

On nudity

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I’m the first to admit things are pretty slow around here, mainly as I am assaulted with the problems of life. I did want to note this amusing quote from Shelly Winters on the topic of onstage nudity.

“I think it is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were twenty-two with a great body it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive, religious experience.”

Can learning be fun?

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I’ve longed complained about modern education and I’m far from alone. Most people look back on their years of institutionalized learning (in schools, universities, private lessons etc.) as being unpleasant.

But I’m a great fan of learning. I love reading books, consuming knowledge etc. This opens up an interesting question. Why is “education” so painful and “learning” so fun?

I stumbled across an interesting site on teaching guitar and the author has several articles on learning theory. In one he gets tackles this general issue.

It may seem odd then that in the mind of many individuals, the idea of learning has quite negative associations. This springs from two main sources: Parenting and Schooling.

The word ‘learn’ is often used in anger and frustration by parents:

“When will you ever learn / Why can’t you learn / You’d better start learning…
… to behave/ to do as you’re told/ to be sensible/ to sit still/ to be quiet”
…etc. etc. This introduces, from an early age, the idea that learning has an element of duress attached to it.

When your child comes home from school complaining of boredom – it is not learning that has bored him – remember: “Learning opens doors, widens horizons, adds colour to our experience, makes life more interesting.” Rather it is a lack of learning brought about by the less than ideal conditions that modern education systems attempt to operate under.

Although improvements are continually being made to education there remains the basic set of problems that spring from the financial and logistical restraints placed upon schools where typically, one teacher is charged with the task of causing learning to occur in as many as 30 children simultaneously, often in subjects they have little or no natural interest in.

Unfortunately it gets worse. The whole subject of teaching gets mixed in with the subject of control and, where teachers feel particularly vulnerable, outright subjugation.

Both points strike me as spot on. I think part of the problem with education is that it tries to invoke learning when it’s simply not desired. Some kid is digesting a big lunch while dreaming about the girl he has a crush on and he then walks into a class and is supposed to care about the table of elements. Not gonna happen.

Of course, one might argue that the solution is to give kids more control over when they learn. Don’t make them enter their biology class until they’re ready. But with kids being the impetuous and lazy bastards that they are, that method probably wouldn’t work either. Perhaps there’s some middle ground?

Out of Our heads, Continued

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I recently mentioned my thoughts and confusion while reading the book “Out of Our Heads” by Alva Noë. I was somewhat dismissive after reading it, but while I’m still not quite sure what it was saying, I find some of its ideas still percolating.

The book seemed to be about defining where the limits of a person are. Obviously our physical bodies can be said to extend to our skin (though one could quibble with even that point.) But if you refer to a person as a sum of their experiences, thoughts, beliefs, perceptions etc… where does a person begin or end in that view? Noë’s claim, and I think he’s probably correct, is that modern neuroscience would generally say that the borders of the nervous system (brain and nerves throughout the body) are this beginning and end point.

Let’s consider our conscious experience of life – by this I mean our sights, tastes, smells etc. as well as internal thoughts, feelings and so on. If we consider that sum of perceptions as “us” where do we begin or end?

Think of seeing a bird. What’s going on there? In short, light particles/waves reflect off the form of the bird and some of them make their way to your eyes and to certain retinal cells designed to respond to different wave lengths of light (what we see as different colors.) Those retinal cells connect to other cells, travel up your optic nerve and into you brain where the “information” is “processed” by the brain and this results in our internal perception of the bird. So where is the “us” in this process – who is seeing the bird? Conventional science would probably say, again, that it’s the nervous system (the eyes and brain etc.) And that not a bad view to take, especially for medical purposes. This view would say our perception arises out of the signals traveling through our eyes, optic nerve and brain. But let’s consider what’s happening before those signals fire from our eyes. Light particles bounce off the bird and go to out eyes. In a sense, those particles could be thought of as signals (at least as well as the electrochemical firings of your nerves can.) So could those particles and indeed even that bird be thought of as part of “us”? And where do those bounced light particles come from? If we’re outside, the sun is likely source. So is the sun not a part of “us”?

At this point one starts to sound rather new agey, essentially claiming that “we” are the universe—a complex system of signals of “information.” I’m not really willing to take it that far (though the case could be made.) But I do find it interesting to think of ourselves (if we define “ourselves” to include our conscious perception of the world) as more than just our brain but also our surrounding environment.

And this aligns with another meme you often see in psychology, Buddhism, new age thought etc… that your environment has a great effect on you and thus by placing yourself in the right environment you can flourish. (The opposite would also be true. And I might argue that the real trick is making whatever environment you are in “positive.” Like the prison lifer who nonetheless thrives.)

To see and observe

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I’m the first to admit that blogging has been light around here; just the complexities of real life intruding.

I have been doing a lot of drawing lately and have noticed something interesting. Much of drawing (or any kind of representational artwork) isn’t about technical skill (say, the ability to draw ovoids), it’s about observing. It’s about really understanding what you are looking at or what’s in your head. I was working on drawing a dragon’s head recently and I referred to some picture of lizards to aid me. I started to become conscious of the peculiarities of how lizards are constructed. They really are rather birdlike in their skull shape. In some cases the scales around their jowls are bigger that those around the tip of the nose. I’ve seen this for years but have not been really aware of it. (As Sherlock Holmes once told Watson, “You see but you do not observe.”)

I was drawing the neighbor’s house yesterday and had a similar epiphany. I realized that what I take to be their front door opens into some kind of enclosed yard, not their foyer as I had presumed. Of course I’ve stared at this house for years without realizing this.

It makes one aware of how much we miss when looking at the world.

Out of Our Heads

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Recently I read yet another brain related book. This one was more philosophical than medical and was titled “Out of Our Heads: Why You Are not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness.” The author the academic Alva Noë

What was the book about? Umm… hard to say… it was pretty vague reading. It seemed to be a rebuttal to the materialistic neuroscience view that argues that every facet of consciousness can be explained as the result of (not yet understood) machinations in the brain. However, the book’s argument was not spiritual; it did not argue for the existence of the non-material soul (I think.) Instead it seemed to argue that a conscious experience involves many systems and is not limited to the brain. If you reach out and poke a bear with a stick then your arm, your stick and perhaps even the bear are part of this experience. The environment the brain is in (including the body surrounding it) are somehow part of the conscious experience.

Hard to understand? Yeah, I didn’t get it myself. However, I do get the sense that there maybe some kernels of truth in the book’s ideas. There is a popular view that we are totally self dependent entities and we “make our own fate.” In this view, environment is not really an issue. But Noë would probably argue that where we are is as important as who we are (and in fact the two aspects are intertwined.) I found myself thinking back to my days in LA. I was, before I moved there, not much of a fan of country music. But I stumbled onto the country scene at the Cinema Bar and fell into it. It was my environment that determined, in essence, who I became (e.g. an alt-country fan of sorts.) Now that I’ve moved away from that I really don’t listen to or associate with alt-country much – that self-definition has faded. The point being that without that environment, I would have been a different person.

This all sounds rather obvious I suspect, but there seem to be a few ideas here contradictory to a lot of the philosophies at work in modern culture. One being: you are not entirely self determined, you are subject to the winds in your environment. (I personally doubt the existence of free will entirely but that’s another story.) But on a sort of flip side, you can determine you sense of self but aiming to place your self in certain environments. (Sort of like the scoundrel characters in much of fiction and real life who assume an identity and hobnob with the wealthy elite. But placing themselves in a different environment, they become a different person.)

The difference between objective and subjective

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In a recent New York Review of Books article entitled “What Your Computer Can’t Know” philosopher John Searle provides a fairly helpful analysis of the different kinds of knowledge. He states:

The distinction between objectivity and subjectivity looms very large in our intellectual culture but there is a systematic ambiguity in these notions that has existed for centuries and has done enormous harm. There is an ambiguous distinction between an epistemic sense (”epistemic” means having to do with knowledge) and an ontological sense (“ontological” means having to do with existence). In the epistemic sense, the distinction is between types of claims (beliefs, assertions, assumptions, etc.). If I say that Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam, that statement is epistemically objective. You can ascertain its truth as a matter of objective fact. If I say that Rembrandt was the greatest Dutch painter that ever lived, that is evidently a matter of subjective opinion; it is epistemically subjective.

Underlying this epistemological distinction between types of claims is an ontological distinction between modes of existence. Some entities have an existence that does not depend on being experienced (mountains, molecules and tectonic plates are good examples.) Some entities exist only so far as they are experienced (pains, tickles and itches are examples.) This distinction is between the ontologically objective and the ontologically subjective. No matter how many machines may register an itch, it is not really an itch until somebody consciously feels it: it is ontologically subjective.

This seems quite useful and is worth keeping in mind. But I feel there are blurry lines that need to be acknowledged. Let’s look at what a mountain is. We can break that entity into a couple of “parts” – there’s the fact that the mountain is there in some objective sense (some people who question the very nature of reality might dispute this point) and then there is my observation of the mountain, my act of seeing* the mountain. The first part is objective, the second subjective. But let’s now look at an itch. An itch is similar to pain and caused by some minor degradation of your physical body. Maybe a bug bit you, maybe a wound is healing. The actual sensation of the itch is your sensory awareness of this degradation. So again, there are two components—the objective part (the biting bug or whatever it is) and the subjective (the itchy feeling.) My point being that a mountain and an itch are not all that different; they share these two components. An itch is really just a way of sensing the thing that attacked your skin.

* Sight is really the only sense that allows one to get a clear representation of a mountain. There are other objects, however, that one can use various senses to appreciate. A lasagna can be seen, smelled and tasted for example.

And going to the first quoted paragraph: We can say that it is objective to say that Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam, but is it really? It is dependent on us agreeing to the human convention that this particular place on earth is called Amsterdam and that this particular bundle of historical matter was called Rembrandt. For the statement to be true we (the observer of the statement) need to agree to various taxonomies. If I could get everyone to agree on some system by which we could judge art, I might very well be able to objectively claim that Rembrandt was the greatest Dutch painter. That really is the difference between the two statements: how may people agree on the terms. (There is near universal agreement on terms like “Rembrandt” and “Amsterdam, less so on “great painter.”)

It may seem I’m trying to be difficult here, but I’m merely pointing out how hard it is to really define these terms.

Why do we draw?

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I’ve mentioned that I’ve been getting back into my childhood pastime of drawing comic style art. Musing on this prompted the question: why do we draw? By this I mean: what is the subconscious motivation to spend hours penciling and inking away at various pieces of fantastic and mundane imagery?

It’s an impossible question to answer, but I feel on some level that we feel we take ownership of what we draw. If I draw a fast sports car—as teen boys have done on algebra books for years—I, in some weird way, own that car. If I draw a fantastic spaceship, I again own it. And if I draw a beautiful, buxom woman, I own her as well, even if I am an overweight, pimply dork, as most comic artists are. (To be clear: I am not an overweight, pimply dork. I am quite beautiful.)

I suppose it’s similar to why we write fiction. Most humans have little control over their lives—they can lose their jobs, lovers, friends in an instant. Their economic fortunes are dictated by impossible to understand market forces and governmental whims. They are lost in a violent sea. But they can write; they can create their own worlds and people and control them. That provides at least some small sense of autonomy.

Cut and Paste art

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Lately I’ve been getting back into drawing comic book style art. (I made my own mini comics as a kid.) It’s a lot of fun and I feel my skill is improving. But as I look at how art is produced in this modern age I find myself struck by a few concerns.

At one point after I started drawing again I looked into whether there was some cheap software that could render backgrounds such as room interiors or a rows of buildings. Such images are largely made up of basic shapes, I theorized, and shapes are basically a series of coordinates which a computer should have no problem rendering. I never really found an affordable program and ultimately decided I should learn to draw such images myself.

Nonetheless, a lot of computer art and animation is produced via that process: an artist defines a shape, often of great complexity, and the computer renders it. If one wants to change the color or texture of the shape, that’s easy enough. This process is far less laborious than the process of drawing or painting the shape.

And there are pluses to this process. It’s allowed for an explosion of 3d art and allowed people with limited conventional artistic skill to produce wonders. But here’s a point that nags at me: I could sit down and draw 10 red boxes. If I’m a decent enough artist, they’ll look pretty similar. But they will have differences. The pen strokes I use on any one box won’t match the strokes on any others. The boxes won’t match perfectly in size, even if I use a ruler. However, I can create 10 identical boxes in Photoshop or some similar program. It’s as easy as copy and paste. The uniqueness of the hand-drawn boxes is lost.

People make similar complaints in the world of music. I can sit down to a mic’d piano and play 10 instances of a C minor chord. None of them will sound exactly like the other because the pressure I use to play the piano keys will vary, the air in the room will settle in different ways causing the sound vibrations to be affected, and a number of other factors. On the other hand, I could sit down and play 10 chords on a midi synthesizer piano and they might end up sounding very similar. The piano sound on a synthesizer is a sample —-essentially a recording of a piano that took place in the past (when whoever was building the library sounds created it) and can’t really change. This is why people complain about the staticity of synthesized sounds. (In fact, sound engineers are making quite a lot of progress in getting variation in sound samples but it’s still not on par with the real thing.)

Having said all that, I’m quite glad sound libraries exist. I’ve recorded fairly complex works using synthesized symphonic instruments that I would never have been able to attempted in the analog (non-digital) days. (Because the world’s symphonies are not clamoring to play my work—the fools!)

But there’s something disturbing about the advent of so much art being exact duplicates of other pieces of art. The ease of use offered by computers is great for the art of neophytes (and in the realm of drawing that is what I consider myself) but it cheapens the work of pros. “Oh, that awesome looking hand you spent 10 hours painting? Look, I can generate something just as cool in 20 seconds on the computer!”

Of course we’ve seen this before. It used to be the only way to get a chair was to have a craftsman make one by hand. Now IKEA pumps them out by the millions. Such is progress. (Note how I spit that last word out.)