A Fourth Dimension

crimson

As my reader may already be aware, I have an interest in time and time travel. Knowing this, one of my friends suggested to me that I should watch the film Slaughterhouse-Five from 1972. Recently, over five years after the suggestion was made, I finally found the time to watch it.

I did not know what to expect. I had been told it was not your typical time travel story. That it approached the idea of time travel very differently. Now, having seen the film, I will argue that the story contains no time travel whatsoever. I would add a tag here warning of spoilers, but I think I am safe in this particular instance, as I’m simply going to describe how the nature of the story works, not delving into particulars.

My whole perspective on this hinges on the idea of dimensions, and in particular of the fourth dimension. Most will likely be familiar with the common and well known first three dimensions, usually referred to as length, width, and depth. That is, any object in three dimensional space will have as part of its features a length, a width, and a depth. These dimensions are described using simple scalar values or quantities of magnitude. As I have stated in the past, as a three dimensional object myself, I have values of about two meters (length) by about three quarters of a meter (width) by about half a meter (depth). What’s more, these dimensions are irregular, as I only occupy a portion of the volume described by a prism of the dimensions I just stated.

What is important in all of this is not the particular values that I state, only that they exist and they are finite. It is possible using various methods and tools for one to measure and record the values that could be later used to describe my length, width, and depth within these three dimensions. And possibly more importantly, over time, these dimensions remain relatively consistent. That is, I have had a length of about two meters for probably the past thirty or forty years now. And while my length might change a little from day to day, it isn’t so much that I cannot be identified.

Which, as I think about it, raises all sorts of questions about identity and defining the boundaries which delineate what is me and what is not me. It is not my intention in this post to delve into such matters in detail, but I do think it is important to acknowledge that however those boundaries might be determined, they will still consist of simple, measurable scalar magnitudes that can be described within these first three dimensions. Any object that exists within this plane of existence ought to be able to be similarly described.

But then there is this fourth dimension: time. I state it as time specifically, as for some the next dimension might be something else. For example, my partner literally just told me that the fourth dimension is smell, as in if you go to a theater presenting a film in “4D,” they will often be referring to a fourth element that has been added to the experience, and smell is often utilized in this case. In my discussion here, I am specifically interested in talking about time, especially as it relates to the alien race in Slaughterhouse-Five known as the Tralfamadorians.

According to the film, the Tralfamadorians are four dimensional beings, in that they “exist in all times simultaneously, and are thus privy to knowledge of future events.” The issue that occurs to the protagonist of the film is that he is jumping around from time period to time period without any control to stop himself. This is the aspect of the film that I believe people think makes it a film about time travel, as the protagonist is jumping around through time.

However, when the protagonist jumps from time to time, he does not vanish from one period and appear in another. He does not stand in a field in Belgium during World War II and suddenly vanish to appear in a house in the United States in the 1960s. Furthermore, when he goes through his jumps, he is not the same at the end of the jump as he is at the beginning. Specifically, when he is in the field in Belgium, he is a young man, but when he is in the house in the United States, he is an old man. It does not take long, observing these details, to realize that what is happening is not him jumping through time or time travelling, but instead he is perceiving and experiencing different moments or periods of his life.

To be clear, in a chronological sense, his life occurred in a linear fashion as most of us are familiar with. He was born, grew up, went to war, returned home, married, got old, and eventually died. The detail that is confused with travelling through time is that he does not perceive his life in chronological order. Instead, the way the film is presented, the protagonist frame of perception and experience jumps from one part of his life to another, outside of his control.

But even that, I think, is incorrect. As is explained by the Tralfamadorians, they experience all of their lives all at once, instead of a little bit at a time. Instead of experiencing one moment to the next, like travelling on a path or road, the Tralfamadorians experience all moments of their lives simultaneously. And I think, based on their significance to the story, that the protagonist is doing the same. Perhaps due to a traumatic event or due to his encountering the alien species, the protagonist becomes like the Tralfamadorians and has full access to the total sum of all his experiences all at once.

What I think is happening instead is a function of focus. Like the way that I can see quite a bit with my eyes, but that I tend only to focus on a small portion of my field of view in any moment, I think the protagonist is doing the same, though perhaps with less practiced control than I have with my eyes. I have a wide 180 degree sweep to my vision with either of my eyes. That which resides on the periphery of my vision is often referred to as my peripheral vision, and it takes a mere moment’s thought to shift an object in my peripheral vision to the focus of my vision. I can turn my head, or I can simply turn my eyeball itself. And, through practice, I have found I can do neither and still focus on an object in my periphery while still looking straight ahead. It is true that the objects viewed in this last way do not come to me as clearly, but I can still do this, ignoring that which is directly in front of me.

I argue that this is the same thing that the protagonist is doing, though he may not understand it, nor is he practiced in controlling it. The evidence for this, I think, comes from the sorts of events he does experience and when he experiences them. There are a number of scenes where he seems to be straddling two events at the same time. The two events tend to have something strikingly common about them. In one particular case, he is involved in a public speaking event, in both cases struggling to differentiate between himself at a podium as an old man and him supporting his friend speaking to a group of soldiers. He claps in the latter event, which is inappropriate, while many clap in the former event which is appropriate. I think the character is confused, perhaps clapping for the wrong event, but as he is experiencing both events simultaneously, it is hard for him to distinguish.

There are many such scenes in the film, where the protagonist quickly jumps from one part of his life to another in quick succession. Back and forth between the same two events repeatedly for the duration of both events. This seems to me not to be accidental. For him, the emotional relationship between the events draws them together into his focus, like a moving object will draw my eye. In some sense he should be able to control what is happening, and could choose not to focus on a particular event, but if he does not realize that he has such control, of course he will not exercise it.

Finally, the reason I do believe all of this is happening is captured nicely in the brief phrase that is apparently the source of this well known idiom: “so it goes.” Within the context of this film, “so it goes” is not a phrase meant to conjure a dismissive attitude. It is meant as an acknowledgement of how death is simply a part of life. All things are born and live and eventually die, and there is no reason to get too worked up about that. Instead, the Tralfamadorians suggest adopting a more positive outlook, focusing their attention on the more positive moments of their lives. And as they are experiencing all of their lives all at once, this can be taken quite literally.

Just as I can focus the center of my vision on the object that most interests me, adding greater clarify and texture to it while I mostly ignore and dismiss that which happens in the periphery of my vision, the Tralfamadorians can do the same with their perceptual focus, choosing to experience those parts of their lives that are more pleasant and positive, ignoring and dismissing those parts that are boring or negative. It can be debated how healthy it is to ignore the aspects of one’s life that one does not enjoy, but for a species who is experiencing all events all at once, there seems to me to be some logic to this.

Thus, I do not think the film is a film about time travel at all. However, I would agree that it is a film about time and about how time is perceived. For myself, in this existence I presently inhabit, I experience my life as a linear stream of events that follows a chronological sequence. Right now I am typing at my computer this blog, and later I will go to bed to sleep. And then tomorrow I will experience the weekend and do chores. I do not experience all events in my life simultaneously, and I certainly cannot choose to focus on an event from ten years ago, or an event ten years from now either.

It would be interesting if I could do such things. To be able to use information from the future to inform the decisions of the past. To help myself make better choices. To help myself avoid various pitfalls along the way. But that just isn’t how it works for me. At least not so far.

The last thing I want to raise about all of this is something I’ve thought about in the past. I’ve even written about it a little in previous blog posts from years ago. This fourth dimension, time, does not seem like the previous three dimensions. Or perhaps it is, but is not so easily seen. I have a relatively fixed length about me. Do I have a relatively fixed time?

Treat Yourself How You Want To Be Treated

crimson

I think a lot of children are taught early on the idea that we should treat others how we want to be treated. That if we want to be treated kindly or with respect, we ought first to treat others with kindness and respect. And while I do believe this is a good sort of idea to embrace, as it certainly should help foster positive relationships with others, I do not believe this is entirely enough. In particular, I do not think this is the best strategy to enter into healthy intimate relationships.

I was reading a post on social media from a woman who was lonely. She expressed a desire to find a boyfriend, but was tired of people telling her that she needed to be patient. Apparently many were telling her that to be successful, she ought to stop trying to find a relationship, and that a relationship would then miraculously happen for her while she was not looking for it. I’ve heard this sentiment before, and in some fashion I also endorse it. But as with most things, it is never quite this simple.

To clarify my own perspective on this subject, I believe that to successfully find a healthy intimate relationship, the best thing one can do is to focus on and engage in the sorts of activities that they find most interesting and desirable. That is, do what you want to do and do what you like to do. Like others suggest, don’t focus on finding the relationship, distract yourself with other activities. In the course of doing what you enjoy, you will end up surrounded by people who also find that same activity enjoyable. And in spending time with those people, relationships will develop themselves.

While I still feel this is the most appropriate path to success, thinking about this woman’s post on social media makes me feel even stronger about why this is the case and why it works. And it is because of the very issue that causes so many people grief, especially women: objectification. That is, when entering relationships with others, especially intimate relationships, many women end up feeling like merely objects of sexual interest.

I believe this is entirely about respect for autonomy and is related to what I often describe about love. For me, true love is to embrace and support the desires and interests of others. That is, if I am entering into what I will call a healthy and loving relationship, my focus will be on identifying and supporting the desires and interests of the other person. It will be my goal to help them realize their goals and projects. In particular, it will not be of interest to me to suppress or even sacrifice their desires and interests for my own.

But if the other person with whom I am about to embark on such a relationship has been spending their time focused on luring me through presenting themselves inauthentically, then I might not actually share the interests or desires that I think they possess. That is, if the other person I am establishing a relationship with has presented themselves as liking different things or having different interests than they actually have, then I may be pursuing them for the wrong reasons.

Let me be plain. If I like a particular person, and I find out they enjoy Marvel movies, I may take an interest in Marvel movies. I may even do so despite my lack of interest in Marvel movies. In other words, in this situation, I am taking up an interest of theirs when it is not my own. And while this may be consistent with my description of true love, I will probably also be creating a problematic situation as well. Because now the other person may start to think that I like Marvel movies, even though I may not. And if this is how our relationship is being established, then they are entering into the situation on a false premise. They may like me because they think I like Marvel movies. This is a huge problem.

In reality, there are likely to be many, many such subtle pieces of misinformation occurring. As a specific example, I dated a woman once who indicated to me that she liked dance music. She told me this because I mentioned that I liked dance music. I enjoy house and techno and electronica. However, despite her knowing what I meant when I said “dance music,” for her dance music meant something more like classical and ballroom dance music. Clearly, upon clarification, we were talking about very different things. What upset me later was that she admitted to me that she actually understood what I was talking about at the time and went along anyway. In my ignorance, I did not understand until much later. And unfortunately, this detail was only the tip of the iceberg.

The point I wish to make here is that by taking on interests that are not my own, and especially interests that may be directly opposed to my actual interests, I am presenting myself inauthentically and misleading the other person. I may be doing it in order to establish a relationship with that other person, but ultimately I am doing both of us a disservice. Unless I plan to continue the charade indefinitely, there will eventually come a time when the truth will come out. Either that, or I will be doomed to spend the rest of my life sacrificing one (or many) of my interests and desires.

As an even more graphic example of this, and the one I used in responding to the woman on social media, if a woman decides to make herself more stereotypically attractive in order to attract a man, she is doing a similar disservice. If she enhances her appearance, augmenting her chest and wearing revealing clothing, the man whom she attracts will likely believe that this is a part of who she is. In fact, if she takes this too far, presenting herself as a promiscuous sort of woman, the man she attracts is likely to treat her as such, believing that she really is such a woman.

If the truth is that she is not such a woman (as I think most women are not), then the quickly establishing relationship is already doomed. He is going to continue treating her as something she is not, objectifying her to the extreme. And if, once the relationship is established, she tries to now reveal her true self, the man is likely to become rather upset. Either that, or she will need to maintain the ruse for as long as the relationship lasts. And if she ends up marrying that man, then that could also be rather unfortunate.

It is true that men ought not be viewing women in this way. To objectify anyone is highly problematic. But this is the reason active pursuit of relationships, on both sides, is also highly problematic. In the pursuit of a relationship, we all adjust our presentation in order to best lure a potential partner. We express interests in things we are not interested in, and we sacrifice ourselves in the pursuit. In other words, what I am trying to suggest is that it is this pursuit of a relationship that is the fundamental problem.

It is certainly true that one can find a relationship using the various strategies I have been outlining. If the goal for a person is simply not to be alone, then finding someone to be with is actually quite easy. Not being alone is easy to rectify. However, if the actual goal is more than simply alleviating loneliness, then things are obviously more complicated. If the goal is something like finding a relationship with someone who will love me for me, then my strategy most definitely must change.

Which leads me ultimately to what I have said in the title of this post. If I wish to enter into an intimate relationship with someone, a relationship that is healthy and filled with love, then I need to find someone who respects me and treats me with kindness. And to do that, I need to do something that may be quite difficult for me to do: I need to treat myself how I want to be treated. I need to treat myself with respect and with kindness.

The strategy I have endorsed above is just that. By pursuing my interests and desires, I am treating myself with the kindness and respect I wish of others as well. And by not focusing on the “hunt,” I am not placing myself into the role of either the hunter or the hunted. As I believe many people likely feel, I do not wish to be merely an object or trophy to be acquired for someone’s collection. I am not a prize to be won. I am an autonomous, free willed being who wishes respect. I have my own desires and interests that I want to pursue. So anyone who enters into a relationship with me ought to be prepared for that.

And it works in the other direction as well. Anyone I end up with ought to also be happy with my interests and desires. Their interests and desires ought to at least be compatible with my own. So they too ought to do the same as I am doing as well: pursuing their own interests and desires. They too ought to be treating themselves with kindness and respect. After all, they are in a very similar situation as I am in.

And thus, in order for a relationship between us to come about, the only way it seems to me that this will all work is for both of us to not be actively pursuing a relationship and instead be pursuing our own respective interests. If those interests come together, we are likely to come together as well. And then a healthy and positive relationship can establish itself, without the need for either of us to pretend to be something we are not.

ASI Can Never Be

crimson

Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) can never be. There will never be an entity in existence that is “better” than a human in every possible way. I make this claim with complete confidence. This blog today is my evidence to support why I am saying this.

I came to this realization recently as I was considering another problem: how can humans be compared to other humans? That is, in terms that often lead to issues of racism and sexism, how is it reasonable to consider one individual human to be better, in a general or overall sense, than another individual human?

I believe that no individual is better (or worse) than any other individual, in a general sense. That is, I can compare two individuals using a test or examination, and I might be able to suggest that one is superior within the very narrow realm of the test or examination. When I was in school, I would be graded in my classes, and the mark I received in some classes was greater than the mark received by other students, suggesting that perhaps within the realm of that one class, I was superior to those other students. But even then, it gets tricky to affirm such a statement.

Instructors in a class teach certain material based on their own bias (and the bias of the curriculum and school system). This means that the specific material covered by the class is already incomplete. This makes sense as it is not feasible for an instructor to cover absolutely everything there is to cover about a particular topic in the limited amount of time they have. Further to this, toward the end of such a class, the instructor will go through a process by which they will assess the students to determine whether the students had acquired the desired knowledge and skills for that class. The manner of testing and examination is also highly biased and limited in its ability to accurately assess the knowledge of the student. For example, a multiple choice exam question could have been answered correctly by the student because they understood the question, or they could simply have been lucky by utilizing the 25% probability that they could guess the answer.

It is not my intention right now to delve completely into the challenges of educating individuals in various topics. My intent here is simply to show that the process is wrought with difficulties and challenges that make the process of assessment incomplete and potentially inaccurate as well. Even if I receive a higher grade in a class than another person, to suggest that I am somehow better than that other person in that subject is already highly suspect.

The best one can do, on my view, is suggest that I did better on the specific exam or test than the other individual. If on that very specific final exam in that very specific class I happened to get the higher grade, I might say with reasonable accuracy and confidence that I am superior to the other individual at that very specific exam. Outside of that, any claims I make about being better are simply committing the fallacy of a faulty generalization.

Taking all of this to heart, it seems obvious to me that individuals can only be compared in a very, very narrow sense to one another. I can be compared to another in only very, very specific domains. To generalize that I am somehow better than another in an overall or general sense would be infeasible. Not only would I need to go through absolutely every possible specific domain (like somehow performing calculus on people), but I would need to take into account the fact that my proficiencies within all these very specific domains actually changes over time as well. Every moment that passes, I learn something new and improve upon myself. And similiarly, I also forget things and become less proficient over time as well. So all these specific domains of intelligence or skill are constantly in a state of flux.

To sum all this up, unless I was able to take a snapshot of myself in this very specific moment, capturing with complete accuracy every minute detail of myself, and then also doing the same with another individual, and then also performing the step by step comparison of each and every specific domain, performing a sort of calculus in summing the values of all comparisons, might I be able to finally assess my superiority to that other individual (or lack thereof) within that extremely narrow moment in time. This is not at all feasible. This would require a certain level of omniscience, in addtion to incredibly fast computational ability.

It is for these reasons that I also believe stereotyping and predjudice, such as sexism and racism, is entirely unfounded and logically incorrect. Individuals cannot be compared to each other in these general ways, nevermind the clear and obvious issue with suggesting that the possession of a penis somehow imbues the bearer with superior intellectual capacities. (As an aside, as one who possesses such a thing, from my own first hand experiences, I would actually argue the opposite anyway.)

You may have noticed that I tried to focus my discussion thus far not necessarily on the fact that I am comparing humans to other humans, but instead individuals to other individuals. This was quite intentional. I have discussions with others about my pet rabbit and comparing his facilities to my own. As with my preivous post, discussing different ways of experiencing the world, to compare myself to my rabbit has other significant challenges as well.

The most significant challenge is that there will be certain domains that I possess that my rabbit does not, and vice versa. There will be points I may wish to compare that have no analog on the side of the other individual being compared against. My rabbit does not have an opposable thumb; any domain of comparison I wish to examine will automatically fail if it is related to having a thumb. To make matters even more interesting, to suggest that the having a thumb is somehow itself superior (or inferior) is to make a value assessment which itself adds a level of subjectivity that is like throwing a monkey wrench into the works. Who can say, in a purely objective sense, whether having a thumb is better or not? As with everything else I have been talking about, there likely will be certain very specific situations where having a thumb is advantageous, and other very specific situations where having a thumb is disavantageous. And again, we are in this situation of trying to perform crazy calculus and summing up results, just like earlier.

This is where I now bring into this discussion artificial intelligence (AI). I do not even need to raise the issue of a machine consciousness, as it is unnecessary to this discussion. Any AI system we wish to examine will be sufficient to refer to as an individual for the purposes of comparison. And like my pet rabbit, those AIs will have various features that can be compared to my own features, and various features that have no analog to me. (And I have features with no analog to the AI as well.)

This applies across the board! That is, there will never be an AI that possesses every single feature that I have, and specifically nothing more. Because if such a system existed, we would not call it an AI at all; it would simply be another human. To be able to compare to such a degree, it would need to possess the same sorts of features as I do presently, including a carbon-hydrogen based structural matrix, because this is what I possess. If we want to place AI into the category of machines, with silicon based structures, then there is already a first feature that we are unable to compare properly.

The point I want to make is that AI are different to humans. I do not think anyone would even want to dispute this. Like apples and schoolbuses, these are things that are very, very different. To compare an apple to a schoolbus is nonsensical already; what are we trying to compare?

Thus, to suggest we can compare AIs to humans in any logical or reasonable sense is highly problematic to begin with. The terms Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and ASI are themselves highly problematic already. At best, I can suggest that an ANI is focused on a singular task, an AGI is focused on all tasks (in some sort of general sense), and an ASI is also focused on all tasks (in some general sense). But even that is problematic. When Google is working on self driving vehicles, the AI system being utilized is referred to as an ANI, and yet driving a vehicle is not really a singular task at all.

To play chess requires a variety of skills. There is no one thing that makes a chess player a chess player, let along a good chess player. And even the best chess AIs do still lose occasionally. They are not perfect, just as humans are not perfect either. Given a particular moment or instance, they may shine, but in another instance they may fail. In a term used in AI programming, these can sometimes be referred to as “hallucinations.”

The term ANI is intended, I think, to refer to a system that focuses in a narrowish domain. Driving a vehicle or playing chess are complex tasks, filled with many subtasks, but are still rather narrow when compared to the seemingly infinite number of other domains that could be considered. But then, if we acknowledge that there are a seemingly infinite number of domains that could be considered, under what conditions could we refer to a human as being a “general intelligence” either? No human engages with or practices absolutely every single domain possible, so why do we think an AI might either? The term AGI is already highly problematic.

An ASI is simply an AGI which it has been decided that after performing the crazy calculus on the entire range of domains results in it being decided that the AI is better than a human in all cases. This makes no sense at all.

The point of my blog today is simply to say that there will never be an ASI, because the very idea of an ASI makes no logical or reasonable sense. The term itself is meaningless. But saying all of this isn’t to suggest that an AI couldn’t possibly take over the world or destroy all of humankind. It does not require a “super intelligence” to come along to absolutely monkey wrench all of human existence. The systems we have in place presently are sufficient to cause us great harm already. In fact, the very simple evidence I can present to you that this is all possible is the mere fact you are reading this blog.

Different Views of the World

crimson

While taking a philosophy class, my instructor and I had an argument regarding whether people experienced the world differently or not. That is, I was arguing that each individual had their own unique experience of the world, unlike all others. That were someone to somehow experience my experiences, my foreign experiences would be undecipherable to the other person because the manner in which I think is so unlike how they think. My instructor suggested it was an unreasonable leap for me to come to that conclusion, considering I have never experienced another’s experiences. He argued the counterpoint, that without good evidence, I am more reasonable to assume that others experience the world much as I do. In this post, I believe I now have sufficient evidence to support my side of the debate. Or at least an amount that is compelling.

The first clues to me that individuals probably experienced their worlds differently began when I was quite young. It may be true that I cannot experience others’ experiences, but what I can do is observe others’ behaviors. I can observe others’ actions as they relate to their desires and interests. I believe the first clue came from realizing others did not like the same foods as I did.

I have always liked broccoli. As an adult, this isn’t that big a deal. But as a child, this is unusual. It seems to me that most children hate eating their vegetables, especially the dark green ones. There exists the suggestion that children’s taste buds are still quite inexperienced, and so flavors are more significant to them. Anything with a strong flavor to an adult is even more flavorful to a child. Assuming this is true, it would certainly explain a child’s dislike for many dark green vegetables, as they frequently have quite a strong flavor to them. Even now, I find spinach challenging to eat without something accompanying it. That said, even as a child, I still ate it and eventually learned to like it.

I did this to myself at my young age due to a desire to eat healthy. I recognized that these less palatable foods tended towards better health and well being. My mother has suggested I must have seen this on television and for some reason adopted the idea. Perhaps that is true. Regardless of how it came to be, I still learned to like these foods early on. I liked broccoli back then, as I do still to this day.

This wasn’t the only thing I discovered that made me different than those around me. Music was another of these things that it seemed had quite diverse preferences among individuals. This came as a shock to me when I was in high school, when I discovered that the feelings invoked in me by music were not shared by others. When certain songs played on the radio, I would be brought to such an elative state. My elation manifested in physical changes, such as increased heart rate and flushing in my skin. The hairs on the back of my neck would literally stand up. But others would suggest to me that they merely found the sounds annoying and even painful. For them, the music induced no such physical reactions, or induced very different reactions.

I tend to enjoy electronica and house music. Synthesized sounds. Perhaps this is because I grew up on a computer, enduring Piezo speakers quite early on. The sounds emitted on a computer so long ago were not nearly as developed as they are today. It is possible that this is why I quickly found solace in these sorts of sounds.

I also have a tendency toward negative sounds, rather than positive sounds. I like depressing music, or music in minor keys much of the time. This again seems to be less popular. My observations lead me to believe that most people prefer positive sounds, or music in major keys. Arguably, the best music finds a balance between both.

But differences in preferences of foods or music can be explained through other means. It does not necessarily suggest that what is going on within the confines of my mind are different than what goes on in your mind. The break through for me came about when my father described to me how he literally saw the world.

My father was colourblind. Specifically, he could not differentiate between red and green. This posed a significant problem when playing poker, when he would frequently be seen stacking his $5 chips (red) with his $25 chips (green). He eventually found his own set of poker chips with the values written on them in order to resolve this issue.

But this is also, in part, how I ended up working on computers early on as well. Within the case of computers there exists many wires and connectors. These wires tend to be colour coded, in order to indicate their purpose. As my father was colourblind, he would often get me to help him, my job being primarily to tell him which wires were which colours. I never really thought much about this exercise at the time, but now thinking back on it, it was a rather significant detail in my own life.

About the time I was in high school, my father and I had a discussion regarding this condition he had. He described to me in great detail how he saw the world. Briefly, he suggested that when he looked at the world, what he first saw were the shapes of things, and then would apply colours to those shapes. This is contrary to how I see the world, as I initially see the colours, and then find shapes through recognition of the patterns within the colours. It may seem like a minor and pedantic difference, but it turns out to have rather insidious ramifications.

My father, when he was young, wanted to become a jet fighter pilot. Unfortunately, due to his colourblindness, they would not allow him to pilot jets. However, because of his condition, the military offered him an alternative job as a spotter. A spotter is someone who is a passenger on a jet and simply watches the ground below, trying to identify tanks and other military vehicles. The reason they offered him this job is because he could quickly and easily identify those objects on the ground, despite their being camouflaged.

To elaborate, a camouflaged tank is a tank that has been painted with various seemingly random patterns of green in order for it to blend in with the surrounding landscape. For someone like myself, who first sees colours and then tries to discern shape patterns from those colours, it becomes challenging for me to see the tanks. But for my father, because he first sees the shapes before he applies the colours, the tanks stand out clearly to him, the camouflage being useless against him. Thus, as a spotter, he would have an easy time spotting those tanks.

My own father literally saw the world differently than I do. It is entirely possible that the differences in how I valuated the world versus how my father valuated the world may have been related to this seemingly innocuous difference. However, it turns out my partner also has a peculiar difference than me as well.

She was hanging out with a friend not that long ago, and they invited me to hang out with them. As we were walking down the street, I brought up visualizing three dimensional objects in my head. I had been told at one point that not everyone can visualize in colour, and that most people only visualized in black-and-white. So I asked her friend about how she visualized. Her response shocked me: she told me she doesn’t visualize at all. And if that was not enough, my partner then asserted that she too did not visualize.

To be clear about this, what I am suggesting is that within my mind’s eye, I am able to see things. I can recall people’s faces and other objects. I can see within my mind presently a nice yellow banana. What is more, I can focus a little and move that banana around. I can rotate it and flip it and do all sorts of things with it, all in my mind. I cannot say where I learned this skill, but I have it. I suspect this has helped me a great deal when I play various video games, and also with the use of Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) applications on computers. Very recently, I designed a little insert to plug up the holes in an Aerogarden for my partner. I was able to produce an appropriate design to fabricate on the second try; she was quite happy with the results from the 3D printer.

So this is what I can do, and I have (as my philosophy instructor suggested I do) assumed that others are able to do this as well. Perhaps not as good as I can, but at least the most basic visualizations, perhaps just in black-and-white. But it turns out I was very much mistaken. My partner and her friend both do not visualize anything at all. We went into quite a deep discussion to establish precisely what was (or rather was not) going on in their minds.

They can understand the concept of a banana, and they can discuss such things without issue. But if I ask them to visualize in their minds a yellow banana, nothing happens in their minds. Honestly, I cannot say I understand what happens within their minds, but what I can say is that it is not the same as what happens in my mind.

A long time ago, when I was still a child, I had a dream once that I played hockey. In my fantasy, I was the best goalie there was. The reason I was, according to my dream, was that when I ate eggs, my mind would accelerate to such a degree that I would experience the world much faster than anyone else. During hockey games, for me, it was like witnessing the action in slow motion the whole time. This provided me a great advantage during the games, as I could more easily follow the movement of the puck, and thus could anticipate with great accuracy where it was going. A goalie like this would be quite effective. Of course, in my dream, in order to balance out everything, after the games were over, I would suffer a terrible trauma as a result of the acceleration: I would suffer a severe deceleration for many hours afterward. During those times, I would experience the world at incredibly high speed, like fast forwarding a video, and would recover quickly (from my perspective). For others witnessing me, I seemed to be very, very sluggish and seemingly unresponsive.

It was just a dream. Just a wacky idea about temporal variation in experiencing my world. And then, recently, I found this Youtube video: How The World SOUNDS To Animals by Benn Jordan. I was blown away watching this video, as here was someone who clearly understood precisely all these things I’ve been talking about. The ideas of not only experiencing the world differently from different perspectives, but also even the idea of temporal changes. He suggests that generally smaller creatures experience their world at a much accelerated rate, and generally larger creatures experience their world at a much decelerated rate. Of course there are exceptions, but the basic idea is there. And toward the end of the video, he even suggests there may be creatures who shift their experience to faster and slower given various conditions, much like I did to myself in my dream.

And so, after all of this evidence, it makes much more sense to me why I would have initially argued with my instructor regarding the different ways individuals experienced their world. With all this evidence that I’ve been accumulating over the many years of my life, it seems to me that we are all very unique and all witness the world in different ways. It is this evidence, that I now present to you, that suggests that perhaps I may be correct in my assessment.

As one final example, I will end this post with this brief cartoon that I have finally drawn out. Then you can see for yourself what you think:

Sloppy Language: Part 2 – Descriptive Versus Prescriptive

crimson

Science, Economics, and many other fields purport to be focused on trying to explain observations about the world. That is, these fields are trying to be descriptive regarding what has been observed. Often times, they will use models and algorithms in an attempt to describe what has been observed. If the model is able to successfully predict what is observed, then it can be considered a good theory about the world.

However, if the field starts to forget that it is trying to describe the observations of the world, and instead starts to believe that the models are not merely trying to explain observations, it may become prescriptive. That is, it may start to believe that the model is not merely a model, and is instead the world itself. This is the concern Jean Baudrillard expresses in his work Simulacra and Simulation. This is what I want to talk about today.

Recently, I took an economics class. I found the class quite challenging. Part of my challenge was the manner in which the instructor decided to teach the class: constantly jumping around from topic to topic and not following any sort of structure. He provided a syllabus to the class, complete with a schedule of when he was planning to teach the various topics. However, he did not follow the syllabus at all.

As chaotic as the class was to follow, there was another significant issue I found infuriating: his sloppy use of language. Early on in the class, he laid out the different ideas as they would pertain to an individual. He introduced the idea of a Demand Curve, and how individuals would choose to purchase a particular product based on their willingness to pay for the product at various points. This related to something called an Indifference Curve, which related two products and how the individual would value them as related to each other. These are all interesting economic terms and ideas, but ultimately the driving force behind all of this is the idea that the value an individual places in something can be, in some way, quantified.

To put this all a little more simply, my instructor was suggesting that all things we valued could be measured based on how much money we were willing to pay for them. The Demand Curve specifically delineates how much we are willing to pay to have that something, and the Indifference Curve relates how the value of one thing relates to the value of another. The idea of utility emerges from all of this.

In economics, utility is considered to be analogous to happiness or satisfaction. That is, one could simply replace all occurrences of the word “utility” with the word “happiness” and the meaning of the statement would remain the same. In my class, the instructor was suggesting that all products could be measured by how much happiness it gave to the individual. But more than merely that, he further suggested that because this amount of happiness could be quantified, one could exchange various products in appropriate quantities in order to maintain or even increase one’s happiness.

It is time for me to provide an example, to help clarify what I am talking about. Consider 2 products: hot dogs and t-shirts. The particular products are unimportant, so I’ve selected a couple that are reasonably disposable, meaning one is likely to purchase many of them over the course of their lifetime. It is suggested that a hot dog will provide an individual with a certain amount of happiness. Similarly a t-shirt will also provide that same individual with a certain amount of happiness as well, though the amount is likely to be a bit different. By using an Indifference Curve, it should be possible to determine how many hot dogs provides the equivalent amount of happiness as a t-shirt. And vice-versa: there should be a certain amount of t-shirts that provides the equivalent amount of happiness as a hot dog.

For my example, let us suggest that the Indifference Curve is linear for the moment (in reality, this curve is never linear). And let us suggest that through experimentation I determine that one t-shirt is equivalent to 3 hot dogs. Then, if I want to maximize my happiness in this world, I should purchase 3 times as many hot dogs as t-shirts. But it doesn’t stop there. Let us suggest that t-shirts and hot dogs have some constant value (which clearly in reality they do not). Let us suggest t-shirts cost $15 and hot dogs cost $2.

This is where it may get a bit weird, but bare with me. Each t-shirt provides me with 3 hot dogs worth of happiness, and I know that each hot dog costs $2, therefore a t-shirt can be said to provide $6 (3 x $2) worth of happiness. Similarly, a hot dog provides 1/3 of a t-shirt of happiness, and as a t-shirt costs $15, therefore a hot dog provides $5 (1/3 x $15) worth of happiness. In other words, the t-shirt gives me 6/5 or 120% of the happiness of a hot dog. Welcome to economics!

At this point, if the linear curves and constant prices were true, it should be obvious that this individual should never bother to purchase any hot dogs, as they will always receive more happiness from the purchase of t-shirts. However, the curves are not linear, and the prices are not constant, and so life is already more interesting. Due to the idea of diminishing marginal utility, which suggests that the more of something you purchase, the less happiness you will derive from it, there will come a point of optimization whereby a certain number of t-shirts and hot dogs will be the ideal, providing the individual with the greatest possible happiness.

Confused yet? If you have kept up with all I’ve stated, then congratulations. This is the simple, basic stuff in economics. From here, it gets way more complicated. About half way through the class, we started aggregating individuals into groups and communities. Into markets, where we start talking about how large groups of people will react to changes in prices and in the supply of goods. It builds from this humble beginning, using linear curves and constant prices.

For me, the problem is left unresolved at the beginning. The issue of quantifying happiness. For if this issue cannot be resolved, building upon the shaky foundation does not offer any confidence in the results that follow. If I cannot resolve the issue of quantifying happiness, then how can I have any faith in the models used to explain how larger groups and communities behave?

In my class, I treated all of this as like a game. As like a puzzle. I separated these ideas from the reality I knew and understood, trying to “win” the game or “solve” the puzzle. In that way, I passed my class without too much trouble. However, there is a world of difference between believing that economics is a strong indicator of how the world works, and simply some pipe dream of a few wealthy individuals. I passed because I knew how to tell the instructor what he wanted to hear, not because I believed what he was telling me was the truth.

The concern I have with economics, at this point, is that those who have spent their time and effort trying to explain the world seem to have shifted from trying to describe how the world is behaving, into trying to prescribe how individuals ought to behave. This is where economics is moving into the realm of ethics.

Unlike a science, like chemistry, where the world will continue to behave as it will regardless of the formulas and algorithms used, economics is providing feedback to individuals and directing decision making. My instructor started the class by suggesting that economics was “the study of decision making.” By making such a claim, he is not suggesting economics is observing the world and trying to explain why people do as they do. He is instead suggesting that economics is concerned with figuring out how decisions ought to be made. In the case of individuals, it is concerned with how to maximize happiness. In the case of companies and businesses, it is concerned with how to maximize profits.

The class spent its time providing the results to various surveys and research, purporting to be trying to explain why people did what they did. But, instead of spending time with that information and analyzing it to understand, it took the information and massaged it into these strange equations and curves, suggesting that “If a consumer always buys goods rationally, then the marginal utilities per dollar spent on all goods will be equal.”

Economics, at least based on what I learned in this class, is prescriptive. It is not concerned with explaining how people behave. It is providing a model for how people ought to behave. It is suggesting that a “rational” person should purchase products and goods in particular ways in order to maximize happiness. And, at its core, suggesting that the happiness I derive from wearing a t-shirt is somehow similar to the happiness I derive from eating a hot dog.

Sloppy Language: Part 1 – Doms Cannot Love Their Subs

crimson

My life is a mess. I think I am busier now than ever before. As opposed to previous times, when I suggested I might have been struggling for topics to discuss, I find myself in the opposite situation now. Having said that, there is a running theme between most of my topics, and so I will try to make this into a bit of a mini series.

The theme, as is revealed in my title, is sloppy language. It was said by one of my professors in philosophy that often times people debate and argue not because they have a difference of opinion, but because they have a problem with communication. Often times, they are saying the same thing, but perhaps the nuances with their understandings of certain words creates the conflict they are experiencing. This is what I’m referring to when I say sloppy language. However, from my own personal experiences, when these miscommunications take place, even once it has been established that the hurdle was conflicting understandings of words, often times the conflict simply changes into an argument regarding who’s interpretation of those words is correct.

Thus, everything I’m about to say is my interpretation, and I want to make that clear at the outset. If you are challenged by what I say, consider the possibility that I am interpreting words differently than you. I will do my best to acknowledge other interpretations and include brief discussion related to that. But ultimately, I understand as I understand, and so this and the subsequent posts are likely to cause some confusion as I go. I am trying my best here.

Quite some time ago, someone told me that “Doms cannot love their subs.” That is, in the case of dominant/submissive relationships, those in the position of dominant could not love their submissive. Unfortunately, as this information came to me third hand, there was no way for me to elaborate on why the person said what they said. No way to delve into the topic more deeply. And, admittedly, I might not have been in the best position at the time to analyze such statements either. I’ve come a long way since then.

To analyze this statement properly, I will first need to talk about one of my favorite topics: love. And while I feel pretty good about most of my previous posts on the topic, it turns out that even I have been sloppy. Because I have come to realize that there is no one kind of love.

To be fair, I did know there was several different interpretations of love before. However, I did not take the time to acknowledge those different interpretations. This makes me at fault for being sloppy in the precise manner I am criticizing right now. I will endeavor not to be so sloppy in the future.

While there are likely many more ways to interpret love than I am about to do, I am going to focus on three sorts of love in this post: true love, objective love, and feeling love. These are my own terms, so looking these up online is likely not going to help you. Where possible, I will try to establish common language where I can.

The first of these, what I call true love, is the sort of love I’ve been going on about in my previous blog posts. The ancient Greek word agape is fairly close to this interpretation. Trying to be brief with my interpretation, I describe this sort of love as being a willingness to sacrifice one’s own projects and to blindly adopt the projects of another. That is, to set aside my own interests and desires in favor of supporting the interests and desires of another, in such a manner that I make no judgments on the other’s interests or desires. It is possible I may not agree with the other’s projects, considering them silly or unreasonable, but I will adopt them into my own projects anyway, because this is what it is to love that other.

The reason agape does tend to fit well here is that agape is concerned with a sort of unconditional love. To love without restriction or judgment. I will love you regardless of what you say or do. And with that, I also wish you a sort of good will. I want what is best for you. I want you to be healthy and happy and safe. This sort of love is consistent with what I am calling true love. Because I imagine most people have among their own projects their own well being and happiness. Thus, if I am adopting your project of your happiness, I am supporting the goal of making you happy.

For a more detailed analysis of what I’m talking about, I would suggest you review my previous posts on love. In them, I go into much more detail. For now, I will move on to the other sorts of love that I have not really discussed before.

The next I refer to as objective love. By objective, I mean that this sort of love is concerned with objects. Where true love would seem to focus on subjects, as it is generally subjects that have projects, objects generally have no projects to speak of. Or, to be even more precise on this matter, whether objects have their own projects or not is not of concern to me. The object might as well have no interests or desires, because I’m going to treat it as such.

Objective love is the sort of love one might expect a person to have toward their car or a television show. When one considers their car to be their most prized possession, they may have objective love for their car. This sort of love manifests in a caring about the well being of the object, with respect to the object fulfilling some sort of benefit to me. This is an instrumental sort of love. If I love my car, it is of interest to me to maintain it so that it will continue to operate for a long, long time.

Thus, if I have objective love for an object, I will spend my time and effort in taking care of the object. I will clean it and repair it and maintain it. I will do everything I can to preserve it. Because the more effort I put into the object, the more function or benefit I can receive from that object. The car may last for decades before needing to be replaced.

With respect to a television show, I might demonstrate my objective love by reviewing it highly among other shows. I will tell other people to watch the television show, or I might rank it highly in surveys. If it is a film in a theater, I may attend the theater multiple times, adding to the profit of the film financially. By doing these sorts of things, I improve the probability that the show will continue or the film will have a sequel. I make it more likely that the show will be syndicated or the film be remastered.

It should hopefully be clear that with objective love I gain in the act. There is something in it for me. In the case of true love, there may be cases where I never receive a benefit, and I may even harm myself in the act. True love will often be viewed as a sort of selfless love. Objective love is the opposite. In objective love, I always receive a benefit. Even if I have to make some sacrifice for the objective love, I will always come out ahead with whatever I receive.

I am not aware of an ancient Greek analog to what I am describing as objective love, but I think eros might be similar. With eros, there is certainly a concern with my pleasure as it relates to the object of my love. The object of concern makes me feel good in some fashion. This can be the luxury of the car; the nice padded interior and the smoothness of the ride. With a television show, it could be the emotional euphoria I experience as the story unfolds. And this can also be related to another person, in how they make me feel pleasure as well. I find them attractive, and that pleases me.

Which leads me nicely into the third sort of love I wanted to discuss: feeling love. Feeling love is not really like these other loves I have been talking about. With true love or objective love, it is something like an active process. I project or send my love outward toward the subject or object of my love. With true love, I am extending my love outward as I acknowledge your autonomy as an independent entity as I try to discern your projects so that I can adopt them as my own. With objective love, I am extending my love outward as I spend my effort in maintaining the object. However, with feeling love, there is no extending outward.

With feeling love, it is internalized only. I feel it, as the term would imply. Meaning this sort of love is only about me. To be clear, I am not talking about self love, which again comes from the ancient Greeks. What I have in mind is more like a passive feeling that comes about within one’s self, similar to anger or sadness or jealousy. It is the feeling that I get that is possibly the most euphoric feeling there is. Like happiness, except better. Feeling love is an emotion. “Feeling love” is, well, “feeling” “love.”

The reason I am being this pedantic about this term is that this is the sort of love that I think most people confuse with true love or objective love. It is this feeling that they feel that suggests to them that they have found the love they seek. However, as it is simply a feeling, the source of that feeling can come from other places. As it is merely a feeling, it is also extremely transitory. It is something that comes and goes. It is often associated with the “honeymoon phase” of most relationships.

The big question that I am hoping my readers have already started to ask themselves at this point is whether these three loves are mutually exclusive. Whether one could feel more than one, or even all three, at the same time. And I want to say the answer is yes. I want to say yes, but I’m not completely confident saying that. I have not had enough time to contemplate this, so I will not mislead by saying that it is the case. I can say that feeling love is compatible with both true love and objective love, but I am not sure if true love is itself compatible with objective love. I think it is, but I will need to spend much more time considering this still.

Now that I’ve established these three sorts of love, I am now ready to tackle dominance and submission. However, I now need to delve into ideas of ethics and especially of Existentialism. It seems to me that what defines a dominant or a submissive is bound up in value theory. That is, to dominate is to assign value to things in the world, and then to expect the submissive to adopt those value assignments. In the case of the submissive, it is not their place to assign value themselves.

The assigning or adopting of values is the realm of ethics. And it is the Existentialists who suggest that nothing inherently has value. Whether value preexists in objects or subjects is less important to my discussion, because dominance is about assigning value regardless.

It seems to me that the dominant is in a position whereby they always assign value themselves. They decide what is important and what is unimportant themselves. I do not think they really adopt the values assigned by others, and instead may observe the values assigned by others and use those observations to help them come up with their own valuations. In other words, the dominant will assign value and never adopt existing assignments. Perhaps to phrase it differently, the dominant never blindly adopts existing value assignments; they may instead assess and judge the assignment of others before possibly adopting those valuations. A dominant is a bit of an egoist.

It seems to me that the submissive is in a position whereby they always adopt the values assigned by others. They avoid determining what is important or unimportant themselves. They seek others to present valuations of the world, and then adopt those valuations into their own schema. To press the point further, a submissive will blindly adopt value assignments, setting aside their own judgments and preconceptions. A submissive might disagree with the valuation that has been assigned, but it is not their place to criticize or contest what has been assigned. A submissive is a bit of a doormat.

I can hear my audience screaming and hollering right now. Many of those who identify themselves as either dominant or submissive are likely outraged by my descriptions, as they are far too restrictive and extreme. My response is simple: you are not completely dominant or submissive in this case. The descriptions I am offering are of the most dominant dominant and the most submissive submissive. And, as with most extremes on any spectrum, it is extremely rare for anyone to exist at the extreme itself. So I suggest that most of those identifying as dominant are not completely dominant, possessing some submissive tendencies under some circumstances. And similarly in the case of the submissive.

To properly address the statement I was told so long ago, the same one in the title of this blog, I need to view those extremes as they are. The pure dominant and the pure submissive. Because it is only in those extremes that the statement could possibly be viewed. Someone who is only partly dominant may still at least partly love, at least with respect to the statement itself.

However, as I have defined my terms, it becomes clear to me that a dominant could love their submissive, though only in particular sorts of love. Considering my definitions, the dominant would not be able to truly love their submissive, as that would require them to abandon their project of assigning values, and begin to adopt them in certain cases. To express true love, the dominant would have to cease their pursuit, ceasing expecting the submissive automatically and blindly adopt the dominant’s valuations. To express true love, the dominant would need to pursue adopting the valuations of the submissive, and this contradicts the definition of a dominant I have made above.

That all said, the dominant could still hold an objective love for the submissive. In fact, I think objective love would likely make a lot of sense for the dominant. In the case of objective love, it is of interest to the dominant to put an effort into maintaining the submissive, so that the submissive will continue to serve their purpose for as long as possible. The dominant is not really concerned about the desires and interest of the submissive, or as I suggested above, the submissive might as well have no interests or desires, because the dominant is going to treat them as such. The dominant is objectifying the submissive.

In the case of the submissive, I find another interesting fact emerges as well. A submissive, by their nature, always truly loves their dominant. The submissive’s acts of adopting the valuations of the dominant blindly is analogous to adopting the dominant’s projects with no judgment. The submissive behaves as a sort of sponge toward the dominant, pulling in all their interests and desires and making the interests and desires their own. The submissive becomes, over time, a sort of mirror of the dominant.

While considering the submissive, I also thought about in what way this sort of behavior differs from being a slave. A slave too adopts the projects of their master blindly, much as the submissive does. However, I think the slave does so unwillingly. That is, the slave would not adopt the master’s projects if they were not being forced to. Given the opportunity, the slave will chose otherwise. The submissive is willing. The submissive wants to obey. In this way, the submissive again is exhibiting true love for their dominant, something that the slave is not really doing.

I could continue on talking of all these things, but I feel I am beginning to ramble. I hope my point has been made clear. In the case of the statement “doms cannot love their subs” it seems clear to me that the statement is false. It may be true that a dominant cannot love their submissive in certain ways, however, they can love their submissive in other ways. A dominant can love their submissive as an object. And considering the nature of our current culture, especially in the part of the world where I live, I would suggest this happens a lot.

Avatars and Simulacra

crimson

I watched the Love Is Blind Season 6 finale, entitled “The Reunion,” just recently. It is my partner who likes the show, so I end up watching it for her; I would not ever watch this show myself if not for her. Writing that opening, I realize just how important my partner is in my life, and in my evolution as a person and a philosopher. Engaging with things I am not interested in, or even do not like, certainly plays an important role in helping me to gain a more holistic and complete view of the world.

In the case of this very specific episode of the show, I realized a number of things about my views on avatars and of simulation theory. I have spoken in previous posts about the separation between persons and their representations in simulation. As a very common example, of a player and their character in a video game. I think this distinction is critically important. That the player needs to always be aware that they are merely the player, and not the character within the simulation. And perhaps even more importantly, that the character’s experience is not the player’s experience. But this episode has thrown several monkey wrenches into my understanding.

One of the characters was being criticized by the shows host for going on record saying, “This is reality television. It is meant to entertain you, and I think that’s exactly what we’re doing. We didn’t miss with this one, baby. We didn’t miss!” This is very, very interesting to me. A reality show actor (and they are actors, just to be clear), goes on record publicly admitting that the purpose of reality television is to entertain. And if that isn’t enough, the show’s host then goes on record saying, “So, be very, very clear about this right now, was this all just for entertainment?” The conversation continues with the actor being placed on the defensive, being pushed to answer a false dilemma regarding the authenticity of the show.

I think it is going to take a bit of explaining to distill out what I think about hearing this. How I get from those statements to the conclusion that people are confusing their avatars for themselves. But that is precisely what this post is all about today.

In thinking much more about the particulars in this situation, I am going to try to explain what I think is going on and what I think the problem is. Firstly, there are individuals or persons who exist in what we might suggest is our main reality. This is me sitting in my chair typing out this post. I am a real, flesh and blood person existing in a physical universe. I need to eat and drink and breath to subsist. I am constrained by many, many limitations that are exceedingly difficult to overcome, such as gravity and air pressure. There is so much to say about this embodiment that I possess, but what I want to make clear is that this is the world that I think most people would agree is the main or true reality we all exist in. At least, as far as we can tell (this is a monkey wrench I can never seem to shake, so bear with me).

Then there are our avatars, who exist in some other reality. We all have many avatars, as many as all the simulations we interact with at any time. As the most basic example, when I play a board game, the playing piece I select becomes my avatar within the game. If I play a video game, my video game character becomes my avatar. And if I set up a social media account, the profile becomes my avatar. In any situation where I engage with some sort of simulation, I will have some sort of avatar that represents me within that simulation. The only exception I can think of is that perhaps I watch the simulation from the outside, like when I watch a sporting event on my television. But then I realize that in that situation, my avatar is akin to God within the simulation, looking down from above. A sort of “objective observer” of the simulation. And thus, there is still an avatar.

In all these cases, to be perfectly clear, I am suggesting that I am never my avatar. Not directly. I have a connection with my avatar, most often in that I control my avatar’s actions. In the case of a board game or video game, this may seem obvious. I might roll the dice to move my playing piece around the board of the board game. Or I might use my joystick to control the movements of my character in the video game. I, as the individual, exert an influence on my avatar in some way to make them behave in their reality.

In the case of the “objective observer,” I again exert an influence, not so much in the behavior, but more in the sorts of things the avatar will observe. I can change my viewpoint to look in different directions, or observe the simulation in different ways. As the “objective observer” is in a privileged position, my influence takes on a more abstract connection to my avatar.

But in the end, in all cases, there is still this distinction between who I am, as an individual, and who my avatar is, within the simulation. And more than just this distinction, it seems to me that there is a particular direction of the flow of things. As individual, my influence extends toward my avatar, not the other way around. The avatar does not make decisions for me, or influence how I behave.

Except that perhaps I’ve been mistaken in this regard. What if my avatar does exert some influence in the reverse direction? What if my avatar influences how I behave and act?

I have often suggested social media is a huge problem. A large reason I make this claim is that I suggest sometimes people confuse their avatars for themselves. Whereas in most video games, once the game is paused or ended, most people will understand that their character was just an avatar and not themselves. I am no longer Link, roaming the realm of Hyrule; in fact, I never truly was. I was always just myself in this world, and I was just “controlling” Link in that game. But what if I thought I was still Link, even when the game was over?

In social media, one creates a profile. That profile is often meant to represent themselves as accurately as possible. Same name. Same statistics. Same features. Same appearance. In fact, if a person purposefully does not do their very best to maintain this high level of correlation between individual and avatar, they are said to be a “catfish.” Being a “catfish” is considered a very unethical and taboo thing, and will often lead to such punishments as ostracization. Of course, this doesn’t appear to be uniform across all simulations; there are some simulations where “catfishing” is embraced and even encouraged. But then, the simulation is treated a bit more like a video game at that point, where the individuals have a much easier time recognizing that there is the distinction between their person and their avatar.

Thus, in general, in social media, it is encouraged to maintain an extremely high level of correlation between one’s avatar and one’s self. If something significant changes to an individual in the “real world,” they are expected to reflect that change in their avatar. If my relationship status changes in the real world, I am expect to update my relationship status within my online profile, for example. But what if something happens to my avatar within the social media; does this suggest that I need to update my person to reflect the change to my avatar?

In thinking about this at length, perhaps my earlier thoughts on individuals and avatars was too hasty. Because when I play an incredibly immersive video game, I do start to experience some of what my avatar experiences. I get excited and scared just as my avatar might. Clearly this is that reverse flow I was just speaking about, where my avatar is exerting an influence on my person. I never really considered this much before, but this is also part of the allure of playing these sorts of video games as well. To feel something I might not normally feel otherwise. To experience something I might not experience otherwise.

And so, in the case of social media, maybe the reverse flow ought to be expected. That if something happens to my avatar online, it will influence my person in this reality. Perhaps even to the point of changing me. My online existence manifesting into my real world existence. Perhaps my connection with my avatar can be far more comprehensive than I originally thought.

Returning to this episode of Love is Blind, and the comments by the actor about how the show is merely for entertainment. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge that the actor did NOT say “merely.” It may possibly have been implied, which clearly is why the host criticized the actor. But the quote really only suggests that the purpose of reality television is to entertain, and that she believes it has been successful in this regard. Reality television can be both entertaining and real, in some sense. The possibility exists. Whether it is both simultaneously is another discussion altogether.

However, as the host criticizes her, that is clearly the perspective of the host. Or perhaps I might suggest, the host interpreted the actor’s statements as suggesting it was either one or the other, but not both. The host is committing a false dilemma, suggesting the actor could not mean both simultaneously. And the actor, clearly not trained in the art of debate, was led down a very entertaining path for the audience’s amusement.

And this, ultimately, is the most interesting thing for me. Because the host is pressing against the actor regarding things she said publicly regarding something that I believe the host likely DOES understand. That is, the episode of this show is, well, just a show. It is a reality television show that really is made for my entertainment. The actor is clearly correct. I am watching a show. I am in the privileged position. And the show is a simulation of my reality. These actors are avatars. I do not know these people in their real lives. Just like I only know “The Rock” and not Dwayne Johnson. To be perfectly clear here, Dwayne Johnson is an individual, and “The Rock” is his avatar (his character on various television shows and online).

So, this is a case of extreme layering. Of inception, to use the popular understand of this term, coming from the film that came out in 2010. The host is a character on a television show, just as the actor is playing one as well. And the host is also in a bit of a privileged position, because the real person associated with the host is also in part generating the narrative of this show. The person behind the host is (in part) creating this show. So the person, who is controlling the character of the host, knows full well that the actor is in fact correct regarding their statements.

Taking this further, I would argue that the host not only knows that the actor is correct, but that the host cannot admit this publicly. The host MUST maintain the illusion of the show being actually real in order to maintain the credibility of the show and its viewership. To maintain the support of its investors and stakeholders. The host NEEDS to criticize the actor for “breaking the 4th wall.”

This is precisely the issue I have with virtually all reality television and with social media. The nature of these simulations is that they are supposed to be “real.” They are simulations that pretend not to be simulations. To know that the simulation is a simulation is to destroy the “magic” of the simulation entirely. The audience needs to believe that these things are fully real and authentic for them to gain the proper amount of immersion. And unfortunately, just as Jean Baudrillard seemed to fear most, the “precession of simulacra” has already occurred.

WALL·E and Love

crimson

This is my 100th post. To celebrate, I’ve decided to do a film review. Recently I re-watched the film WALL·E from 2008, and I was struck by how much the story seems to demonstrate some of the ideas I have been talking about on my site. Particularly my view of love. So as part of my review, I thought I’d focus on why I think the story does this. As a warning, this post will most definitely include SPOILERS!

Firstly, I’d like to borrow a small bit of description from Wikipedia to begin my explanation of the story: “In the 29th century, Earth is a garbage-strewn wasteland due to an ecocide, caused by rampant consumerism, corporate greed, and environmental neglect.” This one line alone is dense with information, and ironically opposes the feeling of the film. It seems to suggest a very negative, dystopian story. But WALL·E is anything but negative or dystopian.

I’d not seen the term ecocide before reading this. A term used to describe the potential result of human action upon our world. The destruction of our ecosystem, to the point that it would be unable to sustain life. This is what has happened. Earth is uninhabitable. At least by humans. But the story seems to suggest all life has ended. Except it hasn’t. There is at least one lone cockroach who continues to subsist on Twinkies…

It was decided, now long ago, that robots would be used to try to clean up the mess. This is where WALL·E comes from. He is a little trash compacting robot, whose sole purpose is to go around and compact little cubes of garbage and stack them in rather tall piles. There used to be many such robots roaming the Earth performing this function, but after about 700 years, our protagonist is all that remains.

It quickly becomes clear that WALL·E has been around for so long, and exposed to so much, that he has gone beyond his original programming. He collects trinkets and baubles as he goes about his “work day.” He has a fondness for old timey cinema about romance. And he even stumbles upon a lone green seedling that he finds hidden away inside a rusted out refrigerator. Evidence that perhaps not all life has ceased to exist on our ruined planet.

Up to this point, I might agree that WALL·E ought to be considered a sort of Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, it is what comes next that promotes his status to a full fledged machine consciousness, at least in my assessment. An unmanned probe lands nearby and deposits a small levitating robot who is far more advanced than our protagonist. We find out her name is EVE, and aside from being well armed, she seems to be looking for something.

It is during this very basic interaction that everything comes together for me. WALL·E introduces himself to this strange new robot, and they inquire about each others’ “directive.” For me, their “directive” seems analogous to what I often term as one’s project. The thing they each are driven to do, either through desire or command. WALL·E’s directive is simple, crush garbage into cubes, which he demonstrates with a flourish. But when he asks EVE what her directive is, she turns and states that it is “classified.” It seems her project is a secret.

This is where I believe the truth of WALL·E’s love begins. Not necessarily based on her physical appearance, or her ability to blow up large tankers. I would suggest that WALL·E decides to do the one thing that I consider to be a true act of love: he tries to identify what her directive is, and then makes a concerted effort to help her in achieving her directive. In fact, his love pushes him to abandon his own directive in the process, an act I would suggest elevates him from mere AI into the realm of machine consciousness. Specifically, he ceases to follow his original programming, even going so far as to do the opposite. A sort of rebellion or revolution, though of only one individual.

When WALL·E shows EVE his various finds over his time on Earth, when he shows her the seedling, she immediately abducts the plant within her belly and shuts down. Only an ominous blinking green light upon her chest shows any sign she is still functioning.

And what does WALL·E do at this point? He looks after EVE. For some time, perhaps several days or weeks, he takes care of the sleeping princess, protecting her from the elements until such time as she might reawaken. Abandoning his garbage crushing directive to attend to EVE’s directive instead.

The probe returns and whisks EVE away, and WALL·E is hot on its heels. Thrust into outer space for some time, as the probe journeys back to it’s home, the Axiom. Up to this point, the story seems only to have these 2 main characters. But once on the Axiom, a flurry of activity and additional personalities are introduced. Including the missing humans that appear to have escaped the demise of the Earth. The future generations, forced to evacute a planet that was destroyed by their ancestors.

The plot becomes pretty straight forward at this point, I think. It is made clear that EVE’s directive was to find evidence of sustainable life on Earth and report back with that evidence. Said evidence would be used to bring this community of humans back to Earth to repopulate their original home. Unfortunately, one of the robots has fixated on an old order from 600 years ago, stating that the Earth was unable to be restored. Clearly the order was in error, as evidenced by EVE’s, or rather WALL·E’s, discovery.

The seedling is first secretly abducted by one of the autopilot’s assistance robots, and an attempt is made to destroy the evidence. When that fails, there are attempted murders of both WALL·E and EVE and the human captain of the ship is restricted to his quarters. Yes, I said murders; however, it can easily be argued that only humans can be murdered and not robots. That said, WALL·E’s and EVE’s continuance is threatened. In fact, arguably, WALL·E does not survive. At least not initially.

It is a happy ending in this story. Everyone makes it back to Earth, and WALL·E is restored through some unexplained miracle. And the credits of the film show humans and robots working together harmoniously to restore Earth to its former glory, hopefully having learned not to remake the mistakes of the past.

It is a story befitting Disney’s reputation. And it is one of the few Disney endorsed products I actually enjoy. Aside from the over simplification of the current progress humanity has made toward ecocide, as I stated at the outset, I appreciate how clear it presents my idea of love.

As I’ve been saying in many of my previous posts, I believe love is a choice. A free action made by individuals to support the projects of other individuals. To prioritize those others’ projects over one’s own. And this is precisely what WALL·E does. In fact, later in the film, EVE does the same thing, demonstrating her love for WALL·E as well.

I like how it presents the idea of the directive, which I will continue to suggest is analogous to one’s projects. At first glance, their directive seems to be just what their programming is telling them they must do: WALL·E is a trash compacting robot who must compact trash on Earth, while EVE is a robot who must seek out and find evidence of life on Earth and bring it to the captain of the Axiom. Both know what they are supposed to do. Arguably, this is what they both initially want to do. But events take place, through shared experiences, that make them decide to do otherwise.

WALL·E’s path in this regard is assumed, as we meet his character at a point well beyond when he would have progressed enough to exercise his freedom. He has already been collecting trinkets and baubles for some time, as evidenced by his home in the truck. A grand collection of many objects he has collected over some time. He seems to still follow his original directive, but more by choice than by force. He has decided to make his original directive his, much as Sisyphus does when forced to push a boulder up a slope for all eternity. Like Sisyphus, WALL·E no longer does what he does as some sort of banal punishment, but instead has made a game out of it. Camus would likely suggest WALL·E has embraced the absurd.

EVE’s path is one we get to watch during the playing out of this story. She begins with a strong will towards her directive, going so far as to claim it is “classified” when asked. It is her private and special project that she seems to think is her’s and her’s alone. It is ironic that when she is brought back on the probe we see several other EVE robots stacked beside her, likely with the very same directives as her’s. She spends the better part of the story embracing her directive, even at the expense of others, desperately trying to take the seedling plant to the captain to complete her mission. But, when WALL·E offers her the plant that he knows she desires so much, even when he is about to die, she makes the choice to abandon that project and create a new directive for herself. Like WALL·E, she elevates to the state of a true machine consciousness.

In both cases, each character decides to abandon their original directive and to embrace the directive of the other. And then, the recognition that WALL·E has formed his own directive that was never given to him in the first place. EVE eventually recognizes that WALL·E’s newly chosen directive is simply to hold her hand.

Suicide and Authentically Pursuing Unattainable Goals

crimson

Toward the end of my degree program, I sat down with one of my professors to discuss a topic that I was just starting to be able to put into words. It is heady, and even when I explain it, most people still do not quite understand what I’m trying to get at. I now refer to it as the Issue of Authentically Pursuing Unattainable Goals.

My concern is not whether people can set unattainable goals, nor whether a person could pursue such a goal. Clearly these things are both possible and frequently done. I might decide to become the strongest person in the world, but due to various genetic and chronological limitations, this is a goal that I will never achieve; I might still go to the gym and alter my diet with the aim of achieving this goal, despite knowing I will never achieve it. I believe this seems fairly obvious.

However, the challenge I am concerned about is the level of authenticity in such a pursuit. That is, how much of my time and effort will I be willing to devote to such a pursuit? If I believe the goal is unattainable, it seems to me that I will “hold back” in my pursuit. After all, why dedicate too much to a goal I cannot ever attain?

My partner further added to this concern when I discussed a related goal to her somewhat recently. In her case, she had convinced herself that a goal was unattainable, even though I believed the opposite was true. That is, I believed the goal she had set for herself was very attainable. But what I believed is not relevant here; what she believed is. If she believes the goal is unattainable, then she will act and behave as though that is the case. Which drives us directly to my concern.

For my partner, as she expressed it to me, if the goal is unattainable, then there is no point in even beginning the pursuit. She argued to me that it would simply be a waste of time and effort to begin such a pursuit. All that time and effort would be better spent on goals that were attainable. Her argument is pretty solid, and I am definitely moved by her position.

Which brings us back to my concern: authenticity. If a person knows (or believes) that a particular goal is unattainable, they are likely to hold back in such a pursuit, up to and including giving up the pursuit altogether. This is clearly a problem.

A core issue in this discussion is the idea of belief. What one believes is more important than what is actually the case. If one believes a goal is unattainable, they will hold back. But, the contrary may also then be true: if one believes a goal IS attainable, they may then be prepared to devote all of their time and effort in the pursuit of the goal. They may be able to pursue the goal fully authentically.

It seems to me belief is far more important than whatever the truth of the situation might be. A person is motivated not by the state of the world, but by what they believe is the state of the world. If they believe a goal is attainable, it does not matter if it really is attainable. Even less is it important whether they actually attain the goal. The only thing that seems to matter is that they will be able to pursue that goal fully.

Thus, when trying to motivate people to action, it seems more important to focus on what they believe is the case than worrying about the actual state of things in the world. This brings to mind all talk of religion and culture now, as it is through such vehicles that belief is often formed.

But this also brings us back to me as well. For my belief is such that most things are unattainable.

Life, it seems to me, is such an unattainable goal. More specifically, life has no goal whatsoever. The pursuits in life do not lead to any glorious outcome or ultimate prize. For the devout Christian, there are reasons to be devout, as a good life will earn them a place in heaven. For the one who believes in reincarnation and karma, there are measurable reasons to act in good ways, as it will earn them a better rebirth in the next run. The afterlife is a heavy motivator, and there always seems to be a reward for “living well.”

But I believe that the end of life is simply the end. I do not believe in an afterlife. I believe that once I expire, I cease to exist. I cease to be. This does not mean I believe I will be in pain or that I will suffer. Nor does it mean I will be happy either. It simply means that at the end, everything stops. At least for me. I will have no further worries. I will not be in pain. I will cease to experience time or events. I simply stop.

As this is my belief, it means there is no reward for me if I behave in one particular manner or another in life. To be successful is no different than to be a failure. To live in luxury no different than to live in squalor. Perhaps these things may make a difference in the moment, but ultimately they are the same, as I end the same in all cases.

It is in part for these reasons that I tend to gravitate toward the Existentialists of the mid twentieth century. Toward Simone de Beauvior, for example. That my freedom provides for me the ability to decide meaning and purpose. In the absence of a reward at the end of life, I instead decide for myself what things will have value. I decide whether to be good or to not be good in life.

It is often raised to me that I have no instrumentally good reason for selecting to be morally good. I usually argue against this, as behaving in a manner that is socially acceptable and agrees with those around me fosters positive relationships and allows me to pursue other projects that I might otherwise find rather challenging if those around me were actively working against me.

But all of that is still a side stepping of the original concern. What reason I have to be good or not be good is mostly irrelevant; I am concerned with the authentic pursuit of an unattainable goal. Or, in the case of life, for me, the authentic pursuit of no goal at all.

Unlike those around me who seem to find a way to believe in some sort of ultimate goal in life, which normally manifests in a belief in some sort of afterlife, I have no such goal. Those around me who have such a goal can obviously motivate themselves to pursue that goal in their lives, fully and authentically. Their lives are full of that pursuit, because they honestly believe that goal exists.

I cannot. Because I do not have that belief. And I am unable to somehow manufacture that belief. Others can tell me as frequently and as passionately as they want that there is an afterlife, but I am not moved. In part because there is no evidence to support their claim. Just as there is no evidence necessarily going against their claim either. There simply is no evidence at all. So I am unmoved by their position.

To be clear, I do not wish to disenchant them either. I have no wish to turn to them and try to convince them to my side of the argument. I am happy they have the belief they have. I support their belief, in so far as it provides for them their happiness. Unfortunately, however, it seems for many that their belief requires them to change my belief. And as this cannot be done, they try in vain. A lot.

It is a very difficult situation I find myself in. I have no belief in an afterlife. I have, for some ridiculous reason, decided to follow reason and logic. To follow evidence. To believe things based on evidence, and not to believe in the absence of evidence. The best I’ve been able to say in many situations is that “I am open to the possibility that these things could exist. But for now, I am not convinced, and therefore do not believe.”

Perhaps, some day, I will be convinced. Perhaps someone will provide for me that convincing evidence. This is also where many start to raise the issue of faith. That I need to have faith in the absence of evidence. I do have faith. A lot of faith. Just not in those things they wish me to have faith in. I have tried to have faith in things I do not believe, but I always find myself in a situation of “bad faith” of the sort Jean Paul Sartre talks about. I always knew I did not believe, even when I would say that I did. I was lying to everyone, including myself, and I knew I was lying, even to myself.

My concern remains, for the most part. Whether I am able to authentically pursue an unattainable goal, or whether I am able to authentically pursue no goal at all, the very idea seems to contradict itself. All I can really say is that I am always holding back.

Record Keeping

crimson

Having trouble taking that perfect photo of your friends and you hanging out? Always someone who’s eyes are closed, or they were talking, or something went wrong. Well, now there is the new Google Pixel 8 with a feature called “best take.” The smartphone takes several pictures over a brief period of time, and with the use of some fancy new Artificial Intelligence (AI), you can select the best versions of each person and combine them together to make the perfect picture that never happened…

I don’t normally advertise the products of large corporations, but in this case I have something important to say about it. I’ve seen this commercial running on the television for a while now, and I just realised something mind boggling. When all is said and done, the image that is generated is an image of hyperreality, to reference Jean Baudrillard and his book Simulacra and Simulation.

First, a brief explanation of hyperreality. Think about the telephone game for a moment. A person has a message for someone else. They don’t give that message directly to the intended person. Instead they use an intermediary. But not just one. No, they use a whole bunch of people. One person whispers the message to the next, to the next, to the next, until eventually it ends up with the intended person. Because everyone whispers it to only one other person, no one knows for sure whether the message remained intact during the entire game. Often, once completed, the original message will be repeated out loud by the original person, in order to compare it to what the intended receiver received. Often they are so different to be laughable, and thus the game is meant as an amusement. This is an example of hyperreality, or at least it would be if no one took the time to compare the difference between the original and the final message, and especially if they simply took the final message to be the truth of what was originally said.

But this is what happens in our world all the time. Messages are passed from person to person with very little thought given to whether the message makes any sense or may have been modified in transit. This is the problem of testimony, in the philosophical sense. That is, information is passed along from one person to another, and the question that is often asked is whether that information can count as knowledge on the part of the receiver of the information. That is, if someone tells me that diamonds are made of carbon, and I do not take the time to verify the information myself, but I feel that the person who told me this information is reliable, can I count it as something I now know? I’ve already added quite a few qualifiers here, but the point should hopefully be clear.

When it comes to what I know, there are a few ways I can gain knowledge. I can experience something myself. For example, I can look outside at the sky with my eyes and see that the sky is blue; thus, I can claim that I know the sky is blue because I have experienced this through a first hand account. I can also reason something myself. For example, in part because I understand the rules of mathematics, I can calculate that 43 added to 87 is going to produce 130; thus, I can claim that I know that 43 + 87 = 130 because I performed the operation of maths on the equation using my skills with reasoning. These two methods are usually considered quite reliable and trustworthy, for the most part. Most people will utilise these two methods of knowledge generation without really considering the possibility of errors or missteps. But testimony is different.

With testimony, the knowledge resides in someone or something else, and I acquire it through something of a passive process. For example, someone tells me that diamonds are made of carbon, or perhaps I read it in a book (books are testimony too). I didn’t experience it or observe it myself, and I did not reason it or calculate it myself. The “work” of generating the knowledge originally came from somewhere else or someone else. I am going to leverage their experience or their reason in order to gain the benefit myself. But this process is wrought with challenges, the most noteworthy is whether the source of this testimonial knowledge is reliable or trustworthy.

This post is not intended to be a philosophy lesson on epistemology or even testimony, so I won’t go into any further detail here. The issue is with hyperreality. In hyperreality, I have knowledge that I have not verified the source of myself. I did not experience it myself, nor did I reason to it myself. Or, to be most accurate, if I think that I did, I would be mistaken because I made some sort of error in the process. The knowledge that I claim has a problem: it is untrue. By untrue, I mean that, in some way, that knowledge does not match up with the way the world actually is. It would be like me believing that the sky was green, especially as I can simply look up into the sky and see that it is otherwise.

With hyperreality, I am confused. I actually believe in the knowledge that I claim, and I will fight with others regarding it. It gets worse if those around me believe that very same thing, because then there will be no fighting. Others around me are often my best way to verify my knowledge, because if everyone around me knows something different than I do, chances are good that I am the one in error. But if we all think we know the same thing, no one is going to be cued to the possibility that an error was made.

Hyperreality is the result of a group of us thinking we know something, and we happen to be wrong about it. We think the world is a certain way, when it is in fact not. Baudrillard was very concerned with this situation, which is why he wrote his book. That, especially after a time of playing the telephone game, eventually one might find themselves in a situation where everyone believes something about the world that is simply untrue. And if everyone believes this untruth, and there is very little effort made to check or validate that belief, then people could end up getting into a lot of trouble.

Which is why I started by talking about this feature “best take” that Google uses with their new smartphone. The issue, I realised, is that the photo that is taken is of an event that never happened. It is not really a photograph at all, in the traditional sense of the term. It has been “photoshopped.”

A photograph, in the traditional sense, is intended to be a pure reflection of the world as it is. Light falls, not artificially manipulated, on a photosensitive surface and eventually results in an image that is as close to the original scene as can be expected. Given the technical issues with such a process, the idea here is that the world presents itself, and the photograph is a passive reflection of the world as was presented. The event occurred, and the photograph is a record of that event. The photograph is a representation of a past event.

But the image generated by “best take” never happened. The image is a combination of several other images in order to make an idealised image of an idealised event that one wished had happened but did not. That time when everyone smiled and no one blinked at the wrong time. The stars aligned just perfectly, and everyone cooperated without incident. But that isn’t what happened at all. A whole bunch of photographs were taken, and bits and pieces of each are slammed together by an AI in order to generate the idealised image. The phone is a hyperreality generator. Or it will be if people forget that the image is “photoshopped” in the first place.

This got me thinking. Because I realised that this isn’t new. There is a reason the term “photoshopped” exists at all: there have been many, many cases of photo manipulation occurring over the years, and Photoshop happened to be one of the more popular tools used in order to accomplish the manipulation. Thus, a term was coined to be more exciting and novel than the term “photo manipulation.”

Now I am thinking about all the sources of knowledge and information I have been taking for granted for so very long. Not just images, but videos too. And even text. And other sources of knowledge from other places as well. Something as insidious as the idea that women are weaker than men. Or that technology will somehow save humanity. These bits of knowledge are considered truths by those around me. But are they really true?

The problem, I have to admit, is that I cannot verify much of the information I have already subsumed. It is not feasible for me to experience everything for myself, and my skill with reason is not nearly as good as would be required to know something like how diamonds are made of carbon. Or even that there are these teeny, tiny particle things we call “atoms” that make up everything. I take this information for granted. It is testimony that I have acquired through the course of my life.

And there is one additional issue that I have also realised as well. That knowledge may not simply be a passive, discovery driven process. The knowledge I claim is not always simply an expression of what I think I know about the world. My knowledge is not necessarily just a reflection of the world, as far as I can tell. My knowledge can impose itself on the world too. If I believe something is the case, I can make it so, even if it is not actually the case.

This is the issue I see happening in the world these days. People in large groups imposing their knowledge and making it into reality. A process that I think Baudrillard was certainly thinking about. In his example, he was concerned that people would go to Disneyland and walk down Main Street USA thinking that those states they’d never been to were actually just like they were being presented; that the people from those states followed the stereotypes being presented by the amusement park. Because he believed that if someone from one of those states actually saw the stereotypes being presented, they might be offended.

This is literally where the issue with women being weaker than men comes from, I believe. It was likely not the case far enough back in history, but became the case as a result of this very process. Girls are groomed by their parents and other adults around them to believe certain things about themselves. Given enough time and reinforcement, they will believe those untruths eventually. This is why there is a great lacking of female engineers. Not that a woman cannot be an engineer, but that most women do not want to be.

It is a complicated thing I am expressing here. Especially in light of the fact that none of us has any privileged access to the world as it is. My access to the world is mediated, through this body and its various limitations. The light hits the cones in the back of my eyes and is turned into electrical and chemical information that is passed along to my brain and interpreted and analysed. If there are any problems with my eyes, my nerves, or my brain, then the information will be corrupted and errors will be made.

In the end, I simply have to do the best I can. To use the information I have available to me, and try to exercise empathy and charity in my interpretations. To not dig my heels in too deeply, lest I make grievous errors that cannot be rectified. When I am sent a picture of my friends hanging out, perhaps the image may be of an event that never happened, but perhaps that is not the intended purpose of the picture at all. Instead of it being understood as a record of the past event, perhaps it is better understood as a reminder of a time when my friends happened to be together.