Some thoughts

January 23, 2007 · Introspection

For the past several days I've had a strange concoction bubbling in my brain. On Friday I went to The Perception of perception conference, which was good fodder. The first panel was amazing and asked some interesting questions, like

Have we always perceived the same way? (Which made me remember about a neglected book on my shelf. (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)
When Margaret Wertheim (who runs the Institute for Figuring) lead us through her images showing the impact space and perception had in medieval times, I was reminded of the idea/concept of a theme of our times. Culture has changed and with that culture, the worldview of the world. We assume we are related to the people in our past histories, but perhaps only biologically. Who is to say that we perceive, and think the same as our ancestors. We are evolving.

And then there are the skeptic books I've started reading. They frustrate the hell out of me. Not because I necessarily disagree with the content (because I actually agree with the 6 points on the cover of Don't Believe Everything you Think) but because they are argument books. Granted I haven't finished them yet, but so far the books are filled with fact after rebuttal after logical explanation after derogatory attitude. It's tiring. I'm not looking for someone to argue with. In fact, I don't want to argue - facts, experiences, stories, logic, anything. I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm trying to understand. Yeah a lot of things are possible, a lot of the possibilities are not possible now, but may/will be some day. A lot of those possibilities may never be able. But who has the last word? Who can say for certain? Scientists?

We used to think the world was flat. Then we thought we were the center of the universe. The fallacies we believe in today will be proven as wrong by our future ancestors. Or else the knowledge will disappear. What are the things we believe as truth today that will be shown, proved as false? So why bother spending a lot of energy proving these things as false. When it's all falsity anyway. It's all layers of the onion. Broken clockworks in a huge melting snowball.

The point I try to keep in my mind is that. If it's all false and there are more things in heaven and earth than Shakespeare can possibly imagine, how do you live? You live in the mutually described/defined reality - the collective worldview we humans hold in our minds. To us, it's true. Which means we live in a shadow world of sparking images we have created in our minds. And since we are such good dreamers, it's a fine world and a hell on earth at the same time.

Postscript: This reminds me of some paintings I saw at the Magritte show. I was walking around looking at his stuff and thinking, this is all just fire and images in a cave and then I came upon the image of the image of the fire canvas in the cave. And I meta-cized it. They show could have really hit this point home on 2 more meta levels. First off, there is Magritte's painting of the cave with a fire and outside on the ledge is a canvas with a painting of the nearby mountains. Meta1: Paint the wall on which this painting is hung with the images of a cave wall. You could include a painting of the fire as well. Meta2: About 6 feet out and 3 feet over from the wall painted as a cave with Magritte's painting on it, build a representation of a fire. Have a spotlight from the fire pointing to the canvas in Magritte's painting. You could even have the couches and sofas sitting around the fire.

You can continue to meta-on out, but these two metaviews drive home Magritte's point - and one I seem to go back to over and over without realizing it. And it's a point that was reminded me by Donald Hoffman on Friday, when he showed us optical illusions and walked us through our visual interpretation of the image we saw.