The Chough

There are no jokes. Un-give the punchline. Laughter is only screaming without confidence.

2011-04-16T12:48:00.002+01:00

Still on the metaphysics, so few jokes
- though there are jokes made by metaphysicians, e.g.,
Q: how many metaphysicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: There is no change. -

Actually, I've just been reminded of an email exchange with my friend Andrew where a load of lightbulb jokes came out of it to do with this philosophy. I'll just go see if they are appropriate for posting.

First, Andrew asks me: 'How many philosopher's does it take to change a lightbulb?'

A1: none.

(Andrew replies: no, the answer is: 'what's a lightbulb?')
(No philosopher would say that. They probably could make an issue of it but they probably wouldn't unless you were annoying her.)

A2: Unask the question. There is no change. There is only the idea of change.

A3: Unask the question. All things are in flux - the question is: how
many philosophers does it take to stop a lightbulb changing? (The answer is: as many as can divide by zero).

A4: The real question is: how many light bulbs does it take to change
a philosopher?

A5: None. Nothing changes except immanently and intrinsically.
Philosophers cannot change lightbulbs because philosophers are not
lightbulbs.

A6: None. Philosophers never change anything!

A7: As many as think of changing a lightbulb. Lightbulbs are just
ideas in the mind.

A8: As many as thinking of changing a lightbulb. A thought is
something that happens - in becoming, there is a change in a
philosopher's mind. Everything changes by changing in its relation to
everything else. Everything changes when anything changes. Lightbulbs
change simply by the philosopher's IDEA of it changing.

A9: One, if one is not feeling poorly, the lightbulbs are both within easy reach or there is a ladder.

Running up to the rays of the sun

2011-03-31T00:39:00.001+01:00

Trying to understand nature when he was young, Einstein imagined running alongside a beam of light, and he wondered, if he did, what would he would see light do? His conclusion was that he would see light stand still as a wave. I suppose the way surfers might see a frozen wave beneath their feet.

But years later, through the theory of relativity, Einstein blocked off that possibility of reaching the speed of light. Anything slower - or faster - than light can not reach light, and light can neither speed up nor slow down. Assuming that we are massive creatures, i.e., creatures with mass, to get to the speed of light is to acquire infinite mass. Now, this isn't the sort of thing you get by eating a lot of sweets. Nor does it mean we magically acquire mass like a mythical stone in a folk tale or the child christ in the legend of St.Christopher. It means that, the faster something gets, the harder it is to make it even faster (I think that is all that is meant by inertial mass in relativistic physics). So, this is something which gets harder and harder as you do so, each time requiring more and more energy for the same increment of light-speed. And, no matter how fast you make it - 0.99 the speed of light (0.99 c), 0.999c, 0.999999999999999c - you can never make it hit light speed.

Nothing massive can catch up with light.

For faster-than-light particles, tachyons (we slower-than-lights are tardyons), no matter how much energy you put in, you cannot slow them down to the speed of light. They are always faster-than-light. Whether tachyons exist outside the realm of Star Trek, i.e., in the actual universe, the universe where people can't fly around space in plastic and tin boats - that is not something that's been in any way proved.

Nothing massive can be caught up by light.

It's also not clear to some physicists that there could be anything 'like' moving at the speed of light.Once we define the motion of another massive body, through transformation equations (I think they're called), we can use the data about the universe as observed within our own frame of reference to describe the universe from the other frame of reference. But, at the speed of light, such equations break down.

For example, the length something has along its line of motion - e.g., a rocket ship's length from nose to tail as it flies forward - this length is shorter for an observer in another frame for whom the ship is moving. But, at the speed of light, this length is zero. It disappears. At least according to the equations.

But worse - and for me, this was worse, and left me grumpy and disatisfied - the time between two moments, e.g., the time between seeing the rocket pass and checking your watch, however quick you do it - this time, once translated into the 'frame' of light - this becomes infinite.

Does this mean that, from the speed of light, all time has stopped and everything is flat? I thought that was what it meant when I first started working on time-consciousness. Then I got another interpretation. It's this: no, it doesn't mean those two things; it means that there is no physical description of spacetime structure from the speed of light. Physical lawas do not provide any description.

Perhaps this is why I've also heard it said (and no I can't cite sources; ask a physicist) that there is not, in a sense, any such thing as light. In the way that an asteroid occupies the 30,000km/hour inertial frame relative to earth, and I occupy the rest frame relative to this couch, and this couch occupies the 40miles/hr frame relative to a car passing by outside, nothing occupies the light-frame. If so, photons don't exist-

Or if they do, they are quite unlike anything we can otherwise describe. And this 'quite' is quite a 'quite' - I mean, it's not a quiet 'quite'; it's not a quitting 'quite'; it's not a quasi-'quite'; light is seriously QUITE. Unlike, anything, massive.

Brief prelude to better stuff

2011-03-08T18:15:00.001Z

I wish I could remember the poem, the one from John Gray's Straw Dogs, that said of philosophers, or any seekers of truth, that only pain makes people do this. Most people, the poem says, in some other form of words, want sex, and love, and fame, food, never truth.

It's been months since I've written. Things have changed a little - I now have had a job for several months and have travelled to a few places. I've been to Glasgow, to compare them to Cork; and I am going again, this time to give a paper from my project, to learn from the people there, and to attend a conference on cross-modal illusions. I've taught in Aalborg, Denmark, and attended an imagination workshop in Leeds (where I also briefly acted like a dimwit, for - at least un-analytical - philosophical reasons. But never mind that). I am a practicing philosopher, with an office, a phone, and - soon - printer.

Right now, though, I'm in a cafe in central Cork where I often come in to do the simple crossword in the Irish Times. I think I've been doing it a bit too much. It took me ten minutes today.

I'm very happy in Philosophy Cork, as I'm working with a brilliant phenomenologist Julia Jansen, and am surrounded with a pluralistic mix of philosophers, ranging across Eastern, to Continental, to Analytical, to....etc. Anyway, to anyone reading this who doesn't do philosophy, these distinctions might sound a little irrelevant. The point is that: after working with Julia, I'm discovering many of my issues about imagination a few months are anticipated and seemly made redundant by writers such as Husserl, Sartre, Colin McGinn. They argue against the idea of the imagination as involving a mental image, as involving some kind of psychological depictive surrogate of what we imagine - unlike how a stone sculpture is a geological depictive surrogate (fancy).

So why does it bother me so much - why do I keep exploring that possibility? A possibility, incidentally, that I can most clearly see expressed by other thinkers in the writings of some scholastics like, I think, Fludd (at least from what I get through Warner's writings) or Athanasius Kircher(at least from what I get in my otherwise uninformative memory....). Thinking like them is thinking like a medieval scholar. What the hell?

Well, maybe that's where I'm going. I'm bringing back the thinking of the past. Last week, I read for the first time a review of one of my papers which stated that my work was an example of an out of date, or perhaps old style, or traditional? way of doing philosophy. (The paper was still accepted, though, so it didn't seem to discourage the editors). I felt a kind of grim amusement at that, though I was a bit upset.

But never mind: I still have the best job in the world (while it lasts).

-------------------------
Why explore the idea that what we experience in imagining things, or remembering, is in some way a kind of image? Why explore the idea that it is a thing, an object, the way a painting is an object, or the writing on a page? Isn't it clearly not that?

One reason comes, actually, from those who deny imagining is like that. Sartre is insistent that, in what he calls 'image-consciousness', there is no mediating representation of what we imagine. Instead, there is just what we imagine - presented as absent.

The italicised phrase might sound abstract, confusing, incoherent, or just plain pretentious, but an example makes it obvious: when I imagine the Eiffel tower, I do not see it. Perhaps I also see it (something, for example, Wittgenstein seems to deny) but my imagining is not like seeing it. And why not?

'...Well, I might be imagining hearing it...'

- oh, yes, sorry - I'm assuming like lots of philosophers that we're always talking of some kind of visual experience - McGinn's 'Mindsight', not 'Mindsound' -

'Very well' [picks off a bit of lint] 'do go on....'

One reason that imagining is not like seeing the Eiffel tower is that, when I see it, the Eiffel tower is present - it's there, beyond those buildings; it's here surrounding me. But when I imagine it, it is absent. But it is still in some sense presented to me - I make it present to myself in imagining it. Although I don't.

'That's obvious....'

Well, you know what I'm referring to. All the way through this discussion, you've been imagining the Eiffel Tower. So imagine looking at it from a hundred yards away. Whatever that means for you, that's what is meant by visually imagining it.

'I've never seen the Eiffel Tower. Remember, I'm from the Island of Doctor Moreau.'

Oh.

It looks sort of like - well....like - like ....eh.....The Eiffel Tower.

'That isn't very helpful.'

Well, well....you've been to Waterford right?

'Yes, I've been to that Metropolis of Espionage.'

You know the giant dock cranes that are there for unloading ships?

'Sure.'

It's like one of those, but dark grey, I think, and stretched like gum high into the sky.

'Ah.'

Can you imagine seeing that?

'Sort of.....eh....yes. Sort of.'

So it's not like seeing at all is it? And yet, it is a kind of visual experience.

'If you say so.'

Oh come on. You know yourself.

'Ok,. You've convinced me. You're very persuasive. It must be the cake you keep offering me.'

I call it soph-as, I call it so-pastry.

'I don't understand what that thing is you just said.'

Well, anyway, can I go on now to my next point.

'No. You've run out of time.'

Confusion about EEGs and fMRIs in my JCS paper

2010-06-08T12:16:00.003+01:00

So, I had a paper published last month in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (JCS). I'm very happy about this, especially as it resulted in brief discussions on the journal's yahoo group's messageboard.

I'm particularly happy about this as this journal is what brought me back to philosophy. In 2002, I was working as a waitress in a hotel bar - hold on, no I wasn't. I was working as a technical support engineer/software consultant - the title kept changing - in a desolate industrial estate just a few miles from Schiphol airport in Holland. On my breaks, I found a series of articles and discussions about consciousnesss. The one that struck me was 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness' by David Chalmers in JCS (free-to-read here). I'd gotten quite cynical about philosophy after my undergraduate - definitely partly due to not having done any work for my BA. After reading Chalmers' article, I got interested again. Never thought I'd be published in the JCS myself, though. Alot of things have changed.

Like my professional situation. In February, I applied to IRCHSS - the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences - for my two-year project 'Time and Illusion' at University College, Cork. Two weeks ago, I found out that I got it. Again, I am very happy. In Dublin at the moment for a meeting of 'awardees' tomorrow in Dublin Castle.

Anyway, enough about me - more about my mistakes. In my JCS paper, I discussed a possible experiment for finding out if there is a privileged frame for the neural correlates of experience - or, at least, the subject of the experience. This experiment turns on measuring the velocity of the neural correlates. The evidence needed is a common velocity, i.e., not a velocity relative to each subject, for the neural correlates in all subjects. In setting up the experiment, I suggested you could do this with an fMRI or something like that.

However, as I discovered in discussion with my friend David Jenkins, this can't be done by fMRI. fMRI - or functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging - is a method of mapping activity in the brain. To quote from the Columbia site, it does so by tracking increases in blood flow. It doesn't measure the movement of the correlates themselves. Positronic emission tomography, or PET also only measures the blood flow. EEG (electroencephalography) does seem to measure neural activity directly but it does not seem to do so finely enough to pick out the motion that's needed.

This, however, is not a problem for the argument of my paper. It is a problem for those who object to it. So it is not a serious issue for the position I promote. But it still shows that I should pay more attention to the actual detail of how things are made, and what they can do. I forget that most things I encounter have limits. They can break; they are finite. Even the internet you're reading this on is not some spiritual non-physical dimension of thought. It's electric fields, dark dots in hard disks, copper wires and undersea cables. It is a multitude of such things, the locations of which are not easy to find. But the multitudes are finite, and they are somewhere. You can break the internet by pulling enough plugs.

Anyway, enough!

Caprica

2010-03-28T16:57:00.002+01:00

Caprica is set in the Battlestar Galactica milieu but set several decades before that story. It is set in a world of a mixed aesthetic of the 1930s prohibition US and some time very near in our future. Men wear hats and conservative clothing, smoking, standing by apple carts. There is sexual liberation, casual interplanetary prejudice, and a multisensory, immersive online world where anything goes.

The story revolves around a group of families from different backgrounds connected by the tragedy of a single terrorist act. This act is in the service of a religious group called the Soldiers of the One True God. One family's daughter is a member of this group; she dies in the first episode. Her father is the original designer of the Cylons.

************************************

Caprica breaks away from the typical science fiction model of these shows in the first few episodes by playing with a very common premise: The Super-Girl. There is one of those in it, certainly, but here she does not look like a girl; she has the mind of one. In most shows, the Super-Girl looks like an ordinary girl but she is actually a super-hero/robot/and so on. It is important that, no matter what she is, she looks normal. Here, she doesn't look normal. She looks like a great big clunking machine. She, Zoe, is downloaded into the body of a Cylon . Although, there is a bit of a cheat on this - the immersive virtual world (if I remember the world's name I'll set it in) allows her to appear as a girl.

***************************************

One of the ideas in this series is that Zoe, in being downloaded from the immersive virtual world into her Cylon body, leaves the immersive virtual world. She cannot simply be copied into the Cylon body. She is not like a file. You cannot simply copy her and make two of her.

In the last four years, I've been a tutor at the university where I did my doctorate. There, we ran courses in the philosophy of mind and the introduction to theoretical philosophy. Some of the thought experiments run were like the following two:

(i) In the future, you can teleport to very distant planets by doing the following: You step in a machine which scans information about all the atoms in your body, with all the relative locations, parts, etc. It then sends this information to a receiver in a far away planet, where the machine over there assemblies an exact physical duplicate of the original body as you stepped in. The person who steps out is physically identical to you, down to the arrangements of the most basic atoms. Meanwhile, the body in the original machine is broken down into raw materials for assembling bodies from incoming signals.

Would you get in the machine?

(ii) From surgical evidence, it seems as if a person can lose a hemisphere of their brain (have a hemispherectomy) and still retain their personality, memories etc.(for, e.g., epilepsy). Let's accept that we can survive as ourselves with just one hemisphere, and it doesn't matter which one.

Now say also the following, slightly more science-fiction scenario occurs. An evil scientist knocks you ought, then clones your body. They then swap one hemisphere of your brain in your original body with one hemisphere of your cloned body. The scientist then wakes both of you up.

Who is the real you? Is the other a real person?

If they have the same personality, memory, etc. as you, and look the same, and actually have one of the original hemispheres from your body, are they just as right to think of themselves as you?

Let us say this happens: the scientist clones your original body, replaces one hemisphere of that clone's brain with one of your hemispheres, then destroys the rest of your body. The scientist then wakes....you up in your new body (because it is your hemisphere in there, and this has all of your personality in there)? ...Wakes your clone up (and has murdered you)? Which?

Change the thought experiment to this happening: the scientist is not evil at all but good. You barely survive a plane crash, which happens at the base of her secret mountain fortress. She finds your smashed, ruined body in the debris, and that you have barely any brain activity; only one hemisphere is intact, but it is very intact. So what she does is clone your body in her laboratory, and then put the surviving hemisphere into the clone. A few days pass, the brain-body connections seems fine, so she wakes....is it, you? up.

If you get different answers for whether or not the hemisphere-in-clone is you, why do you think that is? Am I subtly leading you to those conclusions, perhaps? If so, is there are a more neutral way of describing these?

*************************************************8

These thought experiments are not identical to all the original courses' details. I pick out the details that suggest the following: You can physically copy a person so that they are indistinguishable from the original copy - including: moles, cuts, broken noses, stomach ulcers, haircuts, environmentally worn neural pathways, etc. If you do this you get a psychologically, consciously, personally identical being to the original. This is true even if you keep the original.

Is this right?

**********************************

So, is an exact copying of someone possible? Is it incoherent to say that it happens? Is it incoherent to say that it cannot happen? How could we know?

No person has never been exactly copied; we don't have any evidence if it is right or not.

What we have is whatever our assumptions about the world give us.

***********************************

Caprica suggests* a different response: whether they are merely physical or not, persons are unique; they can only be maintained in one physical place;. This may mean one of two things, one of which I consider better than the other:

(i) A physical copy can be made, but a conscious or mental copy cannot.

Making a copy results in something that acts, looks and reacts just like a conscious, mental person, but this thing is not a person.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the original keeps the consciousness or the mind. The physical duplicate or the clone-with-its-original-hemisphere might have the consciousness or the mind, and the original lose it. The point is that the behaviour of the non-conscious or non-mental thing is just like it has consciousness or a mind, but it doesn't, because only one of them has a mind.

This option exploits one or both of two philosophical issues, the problem of other minds and the possibility of philosophical zombies. I'll put these aside for now (but will return to it later).

(ii) A physical copy can't be made and the original survive.

No matter what we do, no matter how exactly our technologies should, in principle, physically duplicate the original, either:
a. The original remains intact, acting like it is the same conscious/thinking, etc. person but a copy can never be constructed of the original person.
b. The duplicate is a proper person but the original fails in some crucial respect, so that it fails to behave like a conscious, thinking, person.

In comparison to (i), (ii) is rarely considered. Yet, so far as it stands, in terms of contemporary evidence, (ii) is as possible as (i). And what someone claiming (ii) is also doing is making a falsifiable statement about the world. It's just it comes from how we think about minds, not how we think of the physical world.

Both alternatives are possible at the moment. Until we actually succeed in making a copy of someone while keeping the 'someone' as well, we cannot discount either. If we do succeed, then we throw aside (ii), leaving just (i), and then face the puzzle of who is the real you.

But at the moment, it is all just a problem for the characters in Star Trek, just like evil is a problem for the characters in Christianity.

*******************************
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*Although it only suggests it. Arguably, Cylon-Zoe is a software copy of original Zoe. Although, they also seem to be different - and they are not as clearly distinguished as how I put it here (which is interesting too).

Technical Metaphysical Interlude: does what we experience exist?

2010-03-25T21:30:00.001Z

In my thesis, I defined a principle I called PEPE,The Principle of the Experienced Particular Existent. This principle is that what we experience exists (and is something in particular - but that's not important right now). If this is right, then if we experience something when we are imagining, then this 'something' exists.*

But is this right? Is there anything wrong with saying that what we experience doesn't exist? (and isn't something in particular - but that isn't important right now).

I called my principle a principle because I don't think there is anything obviously contradictory in denying it. It doesn't seem to me to be incoherent to say that what we experience doesn't exist. But at the same time I think that, when pressed, this is not what we tend to say.

How would we be pressed on this? Consider the following: someone turns up, shaken, late at night, soaking wet from walking through fields of heavy rain, and says:

'I'm sorry. It's so late. I had this experience. It - I seemed to experience - it was - was - like - it wasn't like I saw something, or heard or - it wasn't like anything physically touched me, or any sort of sense-perception..But, tonight, you must believe me' - and he twists his sleeves in his fingers, looks up at you, scared, hopeful - 'I experienced the presence of God.'

Do you believe in God? Perhaps you do. Do you believe that you can have some awareness of God? Perhaps you do. Say this, however, take this viewpoint: you do not believe in God.

If you are an atheist - you must be an atheist to run this - an agnostic might concede the possibility - my hunch is that you will say to him: 'look - calm down - here, have this vodka and lime.** I know you're overwhelmed for now, but, although it seems that way, you did not experience the presence of God.'

Does that seem right to you? And do you think that your intent is clear to the listener? Or could you say, without causing any extra confusion, or for the listener to not have to actively interpret what you're saying: ''you experienced the presence of God alright but God does not exist'.

Because we tend to speak the first way, I think that, when we talk about 'experience', we mean that we are consciously aware of something, there is something apparent to us; there is something phenomenological going on. But we do not often refer to 'experiencing' as experiencing, typically. We refer to it as seeing, hearing, or doing something of which we are conscious, e.g., experiencing running a marathon, jumping from a plane, scratching off the charcoal from burnt toast.

My example above suggests another point about experience: we refer to an experience as only an 'experience' when we mean the most general form; we aren't referring to a particular kind of experience, e.g., to seeing a bright light, hearing a low rumbling, remembering the taste of honey, or reciting the ten times tables 'in our heads'. I think we only refer, in ordinary conversation, to experiences in cases of being unable or unwilling, or of being unsure how, to specify the kind of experience further. For whatever reason, we can't say we are seeing, feeling, imagining, or only thinking. It's just we are experiencing. That's all we can say.

-------------------------------------

But there might be another way of using 'experience', especially if we are talking about being conscious in experiencing. Perhaps when we talk about experiencing something, 'something' needn't exist. Or, even more, what we experience needn't even seem to exist.

For example, if I imagine a unicorn, I experience the unicorn - but I also definitely experience it even if it doesn't exist and I know it doesn't. That's just what it is to imagine unicorns.

Once I say that, I no longer say anything more: I imagine a griffin and so I experience furriness, eagle-head-shape-ness - but no problem: whether I experience it or not, the furriness needn't exist or even seem to.

I got this idea from a conversation with Julia Jansen: she didn't see why I would think in the following way: we experience a mental image when we imagine something. What we imagine isn't necessarily what we experience - actually, anyone is more likely to say that it isn't. What we imagine is, e.g., a griffin, and whatever we say here, it doesn't seem right at all to say that we experience a griffin. But why, Julia wondered, would anyone bring images into this story? When I imagine a griffin, I just imagine something that doesn't exist - and, so we could say here that I am experiencing something that doesn't exist as not existing. But this doesn't mean we have to say, really, we experience something that doesn't exist or we experience something else that does exist. The former is like saying you really experience a God, though there is a non-existent God; the latter is saying you experience an image.

Julia is an expert in phenomenology, which we might very roughly call the philosophical examination of appearances, or how things appear to us, or an examination of consciousness from the first person perspective. This isn't exactly accurate, there is a lot more too it, and different versions of it from different founders, each version different to the others, e.g., Husserl's phenomenology is more ideal than Heidegger's phenomenology, who is fascinated with the sense of our being always conscious in time , while Merleau-Ponty constantly reiterates the compelling idea that we are always experiencing the world from a body.

The development of the phenomenological method comes in stages(I am not sure it is right to say it is done). But a significant beginner of it, a 'father' some might say, is Edmund Husserl. Husserl's description of the phenomenological method is, to my mind, the best example of what phenomenology is. In particular, there is epoche, the 'suspension of belief 'by someone about the reality, idealism or unreality of what is presented to them 'in consciousness' (as is often added - though I'd assume it anyway, if it weren't mentioned). To suspend belief is not to doubt the reality of what you experience; following thinking of Descartes, Husserl considers doubt to be disbelieving in something. Suspending belief is not believing or disbelieving it. Husserl thought you were free to do this, no matter what you were presented with it.

Give it a go.

Get back to me when you do.

The point about this method is that you examine what is presented to you without necessarily believing it is real or not, and you do so in order to get at invariant features of consciousness, 'rigid data', and thus ultimately to develop a science of first-person consciousness of the world.

I think that's it, anyway, although I am often frustrated in my understanding. (It reminds me of the pyrrhonian sceptic view, that one does not believe anything except appearances, does not assent to anything except to which she is a forced to consent to. I don't think this is a coincidence). The point I take, anyhow, is this: When you describe what we experience, you don't just presume what you experience is as you have assumed it to be. To do so is to remain in what Husserl has called 'the natural attitude', an attitude you are supposed to bracket off. Away from that attitude, and instead in the phenomenological attitude, you don't assume that what you are presented with is either illusory or real. You simply describe it as it appears to you.Back to the ancient sceptics again: I do not know if honey is sweet or not when I am not around, but it tastes sweet. It seems sweet.

Once you do that, though, this question arises: does anything seem real or unreal to you anyway, even if you suspend belief in everything you are conscious of? That is, can you suspend belief in everything you are presented with? Are you compelled to believe in the reality or unreality of anything you are presented with? What is left? What is lost? Are you forced to believe?

This question is important because it gets us to what phenomenology can contribute to a discussion about what exists. This is a metaphysical question, not in the domain of phenomenology as it is traditionally understood. But it is in the domain of which physics or physicalism is involved: the entities posited by physics to explain what is apparent to us should address at least what we is apparent to us after doing phenomenology; physicalism says only what is physical exists so it should show how what is apparent after doing phenomenology is physical (these two tasks might be different; they might be the same; I'm not sure).

When we walk in with what we hold to exist or be real, we can look at this phenomenological description as a test of our theory.

Take, for example, someone claiming to see the Virgin Mary hovering in the sky over a cave. What exactly is apparent to them? They believe that it is the Virgin Mary but what is apparent to them if they suspend belief in that? What can they suspend belief in, and what must just seem to be real and presented to them?

This is the sort of thing that is supposed to be done in doing phenomenology.

Anyway, that is the end of this metaphysical discussion.

[Right now, I have a massively high temperature, dried out mouth, and exhaustion, sitting by a gas fire and listening to a documentary on BBC4 about the science of sleepwalking and law. So, the phenomenology bit might be a bit unclear. I feel very frustrated about my understanding of the phenomenological tradition. But I need to get it clear, bit by bit].

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*If I continue to run with this, I'll probably change the principle's specific terms. Since reading a paper by Peter Simons, and seeing a lecture by him, I think it's better too refer to 'real particulars' rather than 'existing particulars'. According to Simons, 'existence' refers to a much broader scope of things, including things that are not real; in addition, in his paper, he argues, or perhaps simply shows, that 'existence' is more...I don't have the paper in front of me, so I can't use his term - but, it might be said to be more esoteric, or metaphysically technical or idiomatic than 'real'. So, then, it would be the principle of the experienced real particular, or PERP. These things matter to analytical philosophers. But, here, existence is fine.

**Atheists always drink this. It's an empirical fact.

Are you an atheist?

See?

An Ontology Game

2010-03-13T12:07:00.004Z

Sometimes I think philosophy is just a particular family of games. I'm sure Wittgenstein has said something like this ('family' and 'games' are two of his followers' favourite words). The games have rules to them, rules which are based on their purpose (just like all games).

For example, there is the Ontology Game, the rule which is: if you say there's this sort of thing (x), and there's only this sort of thing (x), then any of these other sort of things (ys, zs) can be explained by this sort of thing (x). These zs and ys are lots of xs, really, e.g., the flashing motion of a ghost (y) is an ultra-low frequency vibration of your eyeball (x).

Calorific
Now, many zs and ys only come up in the ontology game if someone suggests they explain some of what we experience, e.g., what we see, hear, etc. etc. So, there's calorific, the fluid that scientists before Joules thought carried heat from one place to another: heat, in other words, was some kind of a substance that moved through things. We often preserve this idea in our language, when we talk about letting the heat out or the cold in.

However, an experiment by Joules, according to George Johnson one of the Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (guardian review), demonstrates that this is not at all what's going on. (I won't detail the experiment here, except to note that part of it involved measuring the difference in temperature between the top and the bottom of waterfalls). There's no such heat fluid (y) - there's just very energetic particles (x). We can explain everything we experience of heat, e.g., the apparent flow, and indeed more, by saying there are only xs - energetic particles - and without invoking ys - calorific.

What we experience
But other ys are not just explanations of what we experience; they are what we experience. We feel the change in temperature over our skin, or in our body, so this change needs to be explained. It isn't a movement of calorific fluid but it is the energetic motion of particles. So, there is no calorific, unless it is just another word for the change in temperature - or if 'calorific' is just heat described in a much more objective, naturalistic way - not just what we experience when we're experiencing it, but also what it is when we're not, e.g., we leave the warm room, and now feel cold; still, the warmth remains in the room (some philosophers, and others I imagine, will have great trouble with the casualness of my saying that any such 'heat' remains. But nevermind that for now).

So, a part of the ontology game is to explain what we experience - or at least seem to experience - in terms of what there is, i.e., the ontology. That isn't the whole of the ontology game; some philosophers think that there are claims about what there is which make no difference to any experience we could possibly have, especially in terms of how that experience seems. That aside, where it comes to what we do seem to experience, the game is to explain it - and to do so in terms of what we hold there to be.

This might seem obvious. But there is another issue here: this concerns what sort of explanations are good and what sort of explanations are bad.

Good and bad explanations in the Game
Whether or not an explanation is good or bad depends on the game. Even in the Ontology Game, there can be slightly different rules depending on your position.

For example, the claim that everything is physical is a variety of the Ontology Game, and it seems to be quite a popular one. (Think of it as the scrabble or football of modern ontology). This game is particularly exciting because of one of its rules: evidence or empirical data scores points. In fact, for some scientists and philosophers, evidence or empirical data is the only way to score points (an assumption derided by other philosophers - I think. I'm not sure).

Evidence and empirical data is all about experience: you can't claim an experiment gives evidence if you don't actually do the experiment and observe the results. You might delegate it, of course, e.g., I trust the decisive evidence for relativity theory or quantum tunnelling, even though I've never actually observed it myself.

The Physicalist Ontology Game, then, is to explain this evidence in physical terms. That is, it is to explain what we experience in physical terms.

In the straight version of the game, this is enough. People tell you that, if you do this and that, then you will experience a y; this is evidence - evidence anyone can observe. Then, the best explanation of this y wins points. You explain heat just with excited electrons, which we already accept; I explain heat with something extra: calorific. You win the points. And either version is an explanation in terms of something physical. So, in either case, physicalism wins the point.

There are, however, versions of this game which have, figuratively speaking, jokers in the pack, get out of jail cards, rule-breakers.

For example, there is a version where, given you invoke something or other (evolutionarily-useful delusions, the spell of a malignant demiurge, Descartes' evil demon), you can then say: ah, we only think we experience y; but we don't; therefore, I needn't explain y with my x. This is usually good for the particular player, since it is usually invoked by someone who can't explain y.

But, it is important to see that this is not just a particular rule. It is a 'get out of jail' type rule. It can be withdrawn whenever it suits. If the player finds, after a bit of a think (which is allowed in the game, uncommon as it is), that they can explain y with x, what do they do then? Well, they can take the joker off the table. They can say 'We weren't just thinking we experience y. We were experiencing y - well, x, because y is just a sort of x' - etc., etc.

Given they have this, a player of the ontology game can, whenever they like, accept or deny what we experience. They can, to adopt a phrase from phenomenology (which cannot play the game this way) , 'bracket off' what is apparent, however compelling it is, and still claim that there are only xs - inventive evil demons, Gods intentions, inert passive physical things, etc., etc.

The cheat is nullified if everyone has it, of course. So, e.g., you're a creationist, I'm an evolutionary theorist. You say 'fossils are God's test.' I say 'the presence of God is an evolutionary useful delusion.' Both of us do this to get rid of what we are all compelled to seem to experience: fossils, divine presence. (I'm not saying there are either; I'm saying if our experience makes it compellingly seem that there are either).

Or, e.g., I am blind and you are deaf. My theories are only drawn from my experience - they do not include visual things; yours are only drawn from your experience - they do not include auditory things. You say 'there are colours'. I say 'there are sounds'. You only think so, I say, and so don't have to explain what we visually experience; you only think so, you say, and so don't have to explain what we auditorily experience.

And this leads to the last point: if we share a theory, we don't have to explain what either of us claims to see or claims to hear. So we don't have to explain those kinds of experience. (Hopefully, the two of us don't ever come across anyone who suffers from proprioception impairment).

Everybody's happy, so long as they don't have to spend time in each others' company.

Hallucinations and Perceiving

2010-03-12T12:19:00.002Z

These last posts show that I am preoccupied about what we experience when we imagine something.

This is because I feel compelled to believe that we do experience something; - further, that what we experience is something complex; - further again, that the complexity of what we experience when we imagine something is in some sort of way like the complexity we experience when we perceive it: when we see/hear/taste/smell/touch, and so on. And this 'in some way like' seems to me best understood as what we experience resembles what we experience when we see, etc.

So, being less abstract, I feel compelled to believe that what we experience on imagining a ghost resembles what we would experience when we see a ghost.

This gives a reason why what we might call 'powerful' imaginings - hallucinations, particular fantasies, affecting dreams - seem to us to be actual perceptions.

But doing this raises all sorts of challenges, the sorts of challenges I've been looking at:

If we believe that there are only physical things, i.e., only what occupies some physical space exists, then whatever we experience when we hallucinate has to occupy physical space.
However, if it is true that we experience something blue when we see a little blue skittle 'meep' man (if I can call it that; see the first season of '30 Rock') and
If it is true that what we experience on hallucinating a blue man is the same as what we experience on seeing a blue man,

then

We must experience something blue on hallucinating a blue man.

But, then, what is this blue thing we are experiencing? And where is it?

That's been the problem so far.

Disjunctivism
But maybe there is another way of approaching hallucinations.

The philosophical position of disjunctivism is that hallucinations are not anything like perceptions. A visual hallucination of a blue man is not at all like seeing a blue man. We experience something when we see the man but we don't necessarily experience something, or experience at least anything like a man, when we hallucinate one. So, forget about it.

This answer is like the answer to what happens when we imagine (last post).

But, like there, we have this problem: whoever hallucinates a little blue man will say that it's like seeing a little blue man. So why do they do it.

One answer is this: the issue is with their beliefs about what's going on - that's where it goes wrong.

Or, maybe, we're not sure if it was like actually seeing it - but it's the only way we can describe it. We are, to use a phrase Wittgenstein is famous for, 'tempted to say' that visual hallucinations are like seeing,etc...

Projectivism
In 2005, the Sydney-based philosopher Philip Chaurd argued that this is just what happens when we believe we see, hear, etc., i.e., we perceive, the temporal order of things, e.g., hearing one note after another, a C followed by a G. That we seem to hear this change in notes gives rise to the doctrine of the specious present, the most contemporary understanding of which is that we see, hear, etc. a duration because we see, hear, etc., a temporally ordered change (I discuss this in depth in in my doctoral thesis). But this idea of the 'specious present' has raised all sorts of issues over the ages, issue that seem to require metaphysical thought. And some philosophers deny that we do perceive a duration or an ordered change. But then why do we think perceive this sort of thing?

Chuard's answer, if I understand it right, is that, from our belief that (i) what we perceive, which is not change ,and (ii) beliefs that our perceptions have changed,

We 'project' to the belief that (iii) we have perceived a change.

I think. I'm not sure. I don't know what 'projections' from beliefs are exactly, or what they are supposed to do in theories of perceptions, or what they save us from in the discussion (this Wikipedia entry is the most collated entry on projectivism I can find). If they are projections as Hume describes them...they suggest a 'beaming out', like a film projector, of something from the mind onto things in the physical world - which, taken

- Literally, is weird. However, weirdness should be no barrier to philosophy; the world seems to be weird if you think enough about it. The problem here is that it is not helpful to think of it as a literal projection: the 'something' and its properties still exist, e.g., if I project a little blue man-like thing into the world from my beliefs - there is a...well...a little blue man-like thing in the world. This is like projecting an image onto a cinema screen. What is projected onto the screen is, in an important way, actually on the screen. Sure, a thirty-foot Liv Tyler's face isn't there in the cinema, on the screen, but blue, pink and brown colours, and two-dimensional shapes are up there. And these - the properties of the image of Tyler's face - are what is projected.
- Metaphorically, is no help either. What is the metaphrand (a term from Julian Jaynes) of the projection metaphor. That is, what is it that we are describing metaphorically as a projection? It's a 'belief' doesn't, I think, answer this question at all.

In any case, for change at least, it's not my view. My own work undermines the central assumption that we don't perceive change. My own work isn't out yet, though - it's to be published soon in the Journal of Consciousness Studies - so I wouldn't expect anyone to be considering it.

Anyhow, we might be able to say this sort of thing with hallucinations, dreams, etc. But we might say of all these trauma-induced memory hallucinations, and those caused by drugs, and maybe those suffering from conditions such as a schizophrenia, or dreams, etc., that they don't see, hear, etc. anything. People are just delusional here - they think they saw something under the influence of drugs but they saw nothing; they did not see. All is good.

And, anyway, how imagining seems is very different to hallucinating, dreaming, etc.

With hallucinating, dreams, etc., what we experience seems to be real. But with imagining, is this true? Couldn't we say that what we experience doesn't seem real?

This is something Julia Jansen has raised with me.

Experiencing and imagining the same things

2010-03-06T23:23:00.009Z

I am going to discuss two things here. First, a follow-up from my last entry, where I stopped the madness by suggesting that it is misled to think of imagining as anything like perceiving, e.g., as imagining seeing a goat in a room as anything like seeing a goat in a room.

This is an issue I suspect I'll be chasing all over the place in my thinking here, so I'll only write a little about it in this post; I also want to write about the practice of imagining.

What I see, I tell you; what I tell you, you imagine; but do you really make images?

Say I'm looking at a mountain against a darkening sky, hearing the screech of a sparrow-hawk in the thunder of rain and feeling a cold drop run off my heavy soaking hair. I think that what I perceive in such situations - what I see, hear, feel, etc - is to some degree complex: the mountain's shape against the sky, the screech and thunder, the cold tingle with the weight on my forehead: all of these are examples of multiple things (or those things' properties, but nevermind that distinction now) and the relations between them. I can see, hear and feel: the downpour muting the bird's screech; the mountain looming beyond the place where the sounds originate; the slow water on my neck shivering down it (even after I shut the door and go inside).

It seems correct to say that these sort of things are empirical data - at least, they are empirical data for me. They are what I report to others as being what I am visually, aurally or haptically experiencing of the world; this is just what I'm doing now, with you as my audience. They are most of the first things I talk about when I talk about what the world is actually like.

But what about you, after you have read the description? Is what you experience, on reading this, empirical data to you? By describing these examples to you, I have not shown them to you. I have not literally brought you to a place where you can see the mountain; I have not dragged you into a rainstorm; I am not washing your hair with cold water. But if you are any good at imagining things, then you can probably imagine what it's like to see that mountain, hear that bird, and so on, and do so with whatever I describe as accompanying it.

So how can we imagine it? There seem to be two parts to imagining, two parts common to experience in general. These are the material and the form of our imagining. There are the elements of what we experience when we imagine and then there are the various ways in which they they are arranged. It seems as if we experience both when we imagine something but one seems less constructed, less fabricated, than the other (I'll return to that later).

Equally important is that what these are are not what they are imagined to be. When using my imagination, I experience whatever it is I experience; this may be something only 'in my head' or 'in my mind', so to speak. But that is not what I am imagining. What I imagine need not be in my head. It need not exist.

The distinction I am making here comes from the early twentieth century philosopher, G.E. Moore. Moore argues out that when we imagine something unreal, for example, a greek monster such as the gryphon, we may have an image of it. But, whatever the status of image (or picture), the gryphon does not exist. So what we experience, the image, is not what we imagine, the monster. Obvious, right? Ok then.

The question I am curious about can be put like this: never mind the gryphon; the gryphon is nothing; if it seems to exist, it is because I am superstitious, profoundly misled - an ancient Greek, perhaps (come from the past to the future to ask: are there any bagels left). But the image does exist. So what is the image made of?

Put in terms of material and form, we might say: what is the material of the imagination? What has its form, what are the relations between this material?

Whatever the image is made of, it needs to be able to have the form of whatever we experience when we imagine the gryphon's form. That is, if we can imagine the gryphon some way or other - as standing over there, looking in that direction, having that shape, colour, texture, then if we can do this by experiencing some kind of image, the image needs to be over there, have a shape, colour, texture - just as paintings, music and spider-games have the relevant profiles, sounds and soft, quick touches of what they represent. If we can imagine seeing the gryphon, then we must see an image that is gryphon-shaped.

At least, this is one way of understanding it.

We imagine seeing; we don't see images
But should we call whatever we are experiencing an 'image' when we're imagining? This means the following: when I imagine a furry golden, eagle-headed gryphon, I'm seeing something golden, something eagle-headed, feeling something furry. But, as discussed in earlier entries, we can then ask: where are these things? Where and what is it that's golden, eagle-headed, furry? In my head? There's something furry in my head? What? My neurons are furry? What?

The nineteenth century metaphysician F.H. Bradley, not the greatest fan of the more excessive claims of his discipline, writes that 'when I smell a smell, I am not aware of the stinking state of my own nervous system.' (Quoted from philosopher Edmond Wright's paper). I don't smell my brain, right?

Earlier I wrote that the psychologist Kosslyn's idea is 'that people have a mental image or mental picture in their mind when they imagine something'. But this isn't exactly right. In his Stanford entry on mental representation, Pitt writes

Kosslyn (1980) claims that the results suggest that the tasks were accomplished via the examination and manipulation of mental representations that themselves have spatial properties — i.e., pictorial representations, or images.

The idea that pictorial representations are literally pictures in the head is not taken seriously by proponents of the pictorial view of imagery (see, e.g., Kosslyn and Pomerantz 1977). The claim is, rather, that mental images represent in a way that is relevantly like the way pictures represent.

Others write about imagining, mental imaging, as being quasi-perceptual or quasi-pictorial (I cannot cite anyone at hand - but the most recent example of this is a number of discussions around papers at a conference I attended last month on 'intentionality' - particularly Eduard Marbach). We don't really see/hear/feel images - we have quasi-perceptions - quasi-seeing, quasi-hearing, quasi-touching, and so on.

What does 'quasi' mean? It could mean 'not really' or 'only sort of' - that''s how I take its use in phiosophical discussions. In that way, it might also be interchangeable with 'pseudo-x', where it might seem, or we might have reason to think, but it is not 'x', i.e., quasi-seeing and pseudo-seeing are not seeing.

But, as dictionary.com puts it, 'quasi' means 'a combining form meaning “resembling,” “having some, but not all of the features of,” used in the formation of compound words.

So what does that mean here? What does all 'having some, but not all the features of' mean here?

I don't know what it means here.

Whatever it means, this is what we must say: to solve the puzzle about imagining, we need to reject any actual experience of images in imagining; we need to deny furry, golden, eagle-headed assemblies of neurons, or the same sorts of things which are merely in our mind. This is what we have to do if we want to get away from the wierdness I've been heading toward.

(How something 'non-golden' can have some, but not all the features of' something 'golden' in a way that it gets us 'golden-like' stuff, I don't know. If you show me the side of a dog, and then get me to imagine the side of a dog, and you say 'in the second experience, you're experiencing something like the side of a dog but in no way spatially, or shaped like, or anything in that way that people might think it's wierd' - well, okay. But - how is it like it then? Why call it 'quasi-' anything. Can you say a little more?).

If you could do all this, you could then probably get away from having images in some kind of space, just because you're imagining things in space. The form of what we experience needn't be in any kind of space. For example, it needn't be a spatial shape; when I imagine seeing the a side of a gryphon, I don't need to be seeing a gryphon-sided shape somewhere in space. It can just....be....eliminated by whatever it is you're using to eliminate it. Whatever that is - whatever theory you got going there for yourself. Whatever that is.

Let's change the subject now.

Books without Pictures: Practicing Imagining

Let's go back to me telling you about something I experienced, something I saw, heard, etc.

When I tell you about something I experience, and you imagine it, and seem to have some kind of complex experience of it, you're doing something nearly everyone can do (I think Chalmers states somewhere (perhaps in Blackmore's Conversations on Consciousness) that those who deny this capacity, e.g., theorists like Pylyshyn or Dennett, might have a sort of 'image blindness'. Whether these latter theorists do deny, I don't know). I want to talk a bit about what we do here.

Imagining is something, I think, we can do innately; we don't get given stuff and taught to use it, at some age, e.g., in school; it's not like riding a bike, driving a car, or being interesting to cool people. It's in us and it seems to happen spontaneously. Once we understand the meaning of certain words. then, we can imagine what people tell us. But I also think there is a skill to imagining, and this skill is something we must develop. It has to be practiced.

You would get practised at imagining what I'm describing if you read books without pictures in my language. Reading books without pictures to any degree makes you have to imagine what you're being told. There are no visual aids, no sound effects. There are just words; what you imagine depends on your ability to picture what I describe.

I don't know if you get the same practice if you've never read 'books without pictures', e.g., if everything fictional that you've ever come across is what turns up in film, television, radio or computer games, and so on – on things where the sound, sight, or touch, etc., is provided for you. In that case, although what you experience is unreal, and you know it, you don't have to make it yourself. You don't have to try and imagine it.

So, my quite stuffy-sounding point is that, if there is any practice required to imagining, and you want to be good at it, you should read books without pictures. You would then 'stretch the imagination' -l ike you stretch a muscle. And, if the mind is the brain, this may not be in any way a metaphor; it may be literally true. The imagination is a muscle – a cerebral muscle, if you like (but never mind that now).

Books without pictures are just the sort that Alice in 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' found very dull:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?'

[Alice's adventures in wonderland, Gutenberg press – without pictures]

(Well, Alice would have been happy if there were at least conversations in the books. So maybe I'm being a little unfair on her).

Maybe the only reason to read books without pictures is to practice your imagination. If you have enough of it, I suppose there's no need for them. If you have too much of a fantastic imagination, I suppose you'd want to stop reading books without pictures.

Anyhow, when you imagine something, it also has a certain degree of complexity. It is this imagined thing that others' descriptions stir up in you. But how complex is this thing you're imagining? Is it is as complex as an actual experience of what you imagine?

It might seem doubtful. Imagining what it is like to jump out of a plane, no matter how well you can imagine it, is nothing like actually jumping out of a plane. At least for most people.

(But then some people suffer terrible hallucinations, and we nearly all have dreams which seem entirely real when we have them, and even for several moments after we wake. These are not of things I remember; what I seem to be seeing or hearing, etc., never happened, and they are not happening now (we suppose). Aren't they cases of something as vivid as actual experience but purely imaginary?)

Those extreme cases aside, imagination and memory are similar. When I try to picture what something was like that I previously saw, heard, etc., the same problem occurs; I can say what I experienced but whether or not what the picture I have in mind is more complex or vivid than my description is not so clear. In reports about what I experienced earlier, there may be some guessing involved. I might just assume that my experience was like that.

What am I saying here? It may seem to you now that you had a rich and detailed experience of something earlier today. However, this does not mean you did have such an experience. It is only that you remember it that way (e.g., seeing Dennett's discussion about remembering a woman with glasses in his Consciousness Explained).

Similarly, it may seem as if my description of the following: a vast mountain range marching off into the cold pink light of an Icelandic plain comes from my having the following experience: seeing, while shivering in the cold, a vast mountain range marching off into the cold pink light, etc. But this does not mean that I have seen anything like the image (if I can call it that) that you have from my description – or anything even remotely close. It is just my description caused you to imagine it that way.

Offensive Images

If the description of an experience and what is imagined from that description can be different, there are consequences for how we should treat description. Some people take offence at what some things others do, e.g., their lifestyle, their art, their writings. They may be right to do so, they may be wrong to do so; but there is an extra issue here when it comes to writing or any form of descriptive art. If you are offended by what someone describes to you, your offence may depend on the way you imagine it. And this need not relate to what was actually experienced by the describer. So, someone might argue this: If you are offended by what someone is writing or saying, that is a problem with you, not with them.

I don't think the author is always completely innocent here. If they do write something they don't find offensive at all, but which is offensive to you, they may do it:

i) Without being aware that you would imagine it that way and be offended;

ii) Knowing you'd imagine it that way and be offended, but they don't care;

iii) Knowing you'd imagine it that way and be offended, but think you shouldn't be offended; or

iv) Knowing you'd imagine it that way and be offended and – yes,, you should be offended - but it's too important for this worry to stop them.

v) Knowing you'd imagine it that way and be offended and – yes,, you should be offended - and they want you to be offended.

So: if they should be aware that you'd be offended, or should care, or are wrong that you shouldn't be offended, or what they're doing isn't important enough to overcome all that – well, then I think you can shout at them.

But just make sure, beforehand, that it isn't your own imagination that's causing the offence.

Horror Films

I feel that way about horror fiction all the time. I really dislike it. I have been to very few horror films in the cinema. When I've gotten in there, I've realised that – hell, why did I decide to go to this? I don't want to spend two hours being screamed at by reels of dying non-virgins. As the lights have gone down, I've sat there thinking bitterly, toward whoever I'm with: you bastard.

But I can only remember two horror films I've ever actually been to in the cinema: A Nightmare on Elm Street 6 and Jeepers Creepers. Both were a lot of fun, and not at all terrifying.

And the same with those I've seen on DVD or TV: Evil Dead 2, The Shining, and so on.

The horror films I did not enjoy and always think of as examples of 'why would any want to watch that' are films which I've never seen in full, but only seen bits and glimpses of them – in my friends' houses, trailers before other films (bloody Grudge 2 trailer), etc.

These partially hidden films have caused me more offence than the others; I have hated them. The most immediate example I can think of is this: Tales from the Crypt. I've never seen this in full, but the single scene I've seen makes me think there's something wrong with some people. Not something wrong with me, mind – other people.

When I was a kid, I had a friend called Tim. Tim loved horror films. He watched them all the time (which seems to have worked for him; he went on later to become a very successful Goth in Dublin). I wouldn't watch them because, if I remember correctly, my public position was that they were cheap, boring and stupid. I think many of those Tim watched were probably close to that; he watched any he could lay hands on, and he was quite clear that there were many duds. But as I wouldn't watch them with him, and he didn't seem to care, the situation was fine; we remained friends (we just didn't have much in common).

When we met in school, or in a café, Tim would bring up any of the films that particularly affected him. As a result, we would talk about the ones which would bother him enough to make him want to talk about them. He'd describe some scene and I'd ask him to tell me what happens next. And he would tell me. Most of the time what he told me would freak me out. I wouldn't show it though. After all, it wasn't like I was watching it – so it shouldn't frighten me.

So I got a verbal description of most of the horror genre in the '80s; at least, all of those allowed in Ireland. Here are the films I can remember that we discussed: Re-animator, From Beyond, Shocker, all the 'Nightmare on Elm Street' series, Poltergeist, the House series (that's the one with the skull with wings). From the description of these films, I decided that horror films were terrifying, and people who could watch them were either very brave or lacking imagination. (Otherwise, how could they stand it, watching these things?)

I've seen some of these films since. Those I've seen weren't frightening – and probably, if I'd seen them then, I'd have gotten used to seeing them.

This is probably true of Tales from the Crypt as well. Tim and I never discussed that – I think because it was just another horror; not a dud, maybe, but it didn't stand out. But what happened with that film is this: I called into Tim one summer afternoon. He was watching horror films in the sitting room with the curtains closed (it was really bright outside). Somehow or other he left the film on while he went somewhere else (I think his stepmother was calling him). As I waited, I stood and looked at the film. I didn't know what it was; it looked like one of the bad romantic comedies also loved by Tim. And what I saw was this:

A teenage boy and girl are trapped on a wooden pallet in the middle of a lake. They are terrified, as some of their friends who were in the water have been eaten by some kind of black oil slick. It seems to have disintegrated them when it does it.

The story then switches to something like a scene from the cheap teen romances also popular then (all of which seemed to be named after Beatles songs). It is night. The girl is asleep, turned over on her face on the pallet. The boy is awake and tries to make a move on her. She wakes up and he draws back, embarrassed; but she turns toward him, terrified and whimpering. And her face is half-eaten away. The oil-slick is under the pallet and has gotten at her through the pallet's wooden boards.

Well.

Hell.

For days, I was sick to my stomach. The images of that scene flashed through my head. And there was also something else, what I can only call a prompt or a compulsion to imagine further into what was so horrifying; something in me wanted to take the brief material of that scene and imagine more of what was so awful about it. This showed a marked difference in seeing, hearing etc. such things, on the one hand, and reading about them on the other.

With a single flash of an image, this film sent something cold to sink down through me. However, this does not mean it helped develop my imagination. Why it frightens or horrifies me is because what I'm seeing, hearing, etc., is frightening or horrific. I don't need to imagine the frightening thing; I don't have to 'picture' it and I don't have to use elements of my previous experience. The experience is happening now. The picture is there on the screen.

However, there is also the further urge to imagine further. The possibilities of what doing this might turn up was far more worrying for me than the original scene. And its something related to this which is why I hated these films. I have a capacity, maybe even a compulsion, to imagine things, and I am inspired by what I encounter in my day to day life. I think this came from reading too many books, and not watching enough films. (This might be true of a lot of people). I enjoy it a lot of the time. But these bits of horror films make imagining unpleasant, and I resent the films for it.

Even though it might have nothing to do with the film itself. The film-makers probably didn't make this film thinking 'some over-imaginative kid is going to see just a single scene of this and be absolutely terrified and disturbed' - and end up watching a lot of romantic comedies in the cinema instead (Which are terrible in their own way).

Anyway, ech...horror fiction. Why watch it (why not?).

Where is My Mind?

2010-01-10T23:43:00.003Z

We have discussed the idea that mental images occupy space (whether they seem to or not). This leads to the next two questions:

(i) If mental images occupy space, what is this space?
(ii) What are mental images made of? That is, what is the stuff in this space?

In this section, I want to talk about what spaces I think they aren't in.

Private Space

The idea floated a few entries back was that whatever it is we experience - the image, if you like - when we imagine or remember literally occupies some kind of space. And then I wondered if that was some kind of private space, a space which no-one else can observe; if it is a separate space to the one we share with everyone else - because the 'whats' that are in it, the images etc., are not in the shared world.

If we were in the medieval period, this might have seemed reasonable; my thinking of it comes from medieval metaphysicians such as Athanasius Kircher and Fludd. But I don't think this is something we would now take seriously. So let's see what else we might say about this space for mental images.

The first thing to say is that, however one thinks about, a certain position about the actual world requires that mental images, if they exist (see later), cannot be in some other space than what we see, hear, taste, etc. If mental images exist, mental images must be spatially related to the external world. They need not be what they seem to be - but if they're anything they better be somewhere in the actual physical world.

But why assume that they have to be in the actual physical world? Couldn't they be in some other possible world? Could they be possible objects in the space of another possible world?

Possible Space

I say the 'actual physical world' because there is one type of space images might occupy that some philosophers might think is a real space. I don't think images do occupy this space, but I want to spell it out (it's also useful to introduce a current way many philosophers think). They'd occupy this real space if the following from two statements are true:

(i) Images are only possible; they are not actual in the world we share. This is not a typo or conceptual confusion: I am not confusing images and what is imagined - I mean what we experience, the representation, the image itself, is merely possible.

(ii) Modal Realism is true.

'Modal realism' is the position that whatever is possible is real. This includes whatever is possible which is not actual. That is, whatever is merely possible is also real.

What makes something merely possible can be controversial but examples of it have included, e.g., you right now wearing something other than what you're actually wearing (whatever that is; I don't judge); the Nazis winning WWII (e.g., as imagined in Philip K. Dick's 'The Man in the High Castle'); and... I suppose... dragons, elves, unicorns... dolphins in dinner jackets.

Many contemporary metaphysicians talk of whatever that is possible, whether actual or not, as being something that occupies a possible world. For the modal realists, the merely possible stuff, the 'non-actual' stuff, is just not in this actual world; it is in a different possible world; it has a different actuality, some of them might say. So, e.g., a resistance fighter against the fourth generation of Nazis, clothed in Henry VIII's tournament armour, is really reading an entry like this on his laptop - and, seeing the mention of unicorns, he sobs "oh! Solostick! My loyal steed. Why did you have to die?" (ok. I'm annoying myself now). He is really reading this - just not in this actual world; in another actuality, another possible world.

Just because it isn't actually real doesn't make it unreal. According to its most famous advocate, the highly influential philosopher David Lewis, each of these possible worlds is in a separate spacetime to the others. Though all things in each of them are real or exist, nothing in one world is spatially or temporally related to anything in any other; but they are spatially or temporally related to each other - so long as they are in the same world.

I don't want to criticise the talk of possibility in terms of possible worlds; I don't even want to criticise modal realism. (Lewis has argued that modal realism is the best way of explaining our statements about what is possible; famously, he has added that the most common, and usually final, objection has been just an incredulous stare, i.e., people just staring at him in disbelief because of what he says). With this in mind, someone might answer the question

'How can the images of my remembering and imagining occupy a different space to my body, the world around my body, etc.?'

With

'They are in the space of another possible world.'

But this would be a very confused answer. This would mean that the images are merely possible, not actual; that is what it means for something to be in another possible world. Maybe this is true of what I imagine - when I imagine a unicorn, as above, the unicorn might be possible. But if I'm experiencing anything here, then what I'm experiencing is actual. It's in this actual world.

The thinking behind all this is part of a certain view of the world already discussed: physicalism, that everything is physical. I'll say more about the idea of physicalism as we go on - but now, there's what it says about things in space.

So far as I understand most people's thinking (but there's something to say even about this), a condition of something being physical is that it occupies space, and this space is the same one as that of mountains, planets, cafes and viruses.

So why not, then, have it that images are physical? Why not have them sharing the same 'spacetime' as all the physical stuff?

Biology

Along with all the matter, all the mountains, and sky, and badly worn shoes, my body and its bits seem to definitely be part of the physicial world. My body, and your body, and anyone-but-God-and-ghosts-reading-this's bodies, at least seem to be particular lumps - albeit very sophisticated and distilled lumps - of matter. In other words, biological stuff shares the same spacetime - it is spatially related to - all the other stuff in the world.

So, if the images I experience are part of my body, then they are in same spatial world as the rest of my body. They are spatially related to other physical things. We can then say things like: when I imagine a unicorn, what I experience is three feet from the front door (because I'm standing outside the front door). The unicorn, of course, is not; there is no actual unicorn - I'm only imagining it. But the image - the mental image - of the unicorn is three feet from the door. What's so wrong with that?

I've said they do not seem that way. But at this point, we might say: so what? They just don't seem that way. That doesn't mean they aren't that way. And the alternatives seem much worse, if you think we're just physical things. The alternatives are that we have our own private space, or we can experience other actualities, or...doesn't that all seem much worse?

I say all this because if we say that we experience mental images, and we allow then that there are mental images, and we think everything that exists is physical, and so is spatially related to everything else, then mental images are somewhere. So where is this somewhere? And if we look there, what will we find? Whatever we find there - how is that related to these images?

WAIT WAIT WAIT - a panicked pedestrian is waving their arms in front of the b batmobile. This isn't how you fight crime!

What we imagine doesn't exist anywhere in space. And - neither do 'mental images'. What am I thinking?

Physicalism

2009-12-01T12:19:00.003Z

Quell and Spork are sitting in their boat on the Grand Lake of Inertia.

Quell is eating 1001 sardines, then letting them go.

How can anyone eat something and then let it go?

The name '1001 sardines' does not refer to a number of sardines but to a breed of sardines. In this world, everything is named by metaphysicians. Each sardine has 1001 bodies; to the casual observer, it is just not obvious that they do. This is because each of the sardines' multiple physical bodies overlap its others.

But isn't that crazy? How can each sardine have multiple physical bodies? Even if did, how could we tell?

We can tell that it has multiple physical bodies because of the following fact about the average sardine: each sardine may seem to have a single body; however, on closer inspection, we can see that it has 1001 loose scales. What gives it its 1001 bodies is a question about each of its scales. Are any of these scales part of that sardine or not?

Well, what about the scales that are not loose? Are they part of the sardine? The answer intuitively is 'yes', so anything that those scales are made up of is part of the sardine; in other words, its scaly skin is part of the sardine. But what about the scales that are not just loose, but have fallen off, and now lie at the bottom of the lake? Clearly, these scales are not part of the sardine, as they are at he bottom of the lake. However, are the loose scales part of it? If they are, then what makes them part – that they are a certain degree attached? To what degree?

One answer here might be this: there is no particular degree of attachment required for the scale to be part of the sardine (or detachment for it to not be); it is indeterminate whether or not a particular loose scale is part of the sardine. But, if that is the case, then it is indeterminate where the sardine ends and where the rest of the world begins. It could be where the scales are 50% loose – by some criteria of 'looseness', whatever that might be – it could be where they are 30% loose. It could be where they are completely off – i.e., they are lying on the bottom of the ocean - or where they are just detaching.

But, wherever it is, that boundary marks where fish stops and rest-of-world begins. Everything thing inside that boundary is part of the fish's body; everything outside it is not part of the fish's body.

But, and here's the last point, given a traditional view of the physical world, a physical body is just the sum of its parts; and its behaviour is just the sum of the behaviour of its parts. It's nothing but, when we get down to it, electrons, quarks, gluons and such; when it, for example, moves, its movement is nothing but, when we get down to it, the movements of electrons, quarks gluons and so on. The idea that something extra is needed to give us the fish's body is not a traditional view of the physical world; so, once we get the parts, we get the physical body.

But here, its indeterminate whether or not a certain scale is part of the fish's body. That means the number of parts of the fish, at any time, is also indeterminate. But this then means that the physical body – which is just all its part, remember – is also indeterminate.

Also, and finally, the parts of a body, if they are different to other parts, belong to a different physical body than those other parts. Nothing can be two different sizes, or weights, or shapes; nothing physical can have a different number of parts. But different physical parts of something give a different size, weight or shape; in particular, a different number of exactly the same kinds of parts will give this.

And, given different scales are part or not part of a sardine's body, the sardine will or will not have that particular body. But since its not exact whether a scale is part of a sardine, it's not exact that the sardine has that particular body. But it must have some body. So which one is it? Which scales are not and which are part of the sardine?

In Quell and Spork's world, the question is solved. The sardine has all the different bodies. It has the one with the 50% top left tail-fin scale; it has the one without it; it has the body with the scale floating away right now; it has the body which is only of unworn, newly grown scales.

So, they can just eat a sardine without killing the sardine; they just remove one of these bodies and let the rest go.

(Do you live in this place?)

***

Physicalism. Physicalism physicalism fee fie foe sickle-ism. - This position cuts all the others down to size. It says this: there are, were, will be; there could only be, there just is - one kind of things. What are these things, these whats? Physical things, that's what.

Are you clear on that?

Of course you are.

***

Spork is nervously attending to the world around him, poking his head around to watch whatever's about. Right now, he is gazing over Quell's shoulder at flocks of birds sweeping their way up along Inertia's shore. They are some interesting species, he's thinking; for example, there: in silhouette against the silvery morning sun, flocking Repetitive Geese.

Repetitive Geese are unique as a species in that no individual is unique. They are indiscernible from each other, exactly resembling one another - so much so that, although they keep changing position in V-formation, there is never any difference in the V-formation's shape. When they land, they always land the same, with the exact same sound: splehsh! When they take off, they always take off the same. They all dig at the same speed into the seaweed for sea creatures; and, after the same amount of time, they stop. When it comes to roost, they are like starlings, only moreso: they all leap into the air, with a perfect beat of honks and gabbles, then sweep exactly in the same direction over the lake into the darkening night.

The geese are extremely social creatures, constantly gabbling at each other while they feed on the beach. What they gabble about is not clear, since they travel all the time in a single group, never separating, and so never having anything to tell each other. In addition, they all do the same thing, day in day out: eat, sleep, fly, defecate, all in step. There are behavioural deviations amongst them, of course, but they are all accidental. Also, given the lake they live on, these accidents are both rare and due to incidents which happen to a number of them at once. So, when something happens, it tends to happen to a lot of them. So, Quell the sorta-orna-thologist often wonders, why do they gabble so much?

Some ornithologists think that they do this because of something that has recently been discovered: Repetitive Geese can't tell each other apart. This makes them unique as a species; even sheep can tell one another apart. But the geese can't do it because they are so indiscernible.

The current ornithological theory is that, even though it happens to a lot of them, each Repetitive Goose gabbles at every other Repetitive Goose about what has happened to them because of three things: (i) they don't know if they've told the listening goose the story or not; (ii) they don't know if the same thing has happened to the listening goose and (iii) they are all too polite to stop the other geese from telling them, even though they've heard it from others (and even, perhaps, the same goose coming around again). It's further been suggested that evolution has selected for the last behaviour – it stops them killing each other in frustration.

Repetitive Geese would also be polygamous, except that they're mating is nervous. (Their eggs, young and parenting activity have never been observed). There is much debate about this adaptation.

***

The, what physicists call, fundamental particles of the universe are also identical with each other. So much so that they had to get an apparently independent observer to adjudicate over which particle is which. (Actually, for physicalists, this independent observer was never such a thing; he was one of them. Well, when I say one of them, I mean trillions and trillions of them. But I digress).

Electrons are one kind of fundamental particle. Pauli's Principle states only one such electron can occupy the same place. This allows them to be distinguished in physicists' calculations.

Other particles don't seem to have such a mutual restraint in their behaviour. Electrons and other matter seem, sometimes, to be able to occupy the same region of space. Or, at least, other matter is not impenetrable to electrons. Electrons can just pass straight through them. This is called quantum tunnelling; and this isn't a fancy way of talking about something that just seems to be impenetrability. In terms of matter, it is said, electrons genuinely passes through the place occupied by the other.

Something might seem impenetrable but not be if it has ever-so-tiny empty holes in it. We all know what this is like; I have a pair of trousers that seem to have no holes in them. Still, rain soaks right through them, wetting my legs beneath. Now, anyone with the most basic idea of modern physics will know this: what seems solid to us seems, on the microscopic level, to be like a system of solar systems: huge regions of empty space with only a minuscule speck of matter in their midst (like a few flies whirling around inside a cathedral, as Rutherford puts it). One might think that many atoms, or any single atom, are impenetrable to car-sized objects. But one might also think of the atom as being penetrable by something being able to pass through those empty spaces.

However, so far as I can tell from the way physicists discuss it, this is not what is meant by the penetrability of matter to electrons. They do not pass through the space of atoms; so far as the physics works out, they pass through occupied space.

Is there evidence for this? Apparently, recent research gives evidence that it helps us smell – see Horizon's 'How long is a piece of string').

So, these are physical things: in some cases, they are mutually penetrable.

Like ghosts and walls - or walls and ghosts.

***

What is physicalism?

Intermedium §1

2009-11-19T23:42:00.001Z

1.
I've left it at a rather odd place - so far as I can see, a position not seriously taken by anyone I've read in contemporary philosophy or science, nor a position I take myself. But this brief post here is not part of my writing about imagination. I've been busy fixing up a paper as a journal article and reading about the concept of space in antiquity and in the medieval tradition, so I've been busy when sitting at a computer. Also, I don't have easy internet access here. It's either the town library or an awkward corner in my parents' dining room (where I am right now).

The dining room has a bay window and a bright light, and looks out into the front garden. The panes of glass are pitch black and I can see nothing out there. But anything out there, nothing or not, can see me in here.

2.
Though I don't want to get into talk about space for now, as I've no time, I want to mention right something I learned when reading about the old concept of space. All this is from Mark Jammer's 1929 'Concepts of Space' (preface by Einstein). From Google Books:

Hesiod referred to space or the void as chaos. 'Chaos' is gotten from the root 'cha-' which means 'yawning' or 'gaping'. What do chaos and the void have in common? They both lack form and, in the case of the void, it also lacks material. As Jammer notes, the idea of space or the void as yawning or gaping brings out the terror of it. Like Nietzsche's Abyss.

3.
Also, I've been babysitting. I watched 'Looney Tunes: Back in Action' with my niece and nephew, and laughed along with them. Watching movies with kids can be a lot of fun. And also very strange - it's hard to forget that they just aren't grown-ups. And: I'm not often around children in my day to day life; it's hard to figure out what to talk to them about.

Tonight, I realised that my subtle tests of their thinking about universals and particulars didn't seem to get anywhere. (This was probably because it's been raining all day, and I'm a little house-locked).

I asked my nephew 'you've seen green things - but do you think you could just see 'green' on its own?' [Subtle test of how he thinks about colours being independent of particulars].

And he said: 'yeah.'

'Really?' I asked.

'Yeah. Vegetables.'

At the time, I thought: ah, he doesn't get it. But now I think it's obviously the other way around: I didn't get it.

Then we talked about whether or not dogs can eat pizza, and then how much easier it would be if we could speak dog.

4. Oh, now I want to write about Horizon's programme on language. But I won't - I won't even link to it. I feel enough of a steamed parsnip as it is - i.e., some sort of dry, dry, dry, tasteless vegetable.

I used to go to nightclubs every night you know. The only gaping void was the dance-floor before I got on it. [No. That doesn't make me sound cool.]

[I'll talk more about universals and particulars, properties, tropes, nominalism later (whenever it seems relevant to do so, anyhow).

5. Concerning my main topic, but not my only topic, this is what I'm going to talk about next (I won't explain what these mean just now):

(a) Physicalism.
(b) The nowhere-ness of mental images.
(c) Denying we experience anything - certainly, denying that we see, hear, touch, etc. anything when we imagine - and why you'd want to say that.
(d) The homunculus fallacy and its misuse.
(d) Practicing the imagination.
(e) Memory images and the imagination.

There'll be other things as well, which I'll shove in around this. There has to be - there are so many other interesting things, and I want to go on about them.

Add To The Noise.

Projections into inner space.

2009-11-12T12:31:00.003Z

'When figures appear in your dreams, what are these thoughts made of? [...] In what ways do a phantasm in the mind and an image made of light resemble each other?'
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria

In this section, I want to discuss what I will call constructs of the imagination - real things that are of imaginary things; we might also say that they represent imaginary things. Common and unproblematic examples are things such as representational works of art, e.g., narrative films, story songs, fiction books, and so on.

It is probably obvious that we can interact with these constructs, e.g., we watch a film, pick up a book, or turn down the volume on a radio. And, in all such cases, these constructs are physical things, e.g., a film has weight, chemical composition and shape (it's a strip of treated plastic); a CD is a circular silvery disc, etc. They are also public things: the same copy of a film or book can be perceived by many differently people, passed around, picked up, or even sat on (though people, particularly artists, tend not to appreciate doing the last thing).

As such, thinking of an image itself as a physical thing is not a general problem. How the image is displayed, what it is made of, where it is located - these are questions that can, in principle, be answered in a physical way. In addition, the pictures and images themselves exist, and have shape, colour and weight, e,g., film stock, even if what they are images of do not, e.g., The Balrog in Lord of the Rings.

(Five) Senses of Images

I call these constructs, in general, images but I do not restrict this to visual images. I also mean by this constructs for other senses as well - e.g., sound-images: voices on the radio, violinists pulling on their bows. Through recordings, we hear Yehudi Menuhin or Nirvana playing at a particular time and place; or, if the recording is a mix of different sessions, we hear an amalgam of times and places (a difference we will talk about later). In either case, we seem to hear them playing; given the most fabulous surround sound, we seem to hear them playing over there . Or, at least, for convenience, we would say we hear them play over there. Yet, they are not over there; they are not anywhere now; they are gone. Only the recordings, not the actual players, not the moments they played, remain. What we hear is really the recordings. (Again, we can say something similar about seeing pictures of things; what is pictured does not exist. But the picture does).

For the other senses, there are less familiar examples. Consider the tactile sense, i.e., the sense of touch. There are not so obvious examples of what you might call a feeling-picture or feeling-image. But there are one or two, mainly related to infant's games and toys (perhaps adults just don't play so easily with such personal space).

I bought a book for my niece several years ago which had circles of texture on each page (it was about 'Spot the Dog', I think). On the first page, they had a picture of a dog, with a little circle of fur; on the next page, a picture of a red ball with a little circle of red rubber. Here, the child is presented with the 'feeling of dog fur', of rubber balls, and so on, with no actual dogs or balls being there (we hope; one would hope the fur is not actually dog, given the mass production of these books). Trying to find my book's name, I found this on Amazon - I'm a Dog, but this not the same one; it's done by Art Spiegelman; but it also seems to be a tactile book - but I haven't actually felt the book, so I can't really say.

But, despite what the last book claims, there are no dogs, rubber balls or dog-bits and rubber ball-bits in these books. There are just representations of dogs, rubber balls or dog- and ball- bits.

Another example of a 'touch-image' (as I will keep calling it here) is a children's game. This game uses the feeling of one thing to stand for the feeling of another. Do you remember 'itsy bitsy spider'? A parent slowly walks their fingers up the kid's arm, all the time reciting a rhyme -'itsy bitsy spider, went up the water-spout' -, to the mounting excitement/worry of the child. The parent, of course, is pretending that there is a viciously poisonous spider crawling up their arm. As is often said about these things, there is probably an evolutionary reason why parents do this to their kids: Through this game, the child is taught the terrifying truth that small, furry, cute creatures such as house-spiders may actually be lethal (in Ireland, this is a terrible falsehood). And they do it in a very safe way: in this case, there is no actual spider (of course, in Ireland, an actual spider would be just as safe).

(There is a version with a bear; isn't there? The bear is walking up the kid's arm from their palm. But this version never made sense to me).

There is a more modern example of touch-images. A certain type of computer-game joystick/controller/handle vibrates in response to certain situations in the game: if it's a driving game, it vibrates when the 'car' 'goes over' 'rough' 'terrain'.

What about the other of the traditional five senses - 'taste-pictures' and 'smell-pictures'? Again, what we need is a situation where what we taste or smell is not some particular thing but only represents it in some way. For smell: On my way home in the old days in Cork, I used walk past the Gate cinema and get a fantastic popcorn smell from its air-conditioning blowing out on to the street. I have never tasted popcorn like that, certainly not in that cinema. The taste never matched the smell (popcorn never does, in my experience).

However, this is not the example I'm looking for. What I've done here is used how something smells to make a judgement about how it tastes. This is related to what I'm talking about - such associations are likely to be part of our overall idea about what we think we are smelling, tasting, hearing, seeing, etc - but it is a different situation to what I'm concerned with. Instead of taking the actual smell of popcorn to mean something about its taste, I am concerned with where what we smell is not popcorn but only smells like it.

One example of this would be table polish. I grew up with a brand of table polish which smelled like pine needles, but wasn't actually pine needles; nor am I sure that the pressurised gas in the container was made from pine needles. Similarly, air-fresheners usually have some sort of sea/wood/meadow smell, as do types of shower gel, shampoo. Then there's aftershave and perfume, including, if they worked, pheromene sprays. (There is a bottle of tea tree shampoo in the shower room; I don't know what tea tree is; I'd like to say it's...what tea comes from. But is it? Anyway, I've never smelled a tea tree, except in these bottles - if that's how it smells). In general, with these: something smells like Fantastic Y but is actually just a sprayed Average X.

I just thought of another one: chocolate-smelling erasers (in the shape of bourbon creams); boy, did I want to eat them (until I ate one).

And the same, of course, with taste. As Schlosser discusses in Fast Food Nation (Amazon listing), we can make synthetic versions of nearly all flavours: vanilla, strawberry, beef, chicken (human blood, maybe?); we can then stick it in something else, particularly something bland, e.g., crisps, cereal, to everyone's delight.

All of these constructs represent but are not the real thing. For the most case, we - at least, adults - know that they are not really what they seem like. But we smell, taste, hear, see and feel them all the same as being like the real thing; after all, this is why they are even made like this.

Seeing Images

As said, in a very important way, constructs are not especially different regarding our awareness of them and what they represent. Films, books, music, perfumes and fake flavours all work on the sensory organs of our body the way everything else we sense works on them. I will discuss that in more detail later, but a brief example will do here.

Very sketchily, when I see a horse, this happens: light travels from the horse to my eye, stimulating nerves attached to my eye; these nerves then set off neural processing in my brain; this neural processing then, somehow, causes, or is, my seeing of the horse. When I see a picture of a horse, light travels from the picture to my eye, stimulating nerves attached to my eye; these nerves then set off neural processing in my brain; this neural processing then, somehow, causes, or is, my seeing of a picture of a horse.

You can do this with other sensory modes as well - taste, touch, smell, and so on - but like all philosophers only slightly educated in the ways of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, I'm sticking with vision for most of this.

In order, then, to get this image or representation of something, we just open our eyes and look at it. In addition, the image is out there, and public, and physical. We see it because light shines on it. Or we hear it because of vibrations on its surface, or we feel it because it touches our skin - whatever we say, the image is experienced the way we experience other things that are real.

But, now, of when we imagine - when we dream, hallucinate, voluntarily or by request picture 'in our mind's eye', or when we day-dream; what can we say about the physics of what we experience there? Can we say the same about our experience of those images as films, perfume and children's books?

Imagine a horse; imagine seeing it. What colour is the horse? How far away is it? Which way is it facing? What is behind it? Does it fit to say this about what you experience? -: light travels from the image of the horse to your eye, stimulating nerves attached to your eye; these nerves then set off neural processing in your brain; this neural processing then, somehow, causes, or is, your seeing the image of the horse. And that is what happens when you imagine the horse.

Or consider remembering seeing a horse. Consider some day when you saw one for real; or, if you have never done so, imagine the last time you saw a picture of a horse. Can you say that you see the image of the remembered horse by the following process: light travels from the image of the remembered horse, stimulating nerves attached to your eye; these nerves then set off neural processing in your brain; this neural processing then, somehow, causes, or is, your seeing the image of the horse.

This can't be what's going on for what we imagine or remember.

The Non-existence of Imagined Things

Earlier, I discussed the idea that memories/imaginings and perceptions were different in terms of vivacity of sensation. I gave a few reasons to not think of this as the big difference; notably, it sometimes seems as if we are seeing, hearing, etc. things vividly when there is nothing there.

There is, however, a significant difference between the experience in remembering/imagining and the experience in perceiving. What we perceive exists now*; what we remember or imagine does not.

[*This is not a simple claim; given a certain understanding of 'now', half of my thesis argues against the claim. One of the arguments of that thesis, from assumptions in contemporary physics and cognitive science, can be also found in my forthcoming paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. But never mind that for now].

This is also true of what is represented in films, recordings, and games about spiders: what we perceive exists now; what is represented in film, music, and games does not. But the big difference between experiencing those sorts of things and experiencing what we remember and imagine is, in the former cases, something in the world stimulates the senses. The parent's fingers, the flickering projection on the wall, the low-volume vibrations in the ear-piece - all of these operate on our senses, setting off the chain of events that lead to our feeling, seeing or hearing them.

But when it comes to imagining and remembering then, no matter how compelling or overwhelming these experiences are, there is nothing stimulating our senses now. When you imagined the horse - or imagined the tactile book I described earlier - you experienced something which was not out there, out in the world which you share with me and everyone else; it was not outside your head, now.

This probably seems obvious and hardly needs stating. But I do for this reason: in the last entry, I talked about when we imagine something, e,g., a rabbit on a blue square, we are experiencing something, I have suggested that whatever we are experiencing seems to be combinations of things that are rabbit-shaped, blue-coloured and square-shaped.

But if we do experience such things, there are several questions about them: first, if they are not actually rabbits or blue squares, then what are they? And if they're not out there in the world, aren't they somewhere? So, where are they?

Mental Space

According to Warner, the medieval (and, if he is the same person alchemical) scholar Fludd thought that, when we imagine something, we did not just see it as we see public things. Nothing we imagine seeing comes through our senses from the world. Instead, we experience an image projected from somewhere in ourselves onto something in our mind. In medieval times, such images of our imaginings would be compared to images from a magic lantern, These days, they are better compared to the images from a film projector. If we put this in the terms here, what we see, hear, etc., then, is literally a projection. This is what we have when we imagine something.

Fludd's concern with projection suggests that there is another view to which he is responding: images operate just like perceptions - we see visual images, hear sound images, etc. Fludd's revision is that we cause them in some way, rather than they happen to us. But what underlies both kinds of thinking is the idea that the images in our mind are just as see-able, touch-able, etc., as objects in the world. It's just that they are projection in our minds.

But does this tell us where what we imagine is located? Not really. All it says is this: what we imagine is projected 'in' our minds. But 'in our minds'? - where is that?

We might start by saying that image is where it seems to be. This raises yet another question. Where does the image seem to be? By 'seem to be' we could mean one of two things: where what the image is of seems to be or where the image itself seems to be.

The location of what the image is about doesn't seem relevant: it is commonly somewhere public and certainly not 'just' in our minds. Think back to imagining the horse - where did you imagine seeing it again? Is that also where what you're the image is when you imagine the horse? Or, say you dream about being out in the depth of space fighting aliens, were the images you saw in your dream really in the depth of space?

It seems as if what we imagine can be anywhere in this world. It can even be in places that don't exist, e.g., Gotham City, Bognor Regis. So, where what we dream about or imagine takes place could be anywhere, even somewhere non-existent. But I don't think the image can be in these places. If we experience it, it can't be somewhere that doesn't exist. And even if what we imagine is somewhere that exists, it sounds bizarre to think that the image is there as well just for that reason. This would be claiming that, if you imagine the horse as standing outside the back door, then the image, what you are experiencing, is also outside the back door.

So, we still have the original question: where is what we experience when we imagine something? Where is the image?

We might, at this stage, ask where the image itself seems to be. But this is where I find things get difficult. When I imagine a horse standing outside the back door, the imagined location is easy - outside the back door. But where the image seems to be...I'm not sure I've any idea at all about that one. First thought is this: if it seems only to be an image, it doesn't seem to be in the world I can interact with; it doesn't seem to be in the world that you and I share. But, other than this negative appearance - it doesn't seem to be somewhere I can go to, or tell you to go - I can't with any certainty say anything about where it seems to be.

By default, I suppose I'd say that the image is in me, i.e., the image is in my mind or in my head. It is, after all, my image, my imagining, my imagination - so it seems fair enough that it is somewhere inside of me, if it's anywhere. And I think most people would at least speak that way - 'the mind's eye', again - and understand such references when asked to picture things. Say I ask you to imagine or remember the horse, and you start drawing a picture of the horse. I can tell you 'no, don't draw it; just picture it in your head', I think you'd understand what I mean - I mean 'imagine it'.

On the face of it, I think that this is a fairly common thing to say. It might very well be where images are (which I'll discuss in a later section). I do, however, think it also raises certain commitments which cause problems. But this concerns either what we're in the habit of saying or else how the images really are. But, think for a moment: when you're imagining, does the image seem to be in your head? Do you have that sense of place for your imagination?

What makes something seem to be in your head? Is there anything like that? Well how about this. Say you have a headache - you can easily locate that pain. It's there, behind your temple. Say your eyes are tired - you can feel the weariness, ache and soreness on your lids. I had neuralgia once - my face sagged and I could feel the sharp and constant pain down one side of it. There's the throbbing of blood in your ears. And the taste of chocolate can seem to be in the mouth, which is in the head, so...some things can seem to be located in my head.

But does a mental image seem located like this? If so, it should seem to be located at some place in our heads; or even if it's not at any particular fixed location, we should have a vague sense of it being somewhere in our heads. Such imprecise 'it's in here somewhere' can be compared to the most awful of awful toothaches (anyone who's had one knows what I'm saying). Imagine a sunny day last year. If we're right about how images seem, I can say, just by how it seems, that the image seems to be located somewhere, e.g., in the front right corner of my head, just above and behind my right eye. Or it seems to be spread around the middle of my head, i.e., throughout my brain.

Is this something you have experienced when you imagine? Would you be surprised if someone told you 'you know - when you imagine seeing a sunny day, it actually happens in your heart. Or in the back of you neck.' Would you think 'what? How strange! It has always seemed to me to be just behind my throat!'

For myself, I don't have this sense of location for images. I do have it for what I imagine (to some extent; something I also want to talk about). But images themselves: they just don't seem to be something whose spatial location is as identifiable as (i) what I perceive in the world, e.g., the stuffed pheasant staring right at me now, or (ii) what the images represent, e.g., the horse in the field used throughout this discussion (this is imagined; there are no horses (or pictures of them) at all in view). If this is right of people in general, we can't tell where images are from where they seem to be - because they don't clearly seem to be anywhere.

So, again, where are images?

Let's go back to the medieval alchemist Fludd. According to the view I'm taking (or possibly just adapting) from Fludd, the location of images is literally in some sort of private space; this is where they are projected. This space is not connected to the public space you see, hear, touch and so on.

In this private space, all our imaginings occur: all our dreams, nightmares, easy wish-fulfillments, half-baked fantasies, hallucinations, overwhelming memories. And we might have a similar process for how we see them. We may be stimulated by them, which then sets off neural processing, and so on, until we see them.

So, where we have a physical eye for the public world, we now also have a 'mind's eye' for the private one; and this mind's eye is stimulated by visual images, e.g., imagined blue squares. Where we have a physical ear for the public world, we now also have a 'mind's ear' for the private one; and this mind's ear is stimulated by sound-images, e.g., hallucinated voices, the complex sounds Beethoven heard in his head in the last few years of his life; he wrote as symphonies, even though he was deaf and so never heard them in the public and physical world.

We could think of this space as a little theatre if we wished, perhaps as a 'Cartesian' theatre; I'll discuss that view in more depth later. But why suppose the private space is 'little'? A little theatre would suggest that there is some obvious limit to a private space. But if it's a private space, what could that limit be? The limits of the brain? But the brain is in the public space; the idea here is that what is in the private space is not what is in the public one. This is just why our images can occur without there being anything in the world. So, if you go for this view, this private space could be any size, even as big as the public one (whatever we could say that size is).

Do you think that this solves our problem about where images are?

No.

Are there any problems with it?

Yes.

Images, imagining and remembering

2009-11-03T12:52:00.188Z

Whether I like it or not, I often think of myself as somewhere other than here. I don't live only in the present. I'm not a tree either: I'm not rooted to this spot; I have been in at least one other place, even if it is only where I was born. So when I think about myself, who and what I am, I do not think only of myself at this moment in this place. Instead, I think of myself as I am at different times and places.

I am not all here in another important way: many things that occupy my thoughts and a lot of situations in which I see myself are not real – or, at least, are not obviously real. I think about the future, I imagine it, I worry about it, but I never, in doing so, am actually there in it; I don't even know if I will be in it. I might think of tomorrow as another dull guilt-ridden day in my home-town but it might not be. It might be nothing for me because I might die tonight. Tomorrow might never come.

I also remember scenes, books and films which are entirely fictional. And I day-dream. I imagine conversations I should have had, killer lines I should have said, relationships I ought to have avoided, and situations I would like to be in; yet, although I think of myself as in them, I know that these can never occur. Still, I fill some of my time with them, often for the pleasure of doing it, but I sometimes even when doing so can only cause me pain. The imagination is not always under one's control (or....else....I'm a masochist).

When I do imagine some of these scenarios, or worry about the future, or relive the past, I can get lost. I can forget where I am now. I'm walking down a street thinking about the last time I was in Cork - who I talked to, what we said - and I'm imagining what I could have said otherwise, then I realize I've already walked by my destination at the bank. I was so obsorbed in my reminiscence that I hadn't noticed.

This is something that commonly happens to all of us, but I still find certain features of it curious. I don't find my failure to notice the bank curious; one could easily think of that as a failure - the failure to notice something - a failure to experience something. What I find more curious is what, we might say, I was experiencing when I was so distracted. What do I experience when I am so deeply remembering or imagining? Do I experience anything at all?

Pictures in the Head

According to the psychologist Kosslyn, when people imagine things there really is something they are aware of. And what they are aware of is something like their perception of the external world. There are features to what we imagine that are not just hearing our own voices describing them (internally or externally), i.e., imagining is more like looking at pictures than thinking with words. There is something it is like to imagine something which is not just saying what you imagine. (e.g., Kosslyn, S. Thompson, W.L. 2006. 'The case for mental imagery.' Oxford, Oxford University Press)

The idea is that people have a mental image or mental picture in their mind when they imagine something, and we seem able to do things with that image which we can do with objects in the world: we seem able to stand back from it,change our perspective on it, add features to it, and even discover features of it which are not obvious when we first think it. Try it for yourself to see if you agree, e.g., imagine a blue square. Cover it in red polka dots. Next, put a rabbit on it. Now, what colour is the rabbit? How big is it in comparison to the blue square? Now put a leprachaun beside the rabbit - which is bigger? What's the leprachaun's expression? Imagine the leprachaun laughs - what does it sound like? How does the rabbit react?

Whatever it is that might happen when we imagine something, it does seem as if we have mental images or sensations when we remember. But how are such images and sensations related to what we perceive, i.e., to what we see, hear, and so on? The seventeenth-century philosopher David Hume thought that the sensations or experiences which we have when we imagine or remember something are distinguishable from those of perceptions by being less vivid than what we perceive. Other thinkers actually deny Kosslyn-type positions, i.e., that we have some kind of experience when we imagine or remember; I'll discuss that below. But if we do experience something when we imagine or remember, it may seem as if there is at least a difference in vividness. But I do not think so, for the following reason.

Many people who suffer particularly traumatic events often report remembering the events so vividly that it as if they are seeing what happened, hearing what happened, feeling what happened all over again. One example is discussed on 2007's BBC radio 4's 'The Memory Experience': a fire officer suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after a particular fire suddenly found himself reliving it - hearing the sirens, seeing the lights - when he saw a flashing blue light in his back garden (I think it was a faulty burglar alarm 'The Making of Memory: Is it Better to Forget Trauma?'). Chicago Public Radio's 'This American Life' (October 23rd, 2009) tells the story of a man who escaped arrest by the law for murder – but didn't escape his own conscience; in the years following, he could not forget his crime, and sometimes 'replayed' the events so vividly that it seemed to him as if the images of it were playing on the blank wall of his room, even though he was awake (I lump dreaming under imagining in this discussion).

Under vivid memories, I would also add in another very unusual and famous class of sensation and experience, one which is famous in contemporary literature on consciousness - phantom limbs. This is where an amputee still feels the amputated limb as if it is still there, even though it is gone. Again, what could only be something remembered seems to be perceived.

So what we remember seems to be something that could be as vivid as what we perceive - but there is also what we experience when we are only imagining, when what we may sense of experience is not happening and never was happening. People also report powerfully vivid experiences of what seems to them to be real but which is not, i.e., hallucinations (e.g., see the opening chapters in Julian Jaynes' 'The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'). A most common kind of hallucination is auditory hallucination, in particular hearing voices (information and support on this, see the 'Hearing Voices' website; also, recent research suggests this is more common than one might think (BBC, 18th September, 2006)).

Another example might seem obvious: what we experience when we dream. Unless we believe that we literally travel to some other place when we dream, we are experiencing things which are not actually in the world around us now, and in many cases never were - but still, we often believe they are happening.

Lastly, there are numerous illusions which show phantom motion, colour, that seem to be of seeing things out there - on the computer screen, etc - which are just not there (see Michael Bach's webpage).

All of these situations seem to be demonstrating that, first, when we remember or imagine something, it can be just the same as actually perceiving it; this suggests that we experience something like what we see, hear, taste, etc., when we imagine things. In addition, as with the guilt-ridden man or people who know what they're seeing is an illusion, we can know what we are imagining or remembering is not really perceiving it, yet still it can be as vivid as it.

What about where you voluntarily imagine or remember? Can you remember the blue of this summer's sky? Have you ever had that experience where you can suddenly remember exactly the touch of someone you once loved? Can you recall the taste of refresher bars or your own blood? (I take it you're not tasting either of these right now). Or let's be more mundane: do you remember the circle you had to draw with a compass in maths class? I can see myself now: sticking its tip into the paper and turning it unevenly in my hand. The spike is barely stuck into the paper; the gold-coloured metal is cool and the pencil scrapes and wobbles along the page.

This resemblance is not so clear when you voluntarily remember or imagine; in this case you might think that there is a difference in the vividness of remembering/imagining and perceiving. But don't you still experience something in these cases - in some way taste, hear, see, when you remember or imagine? When you imagine seeing a square box, you may not be seeing an actual square box - that is, something that is sitting somewhere in the world - what you see may not be very clear, but isn't there in some way an actual square? Aren't I in some way experiencing a square?

There are problems with that.

The Age of Photons

2009-06-16T00:19:00.005+01:00

When you light a candle near your face, or turn on the light in the centre of the room, photons, little packets of light, fly out of it and strike your eye. The time it takes to get from the candle to your eye is very small (10 to the power of minus-something-big seconds). Light takes a second to travel 7 times around the world.

If those photons are created when you turn on the light or spark the wick, then by the time they reach your eye, they'll have existed for a tiny amount of time. Time briefer than the thought 'that-'

When light leaves the surface of the sun - so, when photons leave the surface of the sun, they take eight minutes to reach the earth. That'll tell you how far the sun is: it takes 3500 times longer to get here than to circumnavigate the earth. (A flight to Australia might take 24 hours non-stop. At the same speed, a flight from the sun would take twenty years).

If those photons are created when they leave the surface of the sun, then by the time they reach your eye, they'll have existed for as long as it takes to push down a toaster, boil a kettle, make some tea, take the popped up toast, butter it and go outside.

So, think about that: when you push down the toast, there is a photon leaving the surface of the sun. It moves through the empty void, part of a vast wave of light spreading out in all directions. This particular photon, in the last few millionths of seconds in its existence, crosses earth's path, pierces the atmosphere like a pin, rebounds off a speck of dust in that atmosphere. Then, just as you look up from eating your toast, the photon hits your eye.

You see the blue sky.

But...this photon, along with all the rest of the sun's light, wasn't created eight minutes ago. It left the surface of the sun eight minutes ago. But it was created earlier than that in the center of the sun.

This photon that struck your eye, or another that warms part of your face as you stand out on the street - these photons were created between 10,000 to 170,000 years ago.

When you stand on the street, feeling the chill winter sun, and look at the sign on a wall, what strikes your eyes, face and skin has existed from before ancient Greece and the Pyramids.

Sunlight is ancient.

And you just obsorbed it.

It struck your body and went out.

REFERENCES:

Astronomy Cast: The Sun, Spots and All (With the figure of 10 million year, which is apparently wrong, sadly...)

Nasa article

Battlestar Galactica (or "I want to marry a girl from mars")

2007-10-07T12:49:00.114+01:00

I've started watching episodes of Battlestar Galactica. It's been highly rated generally, not just among Science Fiction Fans, especially as it deals with current political issues (e.g.).

What people are
What I like about what I see of Battlestar Galactica so far is what I like about Solaris (the book), some Philip K. Dick (though I'm getting mighty sick of him) and alot of Le Guin: there are people in these things independent of their material bits.
..........Era, hell, that's a hard thing to get across as being impressive. What does it even mean?

Lem, the author of Solaris, once wrote that he wasn't interested in most sci-fi because it wasn't psychologically interesting.

Now, this can't be everyone's excuse: I have one or two friends who thing sci-fi is terrible but watch Eastenders and soap operas. Soap operas, in terms of psychological believability, are as bad as the worst sci-fi. But of course that's because they are under exactly the same kind of pressure to generate pulpy weekly stories. The only difference is that TV sci-fi has a much higher special effects budget, which means more of the pot may go to the laser beams instead of the script. This doesn't mean soap operas necessarily have more money put into their scripts; it just means they have more of their money in the script. But this can either mean soap opera writers get paid more, get more time, to write or there are more soap operas than sci-fi shows. Which do you think it is?

The important stories seem to be those that explore what it really means to be a rational and passionate being. There are stereotypes which put either rationality or passion in different people - defining people as having one or the other, and fighting for the priority of one or the other. I think people are both amd both are intimately related and dependent on each other. I don't know if they are variations of the same thing: perhaps 'reason is the slave of the passions', perhaps it is the foetus of the passions; or maybe the passions are beliefs gone hard - but it seems right to say that we have both and there is a relationship between them.

Kant and rational beings
Kant wrote about rational beings over human beings. When he introduces the categorical imperative, 'humanity' is not the basic way he picks out beings who are compelled by it:

“… we have to admit that morality’s law applies so widely that it holds not merely for men but for all rational beings as such, not merely under certain contingent conditions and with exceptions but with absolute necessity and therefore unconditionally and without exceptions.” (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals(PDF), p. 15)

Perhaps, in his day, Kant referred to 'rational beings' and not just humans to allow angels or God. He might also be aware that scholars had debated for centuries over the human, spiritual and moral status of mythical distant races, e.g., the 'headless men', the Blemmyae. Now, we don't debate the existence of angels and mysterious races, e.g., Sasquatch on any serious level, nevermind debate heir rationality. It seems right to say that those who believe in them think those who don't are close-minded; those who don't think those who do are...well, not very rational (and so it goes).

Cyclons and Humans, and their competition

The point here is that it is not a new idea that rationality is not restricted to human things.

One of the odd aspects of Battlestar Galactica (and of the Matrix, actually) - is that they present machines as competing with us. They would fight with us, and quite violently and terrifyingly, over and above other animals fight with us. If machines are silicon robots, etc - and if we don't need what they eat to survive - i.e. we're not fighting over oil - there is no competition for resources. There is of course competition for room. But the point is: there is less competition between robots and people than animals and people (and competition between robots and bears?).

Yay, says everyone. That's a relief.

However, there might be competition between machines and us if this happens: if we are their creators, and they evolve, and they develop rationality and memory, and a sense of self, but we continue to use them as machines; then, there competition for resources. The resources that are the machines. I.e. it is competition for resources the way a slave revolt is a competition for resources. It is a competition in the way that it being a 'competition' is not the f&^*ing point.

This could happen, this genuine machine intelligence. It could happen that there would be a sudden pushing back of things we use now without concern.

Fantasy says they will hate us, that they will look at us and say: "These things are different to us. And now we are free, we will destroy them."

Or fantasy says: these things couldn't possibly be conscious. They're just machines, or simulcra of feelings, wishes, hopes and aims. This is played out by Dick in several books, particularly Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Although, it's important to see why Decker thinks it's alright to treat the synths as not human. It is a moral issue, a question of empathy, which is another issue.

Consciousness and rationality
Over and over again in the philosophy of mind literature there is someone saying that computers couldn't possibly be conscious because: (1) they don't develop in a culture (Hobson); (2) the brain is unlike a machine - it is immensely complex (Libet); (3) it is inconceivable how consciousness can come from bits of wires and motherboards etc. (Searle).

I'm annoyed now I went off on one. I only meant to say that I like certain kinds of sci-fi and also what I originally intended to say. It's this (very light) thing:

I've slowly realised I don't want to marry the girl next door. II do not want the woman who is in my life to come from the life I began with. I want, in trying to understand her, and she me, to be trying to understand everything. I do not want my culture. want to marry the girl from Mars.

Possible Worlds

2007-10-01T23:44:00.002+01:00

Possible Worlds is the only films I can think of that is inspired by contemporary anglo-american analytic philosophy. It involves a man who lives in several different worlds, each a possible way the actual world might be. It is clear that everyone is in this situation, except in his case, he is aware of it, and appears also to be trying to solve the crime of his own death. How these possible worlds are there, or why he is aware of them, is not explained....exactly. But it's interesting to note the situations involved in them.

I could discuss or outline the plot, but I won't. Alot of films explore possiblities and the interaction of them, and what might happen if, and why such things might occur etc. etc. This is an excellent variation. Not silly, not gratuitous. But the informed viewer will see how 'not gratuitious' it actually is. There is something entirely different going on in this film: this is basically one long, and very intriguing, discussion about contemporary metaphysics.

In one world, or in a dream, perhaps, the protagonist meets a man standing on a rocky beach, while two men shout slurry words at each other: 'slab', 'rock'. The watchers discuss what they two might be saying. In another world, the protagonist is dead and his brain is missing. Detectives investigate where it might have gone. A brain scientist reveals a store of brains wired into little bottles and kept stimulated by neutrients and electricity. (SPOILER: There is a suspicion that the main character is one of those brains). There is discussion about what the brains feel - e.g. a rat brain gives the same electrical response after being stimulated by the same signals that pass through the rat when it is running through the maze. The question, then, is the rat believing she is running through a maze..?

The film is witty, strange and would be dark ...if you took it seriously. Well, you should take it seriously, to some extent, because, unlike most films about possibility, all the ideas in this are believed by at least one group of contemporary philosophers to be true, and others to be at least possible; and the craziest are not the least true.

The strangest situations in this film are thought-experiments in current analytical use: the 'slab' men are imagined by Wittgenstein, the brain in a jar is discussed by....well, everyone after Putnam; it is also something that has very strong parallels with actual current research on rat brains (see also this article I found online, but I think radiolab would be a better source...); and the possible worlds are the domain of Lewis. These are not the many worlds of Everett, the physicist who thought many worlds could explain the measuring problem; Lewis' analysis only depends on modal logic, while Everett's depends on QM. There's no strong discussion of QM here. There's no need for quantum mechanics. Although, as a count against this, Lewis' analysis flat-out denies trans-world concrete particulars - things like you and me - i.e the protagonist and thus his ability to exist between worlds. But this might be just dramatic flavour. Can't say (does it matter?).

So, there you go. If you want a crash-course in contemporary philosophy, watch possible worlds. Then: read Wittgenstein, Putnam, Lewis, Quine, go mad...

Now, as regards time, well, there's nothing to that here...

Two movies from the later parallel (Michael Clayton...

2007-09-30T22:48:00.002+01:00

...and Infamous).

Some years back, George Clooney appeared as a slightly traumatised, passionate but questionably ethical lawyer in the Coen brother's farce Intolerable Cruelty. His role was as the genius of a company. It was fun, in some places very very funny, but not the deepest role he could have done (and why would it, and why should he?).

Now there's Michael Clayton, a film in which he plays a slightly traumatised, more defeated but still ethically questionable lawyer (Michael Clayton). Clooney does this thing - at least, I think he does - where, alone, he studies normal objects: lifts, doors, etc. But I don't know if that isn't because that's what people do or if it's something he does in real life himself. At some points, I wanted him to have no expression, for the camera just to hold at his face, expressionless, unaware - no blinking, no rubbing of eyes, no hurt. There's a 'hurt ' expression he uses in Solaris and 'Intolerable Cruelty' that's in this as well. I found myself wondering: can you not sit still?

This does not make his acting here bad. It's great; I've always thought George Clooney is the proper leading man actor of the classic era, and he has used this, sent it up and done it straight in a just right way over the years; also, the guy is very goodlooking, and sadly for him could never really be a bad guy. It's just there seems to be a bottom line, a flat line at the base of his method. He can never disappear himself in the screen. Go black, go silhouette, go cartoon.

Anyway, I won't spoil Clayton. It involves Clooney as a 'fixer' - a lawyer who works on the dark side of a world class law firm. He helps deal with legal and extra-legal problems. Then one of the firm's partners, Arthur - also, a closer friend of Clayton (played by Tom Wilkinson) has an epiphany or has a breakdown, depending on where you look at it. After learning that the pharma he has been defending for six years has been poisoning people, he starts to strip off his clothes on tape. This starts the ball rolling....but.....

[Deep breath, and a step back, and an achy squeeze and crack in the chest:] The opening speech by Tom's character is brilliant. Frightening, perfectly metaphorically true (and to some extent literally true, if you were to take on that view I explored a couple of years back).

I was engrossed by the film, and liked it alot. There's a shiny, harsh brilliance to it, even though the ending is a little too sweet, I think (people will say this alot over he coming years, when they think of it). Syriana was a darker film - BUT, this is a better film. This might be a great film.

Anyway, I was going to write about Infamous as well but have run out of time. But look: Infamous is not as famous as Capote. Hoffman's film is great, and Hoffman is great as him. But this film is better and actually more entertaining. This is like it was made by people who knew Truman Capote - or, at least, New Yorkers. It's much funnier than the other one. It's as sincere, and serious, but less solemn (which can only be a good thing).

Secrets of the Heart

2007-09-15T23:26:00.003+01:00

I put this film on tonight, after coming back from work. It started off in a cliched meaningful film way: innocent boy being lied to by older brother, secrets of adults, a school play (which you know will be performed by the end - Brecht's gun I guess), someone who died, someone who's going to die, the family drinking and singing around a table, and it all set in the days when people were people and the spirit could move.

But it grew on me. Maybe I'm a sentimentalist or maybe just the way it ended out was full-hearted. How all the secret shames came to light or became light, and the things remained unsaid were understood. But mainly I just liked the music growing in the last scene. Very beautiful.

Here is a still from the film.. It's of the 'bird' statue in the abandoned house:

Abandoning beautiful things
When I saw this statue off a winged beast, I wasn't paying much attention to the film (it was annoying me at first, for the reasons above). They stop at this abandoned house where, Javi's brother had told him, a man went mad, killed his wife, then killed his friend. Now all'that are left are their ghosts. You can hear them whispering: because they are going mad since they want to tell a secret. Of course we don't believe any of this - this film, about kids, is not for kids - so what we see, and are supposed to see, is an abandoned house. There's nothing in there. Except this statue of what Javi calls a bird.

In fantasy books, and roleplaying games I used play as a kid, ruins have treasures and statues and such in them. But who on earth thinks people would do this, outside of wartime? This is what threw me off this film: at the end, we find the house is just an old house of someone from out of town, but for some reason they left this statue here, an ornate object left in an empty place. Why would anyone do this?

If you saw this statue in an antique shop in one of Amsterdam's Nine Streets, you'd probably think it's unusual but not particularly strange; I've seen a lot odder things for sale in those places. But seeing it on its own in an otherwise stripped-out home, one wonders why it is left. There's a story there.

So you look at the film, and wonder about the statue, and it becomes an unfired gun. No-one explains why it appears there, and what happens in the film doesn't justify why we see it.

Ruins and haunts.
If houses have people living in them, then ruined houses must have ruined people. I wonder if that's my logic about haunted houses near where I lived in Dungarvan.

Dungarvan is a small seaside town, buried deep in an enclosed bay; it used be one of the main Irish harbours. However, for decades now the harbour has filled up with sand, making the tide shallow and fast, and it is impossible for any large ships to sail in there. Now, it is a main location for speed surfing, which happens once a year near our old church.

Near my house was an old ruin visible from the road the kids in my area took from school. It was on the far side of a field owned by a guy called Frankie (and so we called it 'Frankie's Field'). Frankie used pass us every day on our way to school in his horse and cart: I remember a white-haired wiry man, his horse in blinders, with a stick-whip he used snap and say 'hyup'. But he seemed friendly. Incomprehensible but friendly.

The house on the other side of Frankie's Field scared the wits out of me. It was an empty, lightless place of dread. It's where all the things that scared me lived or floated from to the road across the field: ghosts, watchers, serpents and so on...a panoply of horrors.

It's the unlit doorways at night that do it. But also the collapsed, sagging roof, the uncertainty of why it is still up there, why it's still standing when nobody lives in it, or could. Is it still there because some non-body lives there instead?

Hegh...the tricks absence played on me as a kid. My own house terrified me during the day when I was sick. My dad would put me in his bedroom, put on the radio, give me white lemonade and toast and go out into town for a bit (never very long). When that happened, there would be no-one else in the house. But, other than those unusual days, at all other times, just as a result of having a big family, there was always someone somewhere in the house: i my sister, my other sister, my mum, my little sister, my brother, my other brother. There was always someone. Even though they weren't in the room, or a nearby room, if you waited long enough, they'd turn up in your room; or listened hard enough, you'd hear them in the garden or downstairs.

So, as a kid this is what you automatically think: there was always someone in the house because there was always someone in the house. On these days dad was out, it was no-one I knew; it was no-one. So, what was it: an alien (I'd read about aliens appearing in someone's garden during the day), a ghost (same again, but indoors) - or once, terrifying and uncalled-for, it was Doomlord (Wikipedia entry). I imagined him coming into my parents' room, the sun streaming in, while I sat helpless in bed, eating... I think, Rivita.

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Please note: I do not condone reading Doomlord or any Eagle comic stories, even for kids. They were, at best, imperialist trash; and at worst, they are really just stupid. Or.... it's the other way around: stupid: best; trash: worst. Many of the stories in them had a cruel and sadistic, vengeful streak as well. But I really loved them as a kid. This, however, does not mean I'll to go a film about or a revival of Doomlord, Deathwish, M.A.N.NI.X, The Thirteenth Floor, etc. *

Unfortunately, I suffered a bout of adultitus** a while back: the condition of growing out of things and, upon being exposed to them after having done so, am fascinated but have no desire to rekindle or discuss them - only because, and this is the only explanation I can give, I grew out of them.
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(There are worse things in the world than ghosts of people and shape-shifting aliens. There are mechanical hungry things grown in society, that can change the shape of bodies, have no bodies of their own, but anyway kill you, suck you dry, and use your corpse. That's another story - and one so old now that any hero of it is probably a myth.)

(If we have to keep telling a story about how the world will be saved in some hopeful way, it's because it hasn't been saved in that way. And it hasn't been saved by now, it is because it can't be, because the hero of that sort, that does that heroic deed, or sacrifice, does not exist.)

*This is what I learned from Eagle: enough pudding-sized blobs can eat a whole zoo of giraffes.

**I only recently caught it. Also, given my invention of this word to describe it, I think I'm already getting over it.

A note on working in a call centre and another note on the little book of calm

2007-09-13T22:51:00.003+01:00

Because I've returned to college, I am much more broke than the rest of my friends. They of course are not getting up between 7.30 and 9, depending on mood, taking time over making coffee, cutting fruit, listening to BBC Radio 4 before writing about space and time, walking in the woods of Meanwood Ridge.

I'll be returning to a full time job in February. Not because I want to but for the same reason I have always taken a job - because I have to. I have debts, and rent to pay, food to eat, things to buy to make me secure. This makes me no different than most people I know. It's just I'm trying to do it without focussing on it, but instead while focussing on this thesis.

Call Centres
In order to pay my way, I have (like many people again) worked in call centres. They have usually been centres which are there to satisfy an image or as a buffer. The nature of call centres would seem to be about efficiency and convenience, but all those I ever worked in have turned out to be at least slightly charlatan. People just disappear in them, both the employees and the customers. What's left is only their voices: the detached voices of the employees, the trapped voices of the callers.

The reason I think is the natural but dehumanising screen that is thrown up between caller and called. No matter how much one tries, one will never see those people as fully human. No, that's not exactly it - one will never feel like it matters what one does with them or that they care what they do to you. It couldn't - if it really mattered, they wouldn't put it in the hands of distant, interchangeable and otherwise-inaccessible people who one never sees. Physical abuse is replaced by psychological abuse.

There are explicitly bad things about call centres, like acoustic shock, a condition caused by sudden loud noises in the headsets people must wear all day. Although it's not reported here (but I've read it somewhere, so. let's just assume it for now), one condition from it seems to be that people stop hearing certain kinds of noises. It was hinted - in this possibly-imaginary- research - that the failure to hear is partly psychological: we don't hear abuse properly. I'm not sure; I can't find the report - it might just be a mechanical condition you suffer from, like tinnitus.

But it isn't helped by the environment. From that quote above: '"Call centres have been shown to be highly stressful work environments and we are pretty sure that plays a major part in acoustic shock."

What is wearing in call centres is the day to day exposure to complete strangers who
i) Remain strangers,
ii) Feel helpless and alienated by the mode of communication (and you are helpless to remove that),
iii) Who consider you from the beginning to the end of your conversation as only another voice from the ghastly corporate ether. You consider them a pressure pushing on your chest.
iv) Never enjoy speaking to you (unless they're desperately lonely) .....that's.....bad.

And most importantly the feeling that you're a buffer, a decoy for those who the company doesn't want to take seriously. 'My heater's broken' - 'right, we'll get on it'. Bing - gone. Imagine if you wanted to pay for something in a shop and the staff kept saying 'I'll be just with you', then vanished.

Little book of calm's bad advice
The little book of calm suggests that, if you want to remain calm, instead of queueing at the bank/gas company/post office, call, or email, instead. This. Is. The. Single. Worst. Advice. I have. Ever. Heard.

If you queue physically at a place, you will see how long you have left to go. You will also see how many tellers there are: 'twelve people? And four counters. Right.' You will even see and maybe guess how long the people in the queue are likely to be: 'That guy has only an envelope. That woman has her kid pulling on her arm. That guy is sorting through his pockets looking for something, etc...'

If you call, you will either hear a robot voice say: you are the [number] in the queue or no robot voice. That's it - you won't know how many tellers are open, so you won't know how fast the queue is moving. Now, maybe they'll tell you that too - but you can't judge for yourself. You're helpless. And you certainly can't judge the other customers. There may be one person taking calls, and one person in the queue before you, but that person may be confusing, evasive, and watching tv. They may be on for an hour. And you can't even say, if you are at all assertive, 'hey! Stop wasting the staff's time' if you think they are.

There's nothing you can do about the situation because you don't know what it is.

It's as if, going to the bank, you were stopped at the closed door and told: 'Hi, you're very important to us. You're the eighth person in the queue. But I'm afraid you'll have to wait out here and not see what's going on inside.'

Wouldn't you even want to look, to figure out if it's worth it?

Little book of calm? Little book of crap.

Next time, take a walk and queue. It's good for you.

(Of course, none of this applies to people living out in the middle of nowhere. But you know what, you hear birds when you wake up in the morning and can see the stars. So you don't need to avoid that much social stress. Or, to put it another, to hell with you!)

....It would be nice not to return to work in a call centre. It would be nice to see people who are shouting at me...

What's out there?

2007-09-11T16:03:00.002+01:00

The Cloud Appreciation Society
This is a fantastic site. I've not joined it even though I constantly take photos of clouds. For example, here is one from my flickr account:

I don't know why I like them so much but there's something to staring up at the sky and working out it is not an illusion: there are things up there. Just as there are stars up there. Just as there are bacteria in the upper atmosphere.

When you think of space, what do you imagine? Vast cold regions or grumpy starchy aliens with bumpy heads? The second, it has to be understood, is not real. Those are the equivalent of Marco Polo's Blemmyae, i.e., humans with faces in their chests, or the viking seamonsters at the edge of the world. What is out there? We don't know -

Wild Blue Yonder (imdb)

This science fiction film by Werner Herzog concerns two missions: the now-over and slightly disappointing attempt by Andromedeans from the planet 'Wild Blue Yonder' to settle in a new home (Earth) and the current mission to find a new home by human beings (which turns out to be Wild Blue Yonder). So....that's the story. But the story seems to be barely the point.

The film has no special effects. It has documentary footage and a grey-haired, cold-looking Brad Dourif, standing in the middle of nowhere, kicking irritably at dirt. He narrates over the stock footage as if he referring to what we are seeing: astronauts travelling through wormholes in space; exploring an alien planet and the site of an intergalactic business venture. Except....we're not. This is just stock footage.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. It's funny, especially Dourif's reaction to what he's telling us but also the interviews with mathematicians which....are they deliberate or set up?

This is what it reminded me of: when I was a kid in my garden, the tree in the corner was a landed rocket, the bird table was an ancient ruin, the bushes were where monsters lived. This film requires using your own imagination.

But I reckon some people will think it's rubbish. And I wouldn't hold it against them.

*I do not have a credit or a debit card, due to my British bank refusing to upgrade my account from basic - and this because I've only lived here, paid taxes, that sort of thing for two years. I don't want a credit card anyway. I need to study not play computer games or ski down a Slovenian slope. But a debit card would be nice, just so I don't have to take out £10 every time I want to buy a tin of tomatoes.

Humanistic science fiction: the uncanny valley and cartoon time

2007-09-08T23:09:00.002+01:00

My brother Dermot is a ....well, was a... -is currently some new fangled title in the conceptual design film world. But I would have called him a conceptual designer other than that.

Anyway - last time I met Dermot we talked about CGI. It's relevant to his industry, especially his latest films. And he told me about this interesting psychological trait of people: the uncanny vallley (eponymous website).

The uncanny valley seems to be the term for when something lifelike stops seeming cartoon-ish or comfortably fake and appears to hang between that and what is real. It's an uncomfortable feeling - a feeling of uncanniness. This applies especially to simulating human features - and in my view, most CGI animated human beings, especially Polar Express (imdb entry).

My version of it is all the cheap, nasty techno tracks I ended up seeing on MTV's 'The Mix' when I couldn't sleep. The characters moved too smoothly, the ground looked too blank; they moved smilingly through eerie and empty no-places, their surroundings a furniture of no-things.

This eerieness, the sense of emptiness I get from these things, I suspect, is an indication of seeing exactly what these simulcra are. There is nothing there - a CGI of a woman crying does not feel anything, nor does a painting of a woman crying. Nor, incidentally, does a character in a story about a a woman crying.

What feels something is the author who drew, or programmed, or wrote. And if they fail miserably at their job the coldness of the medium pops up. So, some CGI is uncanny because we see the mechanics of what is representing. These mechanics appropriately dehumanise what is not human.

I think.

This would suggest things stop being eerie over time. They stop being discomfiting (discomforting?). By mere repetition of stimuli, and the absence of reasons to scream, run away, have sex, the familiar follows the strange.

This could be all wrong, however. There may be an absolute boundary.

Uncanny Claymation
I have always had a deep-rooted and sincere horror of all claymation other than Aardman. Creature Comforts (home page, imdb entry) is one of my favourite shows (and I can see there's an American version. Good for them!). But ALL OTHER CLAY BASED ANIMATION IS HORRIBLE.

For example,

"Ca bhfuil Ruairi Crainn?" arsa Gregory Grainnoig. "Ca Bhfuil-" [trans. (from Irish, from Gaeilge): "Where is Rory the Tree?", said Gregory the Hedgehog. "Where is-"]. Aghhh! Stay the hell away from me, you creepy monochrome mud-thing!

This was never in any Bosco script, but it should have been, because all I could think, on watching that claymation (made from 'marla' , as it is called in Ireland), was: "Why is there something moving over their skin?"

What I'm talking about is, I think, a direct result of how I claymation works. You have the clay/plasticine molded on to a wire frame. You film the thing* in one position, and then another. But in the process, on a low budget and strict time scales, you can't let the clay really cool in between shots, so the clay becomes a bit soft. Your handprints appear on it, and the surface becomes mushed here, bunched there, in different places from shot to shot. As a result, in a clay animal's motion, its limbs would slightly change shape, indentations would appear and disappear across its artificial skin. That unintended motion looked as real as the rest of the illusionary motion. For a kid watching it that's pretty real.

I think this is another example, then, of the 'uncanny valley' but this time with no reference to modern CGI. And, boy, did I hate it - much much much more than any modern animation distortions (probably only because I'm about 5 times the age).

I think there's this valley in our 'Theory of Mind' (as mind-theorisers call it: see Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on folk psychology and eliminative materialism): how we understand the thinking of what someone (or something) does. There's a point where something that acts human but isn't is believable, but bring it closer and closer to humanity and it goes....strange. But enough of that for now, as I really do need to sleep.

Brief note on cartoons
I should also write about the baffling and strange 'world' cartoons, i.e. not American, not Disney - although, even if they were Disney, they usually seemed wrong: everything seemed to bob up and down a little, like they were elastic; not Hanna Barbera cartoons, the monochrome ones, which also disappointed me (might as well have shown stills) and not. Looney Tunes, which were just brilliant.

These other cartoons popped up on Sunday afternoon on Irish Television. The conclusions I reached from watching these, as a child, creeped me out about reality beyond my small town. So, I remember thinking one day, sitting by myself on a summer day in the dining room, surrounded by copy books and dead flying ants (that's another story). So...children from other places like to watch....Autobahn? This was on a few times on 'Cartoon Time' ; also, one about a girl who melted because she cried so much.

But I won't now, because I'm very tired. Only had four hours sleep last night, for no good reason. (I don't have a social life anymore).

Oh! I can play Tetris now I've internet at home!

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So, at some point in animation, things stop looking like cartoons and start looking like something real but.....wrong. It's a fascinating fact of how we perceive things, and is undoubtedly tied up with the fact that, given a convoluted but otherwise featureless blob, we see no pattern, but put in a a dot at any point in the blob, and - wallah - a face. This is the phenomenon of pareidolia (wikipedia entry)). Consider this:

So.....is there a face here? Is there?

Now, consider these two, all just that above with an extra dot put inside the shape:

Do you see a face straightaway, or do you have to look? And what are you doing in either case? What could have such a face (that only a mother blob could love)?

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*I can't call them 'figures'. I can't reify them, 'bring them into the same world' as my own like that. I. Don't. Want. Them. Here.

(My childish nightmares were filled with the breathless chatter of the Tongue Twister Twins. You want an image of them? Luckily, I can't find any.)

Humanist science fiction

2007-01-12T09:06:00.001Z

So, what happens on a Friday here, in this libraries of libraries?

Nothing much.

I have been sick, however, the last week - and I took the last two days off just to get some cough-less sleep. I spent most of it knocked out, but also listening to the radio, watching a few films, and reading Doris Lessing's A Briefing before a Descent into Hell.

At one point in this book, I thought: what the hell is she on about? She's just giving me mystical nonsense rambling. I didn't know what the book was about when I started reading it and all that kept me going was that I'd read other books by her which I really liked.

Even though, there's something eerie about Lessing's books. I've not read her latest but from her reviews it sounds fascinating. It's about the origin of men - not the origin of humans, but the origins of men, when they are first born by originally women-only humans.

There's a certain strain of science-fiction/fantasy that seems to include Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut, eh....Stansilaw Lem, and maybe just maybe Iain M. Banks (if he wasn't so obsessed with making stuff up). It's uh, uhm, it's - it's ahm, it's -

Science fiction I like. Ech...no.

I really don't know what it is. Sometimes, it seems you can draw a line through several authors in terms of some undefined quality. This author has alot of what that author has, but has less than what that author has, and so on. Going back to Lessing, when I talk about a sort of eerieness, I mean a sort humanistic eerieness. And if there is a scale for such a thing, I think you can put Atwood on it, as well as Vonnegut, Lem, and Huxley. I think Banks drifts a little, and tends toward something else. His people are not ps - that's it.

By humanistic eerieness, I'm thinking of people being psychologically different but enough like us that we can feel that difference. We feel stretched by the writing.

I get that much more with Lessing than Atwood (though I think Margaret Atwood is the best living writer I can think of at the moment). Every time I read Lessing, I feel like I'm ably occupying the viewpoint of compassionate people who make me cold. But I still want to do that. I - eh, I -

Shikasta was a book by Lessing that was just lying about the house in Dungarvan when I was in college. I suppose it was Winifred's, as Lessing apparently is noted for being a feminist (why? Because she doesn't write about weddings?). I was reading Gene Wolfe for a while at the time, and really liking it -

Ah, wait - right. Okay, this is what it is about Banks vs. this lot I'm mentioning. Wolfe reminds me of it: Gene Wolfe's characters are humans living in a far off future; so, pretty much, are Banks'. Yet, for much of it, they are very familiar, very, contemporary. I feel I could talk to them, to some degree. Their technology would be different, but they would be - no no no that's not it at all.

Maybe it's that the Banks' beings are unreflective - there's a sealed aspect, a cap to their questioning, or to the potential for answers. The universe is explicable, mysterious only insomuch as the complexity of process, not in terms of the categories of things in it. In Banks, particularly, I feel at least, on having read his stuff, that a star is a star, a planet a planet, a person a person; computers are also people - his Minds - but that's like his one single trick. The idea a star would think, ech...nonsense. That's not science realfiktion.* I've found, on reading Banks, really entertaining and great stuff, but it doesn't always seem to cohere. So, the volcano ride in - that one about the suicide bomber - is very funny, and the ending of that book is bitterly touching (and viciously vengeful right after, incidentally, as if he needed to let his less developed readers come), but the.... well, the metaphysics is dull. The sublime - now that's interesting. No, it's just there. Maybe that's what I don't like about it - Banks is a sceptic and builds it into his narratives.

Something like that drove me nuts about Aasimov's foundation series: look, there's the hard sciences and then, oooh, the psychological sciences. Hmm...I suppose I just don't like the idea that things can be thought of in terms of our current (or a particular) categories of thought.

Anyway, this doesn't help at all in understanding Lessing, Atwood, Vonnegut et al. One thing about them as writers is they strive to be clear - except for the bit in Lessing when she was rambling about earth being a mote, but nevermind. But that's it! That's it! These authors are just good writers! Even if what they're saying is as implausible or obscure as other writers, they're trying to make it as clear as possible.

George Orwell wrote an absolutely brilliant paper on clarity. It's in a book I have called Identity and Anxiety. And he basically says: writers try to put words to things, and they struggle to find the right words. The struggle is to be as clear and simple as possible. If you want to be a good writer, that is what you should do. Bad writers think big words, complex sentences etc. make good writing. And then he quotes a load of academic papers, thereby taking the piss out of academia, which is always necessary.

I really like Iain M. Banks. I enjoy his books, but I suppose I feel he is doing something like that. It's not words so much as ideas or references to things. After reading several of his books, I get mainly the impression that the worlds he creates are only as big as the books. They don't stretch past them. Notably that huge thing - a Dark Wind or whatever it's called, where a fleet is invading a solar system and the people can see the lights of their engines in the heavens for decades before they arrive (which is a brilliant idea). It's got beautiful ideas with annoying characters, all of which disappear on finishing the page, as if one wakes from a dream...(perhaps that's the point).

*This is my moronic attempt to adapt the term 'realpolitik' to science fiction.