Where is My Mind?

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?

Intermedium §1

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.

'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.

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.

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

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

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

Possible Worlds

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...

...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

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

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?

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

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

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.