Experiencing and imagining the same things

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?).

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.

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.)