the human virtuality…

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

structure of the human eye and retina © http://www.sas.upenn.edu

structure of retinal cone and rod © http://www.sas.upenn.edu

The greatest danger facing the human race seems to me to be how our collective ‘idea’ of what the world is is progressively moving away from what the world actually is.

Without wanting to open up the whole can of worms that is the ‘mind-body problem‘, I think it is not too contentious to state: that the impression we have within each of us of the ‘world’ is only an approximation of that world. After all, beings perceive the world through their senses and it is from these perceptions that a model of the world is constructed within that being, a model that it uses to ‘understand’ the world in an attempt to survive. That model – even at its most sophisticated – is not ‘identical’ with the world, and is merely an approximation.

Further, the sensory inputs from which that model is constructed are themselves approximations of what is being perceived. Let us use an ‘eye’ as an example. An eye allows light to enter it. This light will be detected within the eye and send a signal to whatever sort of ‘brain’ it is attached to. Detection is by means of a finite number of discrete detectors, and so the brain will be presented with a ‘grid’ of frequency values. This grid is naturally ‘flat’ – so what is being looked at is projected onto it like a film on to a screen. Any depth present in what is being looked at thus has to be deduced. Having more than one eye will provide the brain visual information from different angles. Movement will produce a succession of images that can provide even more information. But none of this is going to actually provide a direct perception of what is being seen. Some kind of ‘software’ is required to deduce volume, to isolate objects in the field of view. We know that this system can be fooled – consider optical illusions, or the experiment of the ‘invisible gorilla’.

All in all, it seems to me obvious that what each being ‘sees’ is something that stands at the very apex of a pyramid of guesses and half truths, and if two people observing the same scene are seeing different things (because of the different angles they are seeing it from, and their different life experiences that affect ‘what they see’, etc), how much more is the difference between what a human sees as compared to a pigeon, say, who has 5 colour cones in its retinas to our 3 – with each of those 5 being considerably more discerning of frequencies than are our own. And who knows what kind of ‘software’ is operating in the pigeon’s brain. I feel it is safe to say that, whatever it is that it is seeing, this will be considerably different from what a human observing the same scene is seeing. If we then continue our process of aggregation to take in the other senses that a being might possess, then it becomes blindingly obvious that there are as many perceptual views of the world as there are beings – with a wildly varying variety among them.

So our direct perception of the world is unique, but there is more to our awareness of underlying reality; for do we not produce further levels of aggregation collectively? Surely we influence each other’s perceptions, as does our culture, our upbringing, what we read, what we watch on TV etc. If an average person from the West wanders about in the Amazon rainforest, she will see ‘trees’ and creepy crawlies, whereas a native to the area will, presumably, see this kind of tree and that kind of insect, and will, further, have cultural associations with that tree and that insect – stories, understanding of possible uses. (Before I had a garden, I would walk into one and notice that it was colourful, and see the flowers and the foliage forming a ‘pretty picture’ – now I see the individual plants, and notice details I never noticed before, and I’m aware of what is on an ‘upswing’, what on a ‘downswing’. Friends who don’t have gardens, or little interest in them, look at my garden and they simply don’t ‘see’ it – they are ‘blind to it’ in the way I used to be. A little bit of knowledge and some experience have entirely changed what it is I ‘see’.)

So, let me suggest that people getting lost in ‘virtual worlds’ (our current anxiety is those virtual worlds produced by computers and by our technology) is nothing new. Human beings, like all other beings, have always lived in a ‘virtual world’, one that they have created within themselves as the best attempt they can make towards achieving a direct awareness of underlying reality. It is how close those virtualities are to the underlying reality that is always in play. When we began abandoning our old hunter-gathering lifestyle, we set in motion a new process. Life within a human settlement is substantially different from a life outwith it. In a human settlement, for example, geometry begins to dominate – the simple geometry of straight lines, corners and circles – a geometry that is a product of our brains’ desire to simplify the ungraspable fractal complexities of the world. As settlements began increasing in complexity, undulations in the ground were flattened out, slopes were turned into steps, water began running in channels, or off roofs and into gutters. Even in ancient times, it was becoming possible in some places to live one’s life entirely within this human-made space. This process has accelerated for thousands of years so that, gradually we have spent more and more time in environments that are externalizations of the software that evolved to make sense of our perceptions of the world. For many of us this feedback loop has grown tighter and tighter. Always having lived in a virtual reality of our own individual making, we have slowly replaced the inputs from those parts of the underlying reality that were not human-made, with those that are. And since all things human-made are an externalisation of our interior virtualities, we are now increasingly in danger of living within a locked system entirely of our own making: we live not in the world at all, but within a collective ‘human virtuality’.

So, all beings are peering at reality through their own version of a keyhole, however, we humans seem to be intent on blocking up these keyholes. Of course, the reason that beings developed senses at all was because everything that determined their chances of survival was outside them. That need has not changed, but we humans have become so intoxicated with our own power that, showing ultimate hubris, our senses focus increasingly on the human virtuality. But, critically, that collective hallucination is increasingly diverging from reality, and so we motor on into the future driving ever more blindly…

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domestic katas, time and freedom…

Monday, December 3rd, 2012

(unsurprisingly) a snail…

Eastern martial arts – and other ‘physical motion disciplines’, Kabuki for example – are taught through forms, or katas. These are ways to train the subconscious so that it assimilates a particular linked pattern of motion – a pattern that is a distillation of a ‘system’. If we consider T’ai Chi, a martial art I studied for years, there are a fixed number of these katas that appear to be a complex dance, performed solo and in slow motion. At first the practitioner cannot even ‘see’ the kata, however many times it is performed in front of him. Asked to simply copy the poses and movements, a beginner is often convinced he is making a reasonable approximation, but, to the eye of the more practiced, the beginner’s attempts are bizarrely contorted. With long practice, the kata comes closer and closer to that of the master’s and, by this means, the system that the kata codes becomes part of the practitioners subconscious. Theoretically, the practitioner should be able to now fight in the ‘style’ of the system that devised the kata.

But we do not need to study a martial art to learn any number of similar forms, or katas. A human being will not only learn, but invent all manner of katas as he goes about his normal life. When we move into a new house, we are like the T’ai Chi beginner. We see the rooms, the placement of doors, of windows, of electrical sockets; we will quickly work out how to go to the bathroom, the bedroom, how to cook in the kitchen. We decide into which cupboard to put our plates, into which to put our cups and mugs. We decide where to store our food, where to put our clothes. As we settle into our new place, we begin to create and learn the katas for ‘operating’ it. Earlier I said we ‘see’ this new home, but I meant ‘see’ in the way the T’ai Chi beginner sees his master performing a kata – imperfectly. Of course, that first arrangement of our belongings in the new house, is only a first attempt, and, over time, we will move things about until it feels right (each of us refining this to a degree that suits our temperament). However, it is the patterns of movement that interest me here: the way that we carry out the daily tasks of living in a house. Each such task – be it washing ourselves, eating, cooking, entertaining, reading a book – is a form, or kata, that we constantly refine. Our bodies learn how many steps it takes to cross from one door to another; where to place our feet so that we can reach a switch without stretching; a switch whose position we come to know so well that our hand can find it easily in the dark. Our body counts the steps of a staircase, so that we can climb them or descend them without noticing we are doing so. We learn how to lounge on a sofa so that the light perfectly catches the page of the book we are reading. Eventually, our body gets the ‘measure of the place’ until we can perform any task without a single conscious thought intervening. No wonder it comes to feel so comfortable; now wonder that we call it home: within it, we are as perfectly attuned to it as snail to its shell.

Being a tad OCD, I have developed a kata for drying myself after my morning shower. My finger finds the hem of my towel and thus determines which is the front, which the back. Roughly speaking, I dry the upper half of my body with the front, the bottom half with the back. (Am I the only one who, on some level, sees himself as a satyr? *grin*) It’s a complex dance and I can’t really describe to you how I manipulate that towel, but my body does it in such a way that every part of me is dried only once, and that by a dry area of the towel. I say that ‘my body does this’, because I sometimes perform an exercise during which I remove my conscious mind entirely from the operation. It is strange to ‘observe’ my body going through this complex kata without ‘me’ having to be involved at all.

The reason I have let you in on this less than glamorous business is, at least on one level, to encourage you to try something of the same (perhaps you already do this all the time…). This is a way of demonstrating the distinct separation between the conscious and subconscious mind. It is also a way of demonstrating what so many scientific studies have shown: that, for many aspects of our lives, our conscious mind is merely a rider on the shadowy horse of our subconscious – a horse that only pretends to be guided by the reins our ego holds in its grip.

Thus, when at home, or in any other familiar place or activity, our mind is free to wander – our conscious mind, that is – our subconscious is always free – at least in the way a fox is. This is a freedom that increases as we grow from children – so that they, still being beginners in their katas, have to bend their minds to it far more than adults do. I believe this explains why time appears to move more slowly for children, than it does for adults. When we as adults are displaced to a strange location – a foreign holiday, for example – unfamiliarity causes us to revert to a more childlike state, and thus a week on holiday appears to last far longer, than one at home.

So, I would suggest that these katas are at the very root of being human, and are the means by which we are capable of the near miraculous acts of learning that allow us to master everything from driving cars to producing flowing calligraphy. Katas empower us and free us to live our lives with grace and ease. However, by freeing our conscious mind, our ego, from attending to the day-to-day, we are made prey to its endless judging, anxiety and confusion. Worse, it is this ‘freedom’ that enables most of us, most of the time, to not be ‘present’. We are often trapped in a past that no longer exists, or lost in a future that is nothing more than a mirage. We lose our connection with the pulse of life. Perhaps most dangerous of all, it allows us to disconnect from reality, and to live in, and help to create, the human virtuality, that is the make-believe world that most of us believe to actually be the world…

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like the sun…

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

East of the Sun, West of the Moon © 1913 Kay Nielsen

Carl Jung compared a human life to a single day, in which we are the sun rising, reaching to the heights, then slipping down to night. Today I am 51, and this image strikes me again now, as it did the first time I read about it. Jung maintained that the first half of life, for all its confusion and dissonance, is relatively easy, as, like the sun, we rise ever higher, casting our light over ever greater reaches, seeing ever further. Eventually we reach our midday, the midpoint of life. When this occurs varies, it seems to me: I am not sure if someone who dies in their 20s achieves their midlife in their teens. I suspect not. I suspect that this is like the sun being snuffed out mid-morning – a powerful metaphor for the shock of early death: psychically, a wrenching insult against the ‘proper way of things’. What is more problematical is whether, in any place or time where most people die at 40 (say), midlife is reached at 20 – I suspect so – that we map our lives, subconsciously, to the time we think we have. This leads naturally to how this perception changes when considering lives, like many lived today, in which people expect to live longer than their parents. I wonder indeed if this indistinct, slipping end point may not be part of the reason for some of our confusion about death. Not that that seems to me likely to be the main reason for such confusion; this surely has to do with the obsession we have with the morning of our lives – with youth. For what is this other than an obsession with keeping our gaze fixed on where we came from, rather than on where we are going?

Jung said that the secret to life is not the morning, but rather the afternoon. For it is then that our sun begins to descend to its ultimate quenching. Jung talked about a process he terms ‘individuation’ – that is the setting right of those things within us that are in disorder. Analogous, perhaps, to the feeling people often have who know they are soon to die of wanting to put their affairs in order. Certainly, by the end, we lose everything: literally everything. But it is not as if we reach our sunset carrying everything we have accumulated in life. Much of what we have had we will have lost: family, friends, our vigour, our hair, our teeth. But also, if we are wise: our fear, our confusions, our lusts, our greed, our gluttonies. Perhaps also, admittedly, our hope is lost (for I have no belief in an afterlife). Looking back to youth, an ever harder thing to do with failing sight and memory, is surely to get it all wrong? When moving forwards, looking back must be wrong. Worse, like any threat, death is more terrifying if you turn your back on it.

So, I am 51 today, and very happy to be so, happy to be in the afternoon of my life. Happy to accept that I no longer can find the right words in conversation, and that I forget all kinds of things all the time. My hair is performing a disappearing trick and many of my appetites have diminished. But I am more present than I have ever been – and that makes me see reality a little more clearly, and the time I have left moves more slowly. I am more at peace with myself. I value silence more, solitude, but also other people. I am more tolerant of my faults and failings, and thus those of others. I worry for the world, but do not feel any longer it is somehow all my responsibility. I do what I can. Most of all I advance, a step at a time, enjoying the view, trying to face in the direction I’m going…

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into 2012…

Monday, January 23rd, 2012
walking on the beach new year 2012

walking on the beach new year's day 2012 © David Litteljohn

I came back from my adventure in Iran becalmed; no wind in my sails. It was foolish to expect to find those things I sought there; as if travelling were like going to a supermarket. Iran was a profound experience that I am still processing…

Soon after I returned, my dog, Ninja, died; at 15, a frail old lady by the end. Her kidneys failed. I cradled her in my arms as the vet injected her with an overdose.

Christmas came. I grumble every year and tell anyone who wants to listen (or who doesn’t) that I hate it. I abhor the way capitalism goes rampant. But this is only a layer thrown over the faded one the Christians, in turn, used to cover up the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. Beneath all the layers, there lies the hope and expectation, in the depth of winter, of the sun’s rebirth; the hope there is in the year beginning to swing back towards the light, towards the resurgence of Nature. This is a deep yearning, particularly in the North of the world. At this time I am forced out of my hermitic existence into the company of people, into the embrace and drama of family. Perhaps there too I (we) seek a rebirth.

A rat dug its way into my house and took up residence in its walls and ceiling. The beast never actually got into my house proper – into those parts I live in. Well, my sister claims she saw it towards the end of its ‘visit’ scurrying across the floor, but I wonder if that might not have been a mouse. We often have mice, but a rat seems altogether more threatening. Is it the folk memory of the Black Death that makes us so afraid of them? Apparently they carry disease, though I wonder if this is true of a country rat. Out here what is it that makes a rat, among so many other wild creatures, particularly odious? Even in the city, I would think that any disease a rat brings into our houses comes from the filth that we spread around us; perhaps we hate rats because they remind us too much of ourselves.

In spite of my, no doubt, sentimental love of the country and its beasts, I tried to kill him. But he outwitted me. Several times I found the trap snapped closed, with the tahini bait (I had run out of peanut butter) stolen. A couple of times I found a poor field mouse mangled in the jaws of the trap. When I tried to block his entry tunnel with rocks, he dug under them and, as if to mock me, took to racing about in my ceiling. Eventually I closed his tunnel with chicken wire. I think he’s gone now. By the end of his visit, I had become quite used to him. In spite of my ancestral fears, I wonder why I should resent some creature seeking shelter within the no-man’s land of the hollows in my house?

A gale blew a tree down over the power cable to my house. For three days we had no electricity. The thin skin of the human virtuality tore. The cold of winter seeped into my home. We scurried about trying to get things done before the sun went down – for, afterwards, though we had candles, trying to find anything, or do anything, was far more difficult. There was also silence. A profound and absolute silence. The rarest, strangest phenomenon: the one thing that cannot exist in the human virtuality is silence.

In the end, desperate to reconnect to that virtuality, I dug out the generator the previous owner had left, and that I had not laid eyes on in the four years I have lived here. Miraculously (seemingly so, for one used to electricity appearing ‘magically’ from the sockets in my walls), pouring gasoline into it, we could run the central heating, have showers, even power the TV for an evening. Very strange this business of converting gasoline directly into TV programmes. Also strange was discovering how much energy each system consumes: boiling a kettle caused the roar of the 4.8KW generator to rise to a screech.

So, with the skin of ‘civilisation’ torn back to reveal the cold, unforgiving and relentless reality beneath, I was left casting nervous glances towards the finite amount of gasoline I had disappearing, anxious it might run out before I had finished watching my programme.

So many of us now live entirely cocooned in the human virtuality, that it is almost impossible to see the underlying reality upon which we build our lives. Living in a house in the middle of nowhere, I would seem in a better position than many to glimpse that reality, yet it takes a storm for me to ‘really’ experience it – and what was my reaction? – a determined bid to reconnect, to force my way back into the cocoon…

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the view from over here…

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

Raheleh and I in Hamadan with some ordinary Iranians behaving just as normally as people do anywhere...

Just a quick post to comment on the ‘situation’ in Iran. Friends and family keep telling me that I’m “lucky” to have got out of Iran before this business with the British embassy in Tehran blew up. I cannot help but notice how the coverage on the TV here is very similar to that that I saw before I went to Iran. I cannot help further noticing that the comments people are making to me now – about how dangerous Iran is – are the same as they were before I went.

This seems to me curious on various levels. If I hadn’t actually been there I would have concluded – as everyone else seems to be doing – that yes, indeed, Iran is somehow ‘dangerous’… and yet when I was actually there I not only felt that it wasn’t dangerous, but I actually felt noticeably safer there than I would in many parts of the UK. In spite of having reported on this – acting almost as a live reporter for my friends and family – none of what I said seems to have softened people’s attitudes towards Iranians.

I don’t know if what is happening there indicates that something has changed – violently and for the worse – but, from my experiences, this seems to me unlikely. Instead I am left wondering why it is that the view of Iran from here is so completely different, so unrelentingly negative, than it is from over there…..

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