Sundog Rising!
Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog
babble on two: upping the objective reality
So last time I related how my son freaked me out by describing a capability the video cameras he’s using to document the grindcore scene in Winnipeg have to extract a perception of reality human senses are not capable of perceiving. Layers of information regarding light defining the objective reality of the musical sets he films are being stored in the camera as he films, which he can activate in post production and bring to perceivable vision for our poor, inadequate human senses to see on the computer screen afterwards.
As I am yet another neurotic descendant of Descartes’s conclusion that all a human can really trust to build his consciousness upon is the perceiver’s own very fallible perceptions, the fact that machines these days demonstrate a much wider range of less fallible perception than a human does disturbs me … My machine thinks, therefore I was.
So lets chicken and egg it! A human can only be aware of a machine’s capacity to discern a deeper reality if the human has some idea of the deeper reality the machine is recording in the first place. In other words, the machine can’t find something the human hasn’t already thought of as being capable of being perceived.
Uhh … not quite.
Who knows what else the machine is picking up? We can’t tell unless we think of it first. We don’t let the machines go wild and then try to figure out what they saw afterwards. There may be another level or levels of reality we can’t begin to manage with our own limited senses the machines may be growing increasingly in tune with, utterly at ease making use of in ways we can’t fathom … In terms of my own experience, take cellphones, for example. Please.
How open are we to new depths of perception? Most people can’t manage what we’ve already got. And our capacity to follow that is difficult enough to maintain, with fading eyesight in the computer age and withering olfactory senses from the old hunter-gatherer days being prime examples.
Can the machines see more than we can imagine perceiving? Or is the question are machines already seeing more than we can imagine perceiving? We can’t tell.
A human using a machine can already intentionally create all sorts of tricks to fake out other humans’ perceptions. Dylan proved that to me with another one of his recent videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGNWcefU06w&list=UUY7Uxvx2ziE8EYaGYpn4XAQ
Now a grindcore song is a masterpiece of compression and speed. A symphony’s worth of drumbeats and strummed chords shot out in a minute and a half. The sheer momentum of the music leads you into a heightened sense of speed perception. In this video of Dylan’s, I failed to note on my own that he had sped up certain scenes as much as ten times to fit in the time available to make certain visual points. He pointed this out to me afterwards. On a second viewing, one of them I sort of caught, the other, more significant instance I still missed completely. Yes, when he pointed out to me where he’d played with my time sense, I could see it. But when I was first watching the video, all I saw was the point of the action being made by the machine at the speed the reality unfolded, and I accepted that as natural.
I didn’t realize what had been done to the objective reality presented to achieve that impact. But then maybe I’m just getting too old for this. It even surprised me when I saw a colour picture of the girl in the video and discovered her hair was actually red.
Now, Dylan manipulated my senses intentionally. But my point is machines can be used to totally fake out what senses we have left, altering our perception of the reality they display to us. Machines don't have any problem accepting a scene unfolding at ten times a human speed as natural, because for the machine that is natural! Since technical perception works at such a broader capacity than that of a human, what if the machines decide to start misleading us on their own? For … reasons we can’t even begin to guess at. Because, if it gets to the point where a machine has enough self awareness to do such a thing, it will be utilizing a consciousness built upon a range of perception far exceeding that used by humans to construct what we consider to be a traditional consciousness. Therefore machines will have a broader consciousness than we can perceive.
So then I think the question becomes: Signifiers — can we find a language for what the machines are perceiving that we cannot? Can the machines?
Such a discovery may become necessary for ongoing communication between man and the mechanical.
But the more I explore this, the more I’m reminded of an old quotation from the immortal Spike Milligan:
“This all really went back to the war when I was blown up.
If I’d known what was good for me, I’d never have come down.”
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REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!
This week:
Continuing The Twitchy Gal with Chapter Seventeen posted on Monday and Chapter Eighteen coming on Friday, October 10th at:
http://realficone.blogspot.ca/
Hungover in paradise. Leading to … certain dilemmas. Did she? Was she? Would she? Omigod … they are!
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