While Mark Bruce regularly provides details on the answers to many research questions as they’re being announced, David Amerland regularly offers hard questions to which there may be many answers, or maybe even none? Will humanity find the answers to the question of how to connect deeply and powerfully for good, when it seems we can’t even agree on the colors of a dress amicably? I don’t know. Sometimes I have hope, other times I despair and think that the Singularity could be the only thing to save the world, though at the cost of humanity.
Originally shared by David Amerland
The Vision Thing….
A friend who was in advertising told me once that “To see you don’t need eyes, you need vision”. It’s one of those smug statements that can be used in all sorts of contexts. It’s memorable because it shocks with the simplicity of it that addresses one of our greatest fears. Without eyes our direct connection to the world is lost in darkness, we think. Everything that we see (and verify) becomes unseen, a construct of the mind that exists only in the realm of possibility.
Eyes “the window to the soul” which scientists found do correlate to, at least, our disposition (http://goo.gl/M8eeQ) are also the primary gateways through which an enormous amount of data enters our brains. Nearly a third of our brains is given over to processing visual data which makes communication via mediums where the visual element is absent problematic, at best.
Depending on which school of thought you subscribe to, perception of the world (http://goo.gl/wjDtN) is either internal (which means it arises mainly from the constructs of our minds) or external (where independently existing objects impinge themselves upon our awareness via our sensory channels). In other words we create the world we live in via our mental presence, like John Wheeler (the man who coined the term “Black Holes”) suggests: http://goo.gl/g37zg or the universe exists independently of us, waiting for us to experience it (which is closer to what John Locke theorized).
The question became suddenly important because of a ‘simple’ Bodycon dress whose colour the social media world has debated to death. The science behind why we can’t make up our minds (or rather why we cannot agree) is simple enough: http://goo.gl/6BxkC7 it has to do with the way our daylight-programmed hunter’s eyes filter hues so our brains can decide colour.
The real story of the dress however is that my advertiser friend was right. Vision seems to be mainly in the brain rather than the eyes: http://goo.gl/0IQQTa. And it is the brain that fascinates us to the degree that a conversation between a Hebrides bride and her friends, on Facebook, suddenly went viral and involved millions of people from around the world: http://goo.gl/0D4KIx.
What became apparent is that context (as Beau Lotto suggests) is everything: http://goo.gl/Sg9RUq. By association the things we “see” are reflections not only of the world around us (if it really exists) but also ourselves, our identity and experiences.
This makes things a little problematic. If visual perception (http://goo.gl/Yw9F0) is a primary channel through which we establish our sense of ‘real’ they rely on visible light or visible spectrum (http://goo.gl/fwtSZ) which, in itself, is only a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (http://goo.gl/uWL) birds and insects see.
It is in gap created by the limitation of our minds that creativity arises Wittengenstein would argue: http://goo.gl/NnFIMz. He was more right than he thought because blind people, paradoxically, cannot see darkness: http://goo.gl/n3VpMY. Their minds, limited even more than the rest of us, supply information and create things to take up the ‘slack’.
If we cannot even agree on something as simple as the colour of something we see, you might argue, how are we going to agree on anything through social media connections where the visual element is mostly absent? Lotto, does give us a glimmer of hope here. When all data is meaningless, meaning arises out of the use we choose to put it to. We constantly redefine our reality and create our ‘normality’. We are defined by our interactions and our environments.
In a way each of us is a quantum cloud of probability. The context of our reality ‘collapses’ us turning us into teachers, doctors, street sweepers, serial killers, cops and charity workers. Taken to its logical conclusion this has some terrifying implications. We are responsible, it seems, for how people turn out by our very interaction with them. The world we create is the world we expect to create. We are the architects of our universe.
If that is the case, really, how can we learn to understand that our differences are expressions of the same drives we all feel, filtered through different contexts and environments? What engineering must take place, at a social level, to make us all feel one, without railroading our individualities?
This is a Sunday Read full of questions. We have yet to deliver successful answers but, it might not be a stretch too far to think that what we do here, and elsewhere, when we talk, engage, interact, is actually creating the world we want to live in.
Coffee, lots of it. Donuts and croissants (obligatory), cake (if you must) and thought, lots of thought, is what makes Sunday worth waking up for. I hope yours is a great one, wherever you are.
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