Perception

This week was fun again! Honestly, this might be my favourite class currently, and David is definitely my favorite lecturer. The main ideas this week were perception and information — things I'm very interested in exploring through various kinds of art. A key theme was how the ancient Greeks defined each material into its underlying component parts in rational, material, deterministic, and ultimately reductionist means. So, the idea of controlling those components is controlling everything in a complete sense.

The stuff about quantum fields was really interesting to me. Like how quantum fields and particles change on observation, the same understanding should be applied to the act of 'controlling everything' — it's an impact of the culture those ideas come from. The cultural phenomenon that reduces ideas to their base forms is the same that creates the idea of the meaning of life. In my opinion, a more postmodern version of absurdism is the way to go.

The brain as a network — I was already aware of this, but it reminded me of the game Disco Elysium. It frames each interaction with other characters through different parts of your brain, judging them and you in different personalities. Really fun. Looking at the lesson plans, psychology, Jung, and Freud will come up later, so that'll be great as well.

David Shea mentioned optical illusions as a way of understanding how we change — and are changed by — the world we view. I think that's a great point, but a more philosophical approach might be better, otherwise optical illusions can be passed off as being a problem with the human brain from a techno-determinist standpoint. If you look at these things as existential instead, it forces a more interesting conversation. My favourite example: in Dark Star, in order to stop a sentient atomic bomb from going off, they have to convince it to mistrust its own senses.

The comment that all art is electronic art brought the whole class together for me. Of course, if we see through electrical impulses absorbed by the backs of our eyes, anything we observe is 'electronic'. But, it helped me understand why all of the content so far has been so important. Phantom limb pain was a cool side tangent. I think it would be more interesting to also look at how you can trick people into feeling things they don't have — the rubber hand trick, for instance.

This led to a nagging thought about the new age of hyperreality on the internet and how the way we perceive can be shifted toward an end goal. The White House sharing CGI clips of warfare interspersed with real ones about attacks on Iran — the end goal is to blur game and reality, to make the living experience an optical illusion. The human brain can be shifted by confirmation bias, just like an optical illusion. People can be controlled with the same concepts of optical illusion and directed belief — see the shooting of Alex Pretti in America, where conservative accounts were saying he was armed while reposting a video that explicitly showed he wasn't. People, thus, can be made to see things that aren't there just from beleiving an ideology enough.

Phantom limb pain made me wonder if it can go the other way. I went down a rabbit hole: in VRChat, people have built brain-to-computer interfaces that track neural signals developed from training your brain to react to sounds while looking in a mirror with extra body parts modelled on. The example was cat ears on top of the head, where a sound detection script eventually let the player move the ears with just thought. Underutilised field of research.