There are various discussions around what the speed of thought is. I won't join the debate, as for this discussion an approximate number is enough. Therefore:
Some people think the speed of thought is somewhere around 250 km per second. Others call it at 300 milliseconds. It all depends on what you are actually measuring.
The speed of the electrical impulse in the human neural wiring depends on the thickness of the "wire".
Other people measure how long it takes to begin to understand objects that are visually represented.
Yet far in the past people used to think that the speed of thought is infinite, that thought is the fastest thing in the universe, as in your mind you can travel wherever instantly. To all the places you have been to, to all the places you can imagine, to all the places you can have as points of reference, or the places you have a symbol, an image or a totem of - like the moon.
For years, that thought, of the ultimate escape through thought has comforted generations. Although it did had in some cases some Jumper intrigue into it - like you can't go to a place you have never seen or visited before.
Of course this kind of brain speed doesn't visit the actual locations, doesn't see the real objects of its imagery. It just activates the symbols, the references, the representations that we hold of those objects.
But even so, it's fun and useful, it enables us to visit the world in our head, hold in the same image objects, ideas and people that we never put in the same room, manipulate reality, find meaning and solutions, and just play.
Yet here's the funny thing. The pleasure we take in our speed of thought seems to be influencing the way we interact with the world. We try to automatize things in our life, and processes, we try to create new circumstances that wouldn't naturally occur from things we put together before in our heads, we try to have the same power over reality, over the source, as we feel having over our minds and symbols.
Tuesday, 18 September 2012
Friday, 7 September 2012
Pure perception and the extra layers of meaning
There is no such thing as pure perception.
All we perceive has an added layer of interpretation and prediction.
In fact this layer goes so deep that we can only be aware of the fact that we are actually predicting things when these predictions are violated - like in the case of visual illusions, or impossible objects.
In this case our "perceptual" system extrapolates an object that is not truly there, but it might be (in a normal world when someone has not created a perceptual trick) - a triangle. As soon as we run our gaze over the edges we realize this couldn't possibly be, as it defies what we know about space.
This extra layer of perception is actually interpretation, and comes from our need of being able to predict the world and categorize it in things that we already know. It is a much harder to notice this layer when we deal with abstract interpretation of events, situations and people. As these rarely can provide exactly the circumstances that would violate those expectations, and even then we can reinterpret that violation under our own system's rules, or simply discard it.*
*Remember it is very hard for people to hold on to contradictory facts; we like things and facts that are coherent, and our brain will do lots to get that coherence, including brushing over very important details that don't fit the big picture, or - well - lying to us to keep our coherence and perception of our normal image of the world going.
It is fascinating to think about the fact that we deal with synthesis, inference and abstraction from the moment we open our eyes (or sensory gates), and that what we think of as being "abstract thought" has in fact roots and examples in our very mundane, anchored-in-the-concrete interactions with material objects of the world.
I call this interaction because even if we don't act on the object we are observing, we already have a predesigned cognitive system that deals with it in such a way as to make it available for our interaction. We can't have pure observation, our level of observation already involves some level of preparation for interaction.
There is no point in seeing the three lines that we perceive as a table, if there is no possible interaction with it. The layer of meaning of the object seems to be added for our possible interaction. What does that say about the ones fascinated with meaning? What is their stance on interaction?
The fact that we seem unable to have "pure" perception also makes me wonder what do those awesome people that are mainly observers actually see (yup, I mean you)? Are they the mirrors of the world, a special mirror, with the properties of their vision and interpretation, in which one can see the world reflected in their personality?
That is why we have such ambiguity with terms like vision - to see but also to have a vision of something. Having a vision is quite similar to having some higher degree of interpretation and meaning over the facts that you know, is being able to put them together in a way that makes them easy to navigate and inspires people to action and interaction.
We can only decide to interact with what we see in our vision.
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Image : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Public_art_-_Impossible_Triangle,_Claisebrook.jpg
--------------
All we perceive has an added layer of interpretation and prediction.
In fact this layer goes so deep that we can only be aware of the fact that we are actually predicting things when these predictions are violated - like in the case of visual illusions, or impossible objects.
In this case our "perceptual" system extrapolates an object that is not truly there, but it might be (in a normal world when someone has not created a perceptual trick) - a triangle. As soon as we run our gaze over the edges we realize this couldn't possibly be, as it defies what we know about space.
This extra layer of perception is actually interpretation, and comes from our need of being able to predict the world and categorize it in things that we already know. It is a much harder to notice this layer when we deal with abstract interpretation of events, situations and people. As these rarely can provide exactly the circumstances that would violate those expectations, and even then we can reinterpret that violation under our own system's rules, or simply discard it.*
*Remember it is very hard for people to hold on to contradictory facts; we like things and facts that are coherent, and our brain will do lots to get that coherence, including brushing over very important details that don't fit the big picture, or - well - lying to us to keep our coherence and perception of our normal image of the world going.
It is fascinating to think about the fact that we deal with synthesis, inference and abstraction from the moment we open our eyes (or sensory gates), and that what we think of as being "abstract thought" has in fact roots and examples in our very mundane, anchored-in-the-concrete interactions with material objects of the world.
I call this interaction because even if we don't act on the object we are observing, we already have a predesigned cognitive system that deals with it in such a way as to make it available for our interaction. We can't have pure observation, our level of observation already involves some level of preparation for interaction.
There is no point in seeing the three lines that we perceive as a table, if there is no possible interaction with it. The layer of meaning of the object seems to be added for our possible interaction. What does that say about the ones fascinated with meaning? What is their stance on interaction?
The fact that we seem unable to have "pure" perception also makes me wonder what do those awesome people that are mainly observers actually see (yup, I mean you)? Are they the mirrors of the world, a special mirror, with the properties of their vision and interpretation, in which one can see the world reflected in their personality?
That is why we have such ambiguity with terms like vision - to see but also to have a vision of something. Having a vision is quite similar to having some higher degree of interpretation and meaning over the facts that you know, is being able to put them together in a way that makes them easy to navigate and inspires people to action and interaction.
We can only decide to interact with what we see in our vision.
--------------
Image : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Public_art_-_Impossible_Triangle,_Claisebrook.jpg
--------------
Tuesday, 4 September 2012
Preference for Escape
We have a cognitive preference for some patterns that have dominated our entire thought for years, or synthesize very intense experiences. We enjoy the taste of these concepts, they are old friends, they dilate our pupils and yield the ideas that can save us.
Me, I like escape. I like the taste of it - it feels like a breeze that lifts my arms into a flying posture, like the joy of freshness and continuous reinvention.
Also there is something in the idea of being able to escape at all times that makes you feel free and safe.
Many people associate freedom with risk, and safety with living a stable, yet sometimes boring routine. But in our thoughts of escape, in the possibility of it, some of us find the safety of not being trapped in a box that is not our size.
This taste for certain notions is reflected in our aesthetic preferences.
This is also reflected in my preference in movies. At least one stream/one taste of the movies I like shows a preference that can be traced back to the concept of escape - The Cube(s), the Saw(s), Fermat's Room, etc. Escapes from rooms, from labyrinths, from situations, survival instinct, traps, problem-solving, cues to salvation.
Being trapped in a box, in a situation, finding your way out by using your brains and your guts has intense meaning for me. And it can take various shapes.
It can be about saving yourself from a box which is not who you are, but just a situation in which others or life has put you in.
It can be escaping the box of routine into the excitement of a brand new box of things to do and people to meet and things to be good at and act upon.
What can be out there, beyond the box, if not freedom?
But freedom and pure chaos, complete indetermination are not something pleasant for the human mind. No matter how chaotic life might seem, nobody can truly live into chaos.
So we just into a different box, an unexplored one, or one in which we can be something we like more.
They are boxes which are too tight for us, and boxes which might take us an entire lifetime to explore.
And although they are boxes, they contain you, limit you, and they are limited themselves, we might not so much mind the box, as we can at times mind the fact that we don't like it's style, it's architecture, or it's tightness on our chest.
As long as there are things to explore, and the box matches our preference, we feel free.
Yet some of the ones ultimately obsessed with freedom, might intensely get focused on getting out of the box. There is escape for escape's sake. There is detachment, refusal to participate into something that feels like a box, and the intense fear that by participating you limit yourself to the size of the box, and you might forget you are in one until it is way too late.
That I understand, I can relate to. I hold the same instinct, and it took lots of learning to accept that some boxes might be "positive", and that I can escape so much as to escape everything I really want as well.
Also, if the things we do, the people we are with, the situations in which we find ourselves are boxes, it is interesting to remember we are boxes ourselves.
We can change ourselves in time by tasting other boxes, or throwing a way the things that are too tight for our liking, yet we are limited. We have the possibility of freedom, the possibility of becoming, yet we are not free to pursue everything at the same time, we naturally want the things that fit ourselves, the box that we are, and other things don't bring us much joy, no matter how heroic of an act of freedom we might be manifesting while escaping the "prison" of our previous identity.
On our road of manifesting our freedom, we want to be open, we want to embrace change, we want to discover and explore new things, new attitudes, new preferences, but something has to remain stable. Not the same thing all the time. We can't change everything at once, no matter how fluid our identities.
The thing we might not change, when we think we are changing everything, might very well be the idea of change, the internal observer, our very detachment.
Yet detachment is a box in itself. An attitude. It might feel like the secret weapon that has help you not fall, but it is also the drive that keeps you away from the things you want to stay in, because they are you, they represent what you need and like. Detachment lures you further, it whispers seductively into your ear that you can't possibly stay here, that there might be more to see, while not letting you feel the boxes you are passing through.
But there is no depth in an escape that is detached, that comes from fear. Those escapes just make you keep on running.
Where do you escape when you have escaped everything? You end up with this box of continuous escapes, which might look very much like a labyrinth. You might be the labyrinth.
Yet you can go back, grab the piece of string, trace your way, and find those exact rooms which where more than boxes to you. The rooms in which you can build, the rooms which you can enlarge, the rooms in which you are at home, and others might want to visit.
There is no point in escaping from the places that make you feel like yourself. And if you have obsessed about escape as much as I did, that comes as a revelation.
Escape was not the point to start with, but I will always have the special relationship with it. The point was being able to move, to see, and to be authentic, without constraints. Yet that is much harder of an essence to convey into one single taste, so escape has taken its place as a symbol.
The total paradox of someone focused on escape might be escape in ourselves. You never know what you have already become in the mean time, while focusing on the previous escapes. But the forever growing, adapting, changing, yet stable box of ourselves is the only box that hold us in forever, the box with that special taste - of not just having found, but feeling at home.
Me, I like escape. I like the taste of it - it feels like a breeze that lifts my arms into a flying posture, like the joy of freshness and continuous reinvention.
Also there is something in the idea of being able to escape at all times that makes you feel free and safe.
Many people associate freedom with risk, and safety with living a stable, yet sometimes boring routine. But in our thoughts of escape, in the possibility of it, some of us find the safety of not being trapped in a box that is not our size.
This taste for certain notions is reflected in our aesthetic preferences.
This is also reflected in my preference in movies. At least one stream/one taste of the movies I like shows a preference that can be traced back to the concept of escape - The Cube(s), the Saw(s), Fermat's Room, etc. Escapes from rooms, from labyrinths, from situations, survival instinct, traps, problem-solving, cues to salvation.
Being trapped in a box, in a situation, finding your way out by using your brains and your guts has intense meaning for me. And it can take various shapes.
It can be about saving yourself from a box which is not who you are, but just a situation in which others or life has put you in.
It can be escaping the box of routine into the excitement of a brand new box of things to do and people to meet and things to be good at and act upon.
What can be out there, beyond the box, if not freedom?
But freedom and pure chaos, complete indetermination are not something pleasant for the human mind. No matter how chaotic life might seem, nobody can truly live into chaos.
So we just into a different box, an unexplored one, or one in which we can be something we like more.
They are boxes which are too tight for us, and boxes which might take us an entire lifetime to explore.
And although they are boxes, they contain you, limit you, and they are limited themselves, we might not so much mind the box, as we can at times mind the fact that we don't like it's style, it's architecture, or it's tightness on our chest.
As long as there are things to explore, and the box matches our preference, we feel free.
Yet some of the ones ultimately obsessed with freedom, might intensely get focused on getting out of the box. There is escape for escape's sake. There is detachment, refusal to participate into something that feels like a box, and the intense fear that by participating you limit yourself to the size of the box, and you might forget you are in one until it is way too late.
That I understand, I can relate to. I hold the same instinct, and it took lots of learning to accept that some boxes might be "positive", and that I can escape so much as to escape everything I really want as well.
Also, if the things we do, the people we are with, the situations in which we find ourselves are boxes, it is interesting to remember we are boxes ourselves.
We can change ourselves in time by tasting other boxes, or throwing a way the things that are too tight for our liking, yet we are limited. We have the possibility of freedom, the possibility of becoming, yet we are not free to pursue everything at the same time, we naturally want the things that fit ourselves, the box that we are, and other things don't bring us much joy, no matter how heroic of an act of freedom we might be manifesting while escaping the "prison" of our previous identity.
On our road of manifesting our freedom, we want to be open, we want to embrace change, we want to discover and explore new things, new attitudes, new preferences, but something has to remain stable. Not the same thing all the time. We can't change everything at once, no matter how fluid our identities.
The thing we might not change, when we think we are changing everything, might very well be the idea of change, the internal observer, our very detachment.
Yet detachment is a box in itself. An attitude. It might feel like the secret weapon that has help you not fall, but it is also the drive that keeps you away from the things you want to stay in, because they are you, they represent what you need and like. Detachment lures you further, it whispers seductively into your ear that you can't possibly stay here, that there might be more to see, while not letting you feel the boxes you are passing through.
But there is no depth in an escape that is detached, that comes from fear. Those escapes just make you keep on running.
Where do you escape when you have escaped everything? You end up with this box of continuous escapes, which might look very much like a labyrinth. You might be the labyrinth.
Yet you can go back, grab the piece of string, trace your way, and find those exact rooms which where more than boxes to you. The rooms in which you can build, the rooms which you can enlarge, the rooms in which you are at home, and others might want to visit.
There is no point in escaping from the places that make you feel like yourself. And if you have obsessed about escape as much as I did, that comes as a revelation.
Escape was not the point to start with, but I will always have the special relationship with it. The point was being able to move, to see, and to be authentic, without constraints. Yet that is much harder of an essence to convey into one single taste, so escape has taken its place as a symbol.
The total paradox of someone focused on escape might be escape in ourselves. You never know what you have already become in the mean time, while focusing on the previous escapes. But the forever growing, adapting, changing, yet stable box of ourselves is the only box that hold us in forever, the box with that special taste - of not just having found, but feeling at home.
Wednesday, 22 August 2012
Meaning, knowledge, truth
I've always been fascinated with meaning, and how meaning is created, refined, discovered and reinvented by the human mind.
Meaning is not a human creation - animals appraise the way various stimuli will impact on their world, if they will be positive or negative for their life, and have instinctive and learnt reactions at those stimuli.
Yet meaning reaches a complete new dimension in a rich cognitive life of a human being. Meaning comes both out of truth and knowledge seeking, and out of our aesthetic pleasure and style of interpretation. Sometimes shaping the facts in our life in a more beautiful meaning can give us immense satisfaction, it can motivate us to take action or change course, it can give us that deeper level of understanding that we long for.
In many ways, meaning guides our lives and our behaviour. Interpreting the events that happen to us in a certain way determines the decisions that we will make. We tend to interpret the art/music that we come in contact with based on the meaning and importance that we assign to various experiences in our lives. That is why the meaning of great art is sometimes so ambiguous, having a different nuance for each receiver (and active interpreter). Great art carries enough reference points into meaning to involve us into a new way of perceiving and interpreting, yet little enough detail, or enough vagueness to flexibly accommodate the interpretation bestowed upon it by various minds, with various experiences, impulses, obsessions, joys, sorrows.
Some of us search in art for a transcendence to a deeper form of meaning, one that will take our perception of our own experiences to a new level. We search for a new perspective, a new point of reference, a new way of perceiving the world, or just one singular event. We search for it with the same craving as we search for new knowledge, or new truth.
In a sense, new knowledge has very much the same function in our psyche - it is a rediscovery of the world, a re-understanding, re-inventing. It shifts our perspective. It changes it or transcends it. Sometimes it muddies the waters, and a new point of view that we gather through an (artistic) experience can have trouble coexisting with our other attitudes or cognitive takes on life. Sometimes it clarifies everything, integrates different types of understanding, and gives us the pure exhilaration of transcendence.
From a cognitive stance, meaning is an extraordinary product. It comes from perception, interpretation, previously-held knowledge, emotional approach, processing style and current mood, all added together. It is a synthesis, the bit of magic which sometimes we have and other times we lose, which we strive for. Anchored into meaning, and its complex, sometimes contradictory layers, actions can be understood.
Yet I can't help but wonder, what is the difference between the human search for truth and the human search for meaning? Pure truth - just fact - has to be shaped to be integrated within our meaning, which tries to be a metatruth (an integration of previous true experiences, parts of truth which we have gathered) that comes in the colouring of what that particular truth means to us.
Yet people can reject the truth and prefer something that has more meaning. Accepting the truth can come at the huge emotional and cognitive cost of having to abandon previously held meaning, lose our understanding, and carve our way into organising all the information that we have in a new form. We do not always afford to do that.
But in a way, finding truth and finding meaning is supported by the same drive. Our drive to understand - the world around us, ourselves and others. Meaning has the added bonus of a very high level phenomenological flavor - we like tasting certain types of meaning, we have an aesthetic preference for them.
If it would come to a choice and we could only have one, when would our quest for meaning and when would our quest for truth thrive?
©2012 Ana-Maria Olteteanu
Meaning is not a human creation - animals appraise the way various stimuli will impact on their world, if they will be positive or negative for their life, and have instinctive and learnt reactions at those stimuli.
Yet meaning reaches a complete new dimension in a rich cognitive life of a human being. Meaning comes both out of truth and knowledge seeking, and out of our aesthetic pleasure and style of interpretation. Sometimes shaping the facts in our life in a more beautiful meaning can give us immense satisfaction, it can motivate us to take action or change course, it can give us that deeper level of understanding that we long for.
In many ways, meaning guides our lives and our behaviour. Interpreting the events that happen to us in a certain way determines the decisions that we will make. We tend to interpret the art/music that we come in contact with based on the meaning and importance that we assign to various experiences in our lives. That is why the meaning of great art is sometimes so ambiguous, having a different nuance for each receiver (and active interpreter). Great art carries enough reference points into meaning to involve us into a new way of perceiving and interpreting, yet little enough detail, or enough vagueness to flexibly accommodate the interpretation bestowed upon it by various minds, with various experiences, impulses, obsessions, joys, sorrows.
Some of us search in art for a transcendence to a deeper form of meaning, one that will take our perception of our own experiences to a new level. We search for a new perspective, a new point of reference, a new way of perceiving the world, or just one singular event. We search for it with the same craving as we search for new knowledge, or new truth.
In a sense, new knowledge has very much the same function in our psyche - it is a rediscovery of the world, a re-understanding, re-inventing. It shifts our perspective. It changes it or transcends it. Sometimes it muddies the waters, and a new point of view that we gather through an (artistic) experience can have trouble coexisting with our other attitudes or cognitive takes on life. Sometimes it clarifies everything, integrates different types of understanding, and gives us the pure exhilaration of transcendence.
From a cognitive stance, meaning is an extraordinary product. It comes from perception, interpretation, previously-held knowledge, emotional approach, processing style and current mood, all added together. It is a synthesis, the bit of magic which sometimes we have and other times we lose, which we strive for. Anchored into meaning, and its complex, sometimes contradictory layers, actions can be understood.
Yet I can't help but wonder, what is the difference between the human search for truth and the human search for meaning? Pure truth - just fact - has to be shaped to be integrated within our meaning, which tries to be a metatruth (an integration of previous true experiences, parts of truth which we have gathered) that comes in the colouring of what that particular truth means to us.
Yet people can reject the truth and prefer something that has more meaning. Accepting the truth can come at the huge emotional and cognitive cost of having to abandon previously held meaning, lose our understanding, and carve our way into organising all the information that we have in a new form. We do not always afford to do that.
But in a way, finding truth and finding meaning is supported by the same drive. Our drive to understand - the world around us, ourselves and others. Meaning has the added bonus of a very high level phenomenological flavor - we like tasting certain types of meaning, we have an aesthetic preference for them.
If it would come to a choice and we could only have one, when would our quest for meaning and when would our quest for truth thrive?
©2012 Ana-Maria Olteteanu
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