July 05, 2004

• What the BLEEP is a "hybrid documentary"? Is it anything like a docudrama? Info-mercial? "Real-life" re-enactment?
• Maybe considering using the "more inside" facility, as long posts push other stuff off the front page.
• Looks like a justifiable rant, squidranch. I'll just move some stuff to a [more inside] if you don't mind...
• I'm going to consciously make them not part of my day :) I always wonder why people are so eager to tell others about their own reality...
• They did warn you it was a "Lord of the Wind" film. :)
• Don't be a carpet, man! If you get 'roped in' to something like this, chances are you are getting 'roped in' to something else. >:| Don't get roped in to anything! What other kind of influence does the mom have, eh? :D
• Don't get roped in to anything! Actually, I'd bet that there are some things your girlfriend might "rope you" into that ... heh heh heh. Right, squid?
• (i)I always wonder why people are so eager to tell others about their own reality...(/i) and i always wonder why people are so eager to dismiss anothers reality...
• And I always wonder why wonder why wonder... Actually, there are a couple of things that she (the G-friend) could rope me into ;-) Honestly though, this was a load of crap. A friend asked me once to attend a meeting of the Kabbalah which likewise tried to prop up their cultish beliefs with pseudo scientific new age jargon. Listen, if you want to believe the moon is made of green cheese, that's fine, but if you try to convince me of the same thing, especially using "science" to prove your point, you are going to have to deal with me dismissing your "reality".
• Amen, brother. Everybody knows the moon is made of angels' boogers. *dismisses self off into own reality*
• Hey, someone else must be a Portlander. *waves to squid* Also worth mentioning in what the bleep is THE WORST SUBPLOT EVER. Which alone should be enough to discredit the film from ever being taken seriously. Something about some crappy deaf chick who's recently divorced and meets this kid and blah blah blah. Thank god the Bagdad served alcohol.
• I dismiss talk of other realities because I believe we all live in the same reality. You're not part of my reality -- you're part of reality. In fact, the very notion of other seems to presuppose an objective reality. Not that anyone's too good at pinning down what the one reality is -- do neutrinos have mass or don't they? But I suspect that when people say they have "their own reality" they just mean their own perception of the one reality. That perception can be right or wrong, though occasionally we don't know which. The alternative seems to be that those with "their own reality" are making me up as they go along.
• do neutrinos have mass or don't they? I thought they did? Despite what Updike says.
• Are you ready for a spiritual film that combines quantum physics, multi-dimensional visual effects and animation, a dramatic story and interviews with leading scientists and mystics? Depends on how many screenwriters were used.
• amphiboly: I'm not completely sure there is one reality, at least at a personal level. I've often wondered, for example, whether others see the same green that I see. There would be no way to prove or disprove it, unless I could get into your brain and see through your eyes, If I could, would I recognize my green? But, then, I'm kinda weird.
• Hah! path, I just make myself the same kind of questions (only with red instead of green). "Do I see the same red as others see that also call it 'red'? Maybe they are seeing what I would call 'green' but they call it 'red'." Then, I wouldn't call it a different personal reality, path. I just see it as different (or equal) perceptions of the same objective reality. The 'color', as you think of it, doesn't exist at all. It's just how your brain interprets that particular electromagnetic wave. Still the question lingers: Why do I see a color I call "red" as red instead of yellow when in the end I would still call it "red" and it won't make any difference? I'm weird too, I suppose.
• Good call, Zemat. I like to think of putting on rose-colored glasses. Some people may have an inverted spectrum (or be zombies!), but this would be essentially like having rose-colored glasses welded onto one's head. Putting on the glasses doesn't change reality, they just make it look different. Having an inverted or shifted optical spectrum should amount to the same thing.
• Zemat, I understand what you're saying, but I guess my wreirdness clusters around some philosophical ideal. If your red and mine are very different, is there another true red out there that we should see as "the red?" If I think something is red, and you think it's brown, how do we resolve our differences? Are the reflections on the walls of Plato's cave enough? Or should we leave the cave ? Maybe one of our more scholarly folks will give us lots of definative answers to my questions, but, I have to admit, that if my philosophy professors did that when I was in college, I must have slept through the class.
• is there another true red out there that we should see as "the red?" What Zemat is saying is that our brains/senses may interpret a given light wavelength differently. The "true red" is a set wavelength--the Platonic ideal. How we "see" that particular wavelength is perhaps entirely arbitrary.
• The neat thing about objective reality is that platonic ideals, such as the one freethough uses as an example, do exist, IMO. They are just beyond our conscious grasp altogether and we cannot reach them neither by instrumental observation nor reasoning. Theories about reality (like the interpretation of light as waves, and the simple namecalling of colors) are just aproximations we develop to reconcile our perceptions as individuals with other people's perceptions of the same real phenomena in a way that could be useful for our own living.
• That's another good point. The wavelength idea of light is just a model. We can define a particular wavelength as being a specific color, but we still might not be any "closer" to understanding light as it exists in objective reality--as it is not filtered thought our perceptions or the perceptions scientific instruments/theories suggest to us.
• as it is not filtered thought our perceptions Let's change that to: as it is, not filtered through our perceptions
• I suppose we should move this to the lovely new thread on this subject, but getting into scientific instruments is a whole 'nother thing. They tell us things about things like wave length and analyse spectra and other hard science stuff. I love that they do that, but I'll still ask: Since we designed them, what are scientific instruments telling us apart from our expectations? Are instuments, to at least some degree, built to measure things we already know? We weren't able to measure sub atomic particles until scientists/mathematicians were able to quantify theories that they do exist. Does the scientific identification of a wave length make any difference in how we personally perceive, for example, a color? Ah, I do love pointless philosophical discussion.
• Actually, of course, even leaving philosophy aside, it isn't as simple as one colour=one wavelength of light. It depends on differences as much as actual values, and all our colours are extrapolated from the three wavelengths our eyes can actually detect. A mixture of red and green light looks the same as yellow light to us, but actually it isn't. Some creatures (pigeons for example - why pigeons, God?) can detect four different wavelengths and presumably see colours differently and better than we do. Which raises a point which does puzzle me - if all we really detect is three different wavelengths, why don't all colours look like graded mixtures of the basic three? Perhaps the pigeons know. *cackles dementedly*
• I think the whole "do our instruments tell us anything we weren't expecting" (which is how I'm parsing your question Path, please correct me if I'm wrong) is an interesting one, given the whole "is what we perceive really reality" intoxiquestion. Because, under some circumstances, our experiments can surprise us and, under others, we can start from what we know and carry out experiments which have, based on our knowledge, completely obvious yet still somehow surprising behaviour. As an example of the first category I would place the Michelson-Morley speed of light experiment (terse and detailed), which launched special and then general relativity. In the second I would place experiments such as those showing that radioactive decay can be slowed by the act of observation and, well, pretty much anything else to do with quantum mechanics (the double slit experiment and variants, diffraction gratings and so on). We live in a deeply weird universe. (putting this comment here, because, well, because.)
• When I began school it was discovered I actually percieve different colours with each eye when looking at the same object. It's as if if there were a faint tinge of red over the world when I see out of only the left eye, and a faint tinge of blue-green when I use only my right eye. I notice this difference most when I happen to be looking at something white, like a snowfall or a sheet of white paper. From an aesthetic standpoint, what I see out of the left eye is always 'warmer' or more 'pleasant' feeling, while the view from the right eye is colder and feels more austere. Have had MRIs and other tests done over the years, there's nothing physiologically unusual that anyone's been able to detect with brain, retina, or optic nerve. [Though who knows what might be discovered in future, the way medicine seems to advance constantly.] Vision is not what we all assume it is, anyway -- we actually see the world upside down but the brain translates it into being 'right side up'. Vision is an interesting illusion, I just happen to be more aware of the fact it is an illusion than most, I guess, due to this longstanding quirk in my own eyesight.
• That's pretty cool. My only peculiarity of this sort (at least I find it odd) is that although I am right handed, my left eye is dominant. (briefly, when the brain puts together the two images it has to work with, one from the left, one from the right, it prefers one image over the other, in my case it's the left one. You can test yourself pretty easily; stretch out your arms and arrange your thumbs and index fingers so they form a small triangle. Sight on something far away through the triangle, and then alternate closing each eye. With one eye closed the object should stay where it is, and with the other it should move sideways slightly. The dominating eye is the one where the object stays put.) This seems odd to me at least. I guess I would have expected handedness and eyedness to line up.
• Have a relative with severe amblyopia, where one eye was strongly dominant, to the degree the less used eyeball wandered inward. As a youngster had to wear a dark patch over the stronger eye for protracted periods [looked like a pirate] and even had a series of eye operations as a kid before greater balance of vision was finally restored. Believe this is what 'cross-eyed' meant in days before the condition was correctable.
• Monkeyfilter: No ulterior motives here, right? Monkeyfilter: You're not part of my reality. Monkeyfilter: Should we leave the cave? Monkeyfilter: Ah, I do love pointless philosophical discussion. Monkeyfilter: We live in a deeply weird universe. Sorry about that. It was such a prolific thread. What else can I say? Monkeyfilter: Where your taglines are my reality
• Monkeyfilter: What else can I say? Just because we don't have a Meta doesn't mean we can't be meta
• Monkeyfilter: Hogwash, hooey, bull pucky! Monkeyfilter: I always wonder why people are so eager to tell others about their own reality... Monkeyfilter: We live in a deeply weird universe. Why do these lines resonate so, both alone and in combination?
• Monkeyfilter: I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in.
• My current condition is air conditioned.
• why, oh why did i try polychrome's vision test with my lousy eyesight? i discovered that i see best with just one eye not both. and the jump is not slight but a matter of inches. i'm taking my reality to be examined.