Where to begin?
Not too long ago, on John Hawk’s blog, he started what is going to be a series, based on the Snowdrift game. If you’re not familiar with that game theory construct, it is briefly:
The situation of the Snowdrift game involves two drivers who are trapped on opposite sides of a snowdrift. Each has the option of staying in the car or shoveling snow to clear a path. Letting the opponent do all the work is the best option (with a pay-off of 300 used in this study), but being exploited by shoveling while the opponent sits in the car still results in a pay-off of 100. (The other two possibilities, both shoveling and both sitting, have pay-offs of 200 and 0, respectively.)
Hawk’s says, in part one of his series, this (among many other things):
If the cost of shoveling is low compared to the benefit of getting out of the drift, it will be in your interest to shovel by yourself. Sure, the other passenger is a freeloader who shares the benefit undeservedly, but so what? If the cost of shoveling was too high for you to bear, you’d have refused to do it, letting both of you freeze there. That would be the Prisoner’s Dilemma. But if the cost of shoveling is low compared to the costs of doing nothing, then a mixed strategy will be optimal. As long as freeloaders aren’t too common, that strategy will pay off. So a population engaged in the Snowdrift game will come to a mixed proportion of shovelers and freeloaders.
I started thinking about how the artist and the viewer, or the writer and the reader — or anybody trying to convey something to somebody trying to get it — is like that. The artist can do most of the work or he can make the viewer to most of the work — or anywhere in between. Or they can both sit in their cars and stare at one another stubbornly; uncomprehendingly.
Then there was a post, Comics on the Screen, on Julian Sanchez’s blog about how movie-makers are now making it possible for you to slow down or stop movies and find extra content that is not otherwise visible:
What J.J. Abrams has realized is that these recording technologies aren’t just a convenience to allow more harried viewers to experience the same linear narrative; they’re also, in an indirect way, tools for the show creator because they change expectations about how viewers are capable of engaging with the program — in this case, less like traditional TV and more like the most formally innovative graphic novels.
It would be great to see more attention paid to this — and more thought given by creators to the possibilities of a form where it’s assumed viewers will range over the content at a pace and in an order they determine. A character might have a flashback shown in rapidfire jumpcuts that, seen slowly, cue viewers to scenes from previous episodes. Going back and juxtaposing the full scenes in sequence might, in turn, bring to the surface some unstated epiphany, or simply hint at a connecting theme that revealed what the character was thinking about. Not everyone, of course, wants to watch a show this way, and a savvy creator would find ways of introducing these elements unobtrusively — just as you could ignore all the formal cleverness and just read Watchmen as a straightforward comics adventure story.
They’re trying to “thin” or slice time; to squeeze it down and make it smaller so you can see a less dense time. That reminded me of the inverse, which is when a still photographer makes a sequence — such as Felix Grant or Dr. C or what I discuss in my Mediated by the Medium post. They’re making still-photo time “thicker” — giving you multiple slices to make a more dense time. Attacking the snowdrift of time from opposite sides.
But finally, thanks to a wonderful post by Felix, yesterday (please read it if you haven’t done so already!), I’ve realized what was in front of me all the time. The snowdrift is not a problem. It is the art. This wasn’t the point of Felix’s post, but it’s there, hiding just under the surface when he talks about what is learned from reading translated texts and extends that to all art:
I have learnt a tremendous amount in the process: and have gradually realised that reading in a second language is giving her a new set of insights generated by the process of crossing the language barrier itself.
This may seem irrelevant to visual imagery, but it is not. Different cultures accrue different visual associations. Moreover, the process of crossing into another mind is as radical in its way as (perhaps even more so than) crossing into another language.
Let me take that further. Watch me play the snowdrift game. I imagine myself, driving down the straight and narrow highway with deep snow on both sides, droning from A to B when I encounter a monster snowdrift. Lo and behold, on the other side of the drift, I see Felix in his car (or bus). So far so good. But then things go all sideways. Because I can’t for the life of me, get either myself or Felix to shovel that snow. Get out of the car; yes! Of course! But do we shovel the snow? Not one bit. There are snowball fights, there are igloos built, there are tunnels made ( a veritable labyrinth of tunnels …), there are ice cream castles and feathered canyons and even flows of angel hair. Art: pictures, movies, books, music = snowdrifts. They get you out of your car and off the road.
What was wrong with Joni Mitchell, anyway, with that next verse:
But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I could have done
But clouds got in my way
Got in your way? They give you ice cream castles, and all you can do is start boo-hooing and breaking out the shovel?
Anyway, I will stop before I sound any more like a Hallmark greeting card than I already do. Point is, snowdrifts and clouds and love and life and, especially, art, is a chance, a space, a time in which you are invited to go off road and … well, you never know what will happen. That’s the point.
One last hair to split with Felix: AcerOne (Luke Palmer) is making snowdrifts; you and your translating friend are playing in snowdrifts that are already (beautifully) made.
-Julie
So, there is no neural “picture” associated with what we see, but there is some sort of neural structure, though what that is remains to be seen. Is the neural structure present in your mind (that recognizes Felix, and the snowdrift) similar to the structure in my mind? It would make sense that this would be true but other than connecting your optic nerve to my brain it would be hard to test. Most people react when they see a snake, even if it is for the first time. (note I said most people.) Is the structure for snake pre coded? This would mean that the information in our brains is coded similarly. Hmm
News Report: Two bloggers found hibernating on either side of a snow drift. Expected to survive.
Comment by Dr. C. — June 13, 2009 @ 10:58 pm
Felix doesn’t hibernate; he *claims* to be pupating. But I think his loud snoring pretty much gives him away.
Now, for a good long blast of cognitive voodoo. You asked for it… All taken from Mind in Life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind, by Evan Thompson (2007).
Comment by unrealnature — June 14, 2009 @ 9:24 am
Phenomenological analysis operates at the personal level. When we describe an experience we are describing it as belonging to the whole person, and our descriptions have a holistic and normative character.
Everything takes place in the brain. Everything can be reduced to a collection of nerve firings, action potentials if you will. To make the statement “belonging to the whole person” indicates that some, I suppose us reductionists, contend that an “experience” doesn’t belong to the whole “person.” It assumes the individual making the statement and I agree on the definition of “experience” and “whole person” and that this statement describes a “real” situation (I apologize for the quotes, but it is the only way I can emphasize the ambiguity in talking about this subject).
“holistic and normative character”
Seven or more years have passed since Thompson wrote this phrase. The word “holistic” has pupated into a concept that, for me, signifies woo and incense sticks. I’m sorry, it has. To indicate that right people consider an experience to take place in a holistic way is to say that wrong people consider something else. Whatever. Let me please be wrong in his (or her) eyes. As for “normative,” I think this is exactly what we have brought up. Is the structure of an experience, all those neurons firing in many different areas including the limbic system (which makes my hear palpitate with pleasure at the mere mention of a synapse), basically the same, the same physical structure, for you and me? He/she would appear to agree.
“…when we describe the neural processes on which experience depends, we are describing subpersonal phenomena..”
What is this transcendent “person” that is not described by the neural processes? Is it unreal? Is it present in a chimp? In a ferret? In a mollusk? In a bacterium? In a prion? Does it go away when we sleep? When we die? Because we cannot yet explain thought and experience with our puny science does not mean we have to postulate an entity that one has no way of proving is there.
“… no current scientific account of the mechanisms of imagery (”the internal representation that is used in information processing”) is sufficient to account for the subjective experience of imagery (”the experience itself”).”
Simply because the net has not been cast large enough. If you wish to include my childhood experienc of reading Superman comic books in my imagery of a hurtling jet, then simple capture those nerve firings in the amygdala that store Clark and Lois. Include those endocrine secretions that work on my emotions. Include vagal and splanchnic titillations, aprocine secretions, the full monty. Trust me, we ratiocinaters like inclusiveness.
“…we are guided by considerations of our own experience and the experiences we attribute to others, understood by proxy to our own.”
Again, if the experience is the same, is the neural structure the same? This would seem to say so, at least for the purposes of the experiment.
“… Discussions of results are frequently sprinkled with hypotheses whose only direct method of verificatioin is instrospection.”
I would partially agree. All that I have said is based on my own hypotheses which are not, at the present, verifiable to the degree one would like. However, and it is a big however, there is far more physical evidence for the hypothesis that there is nothing beyond the presence of multiple brain synapses to explain the phenomenon of human thought, than there is for the presence of a transcendent “person” that is experiencing the world.
Comment by Dr. C. — June 14, 2009 @ 11:38 am
You already know that I don’t agree that “everything takes place in the brain” and you seem to admit as much. Nerves can fire all they want; if they aren’t attached to anything, nothing is going to happen. Likewise, the brain has no intent, no rational function if divorced from the particular personal history as well as its physically peculiar body and environment.
I agree that “holistic” has a certain … aroma … from a few decades back. Nevertheless, it’s a useful word that need not be discarded because of past abuse.
Personal/subpersonal is simply a way to try to get at the problem of getting from or bridging the gap between the neurological event and the experience of perception. The one does not, currently, account for the other.
On the last three, I don’t think you are necessarily in disagreement with either Thompson or myself. None of us are claiming that something outside the mind is part of the perceptual event that happens in the mind. What (I think) he’s saying is that you will not ever capture whatever it is that is happening via purely third person methods — and that first person methods will require strenuous sorting out of experiential reports.
Analagous example: if I give you a bowl of thoroughly scrambled raw eggs (as if ready to cook) and ask you to please extract and reconstitute one egg (white and yolk as they were before scrambling), could you do it? That’s sort of what it’s like to expect to be able to extract “visual perception” from the neurological firing scrambled egg combo of perception, memory, imagination — never mind emotion, distraction, honesty …
Comment by unrealnature — June 14, 2009 @ 3:10 pm
I’m not being tempted again down this “am I my brain or another organ of the same name?” route – there are flowers to sniff, songs to be sung and … yes … snowdrifts to be abused.
But I love the snowdrift post, and shall reply as soon as I can. And I love Dr C’s image of two hibernating survivors too … it made me laugh aloud.
And as for the snoring … what you are hearing is the extreme turbulence of my histolytic/histogenic metamorphosis.
Comment by Felix Grant — June 15, 2009 @ 3:00 am