Atemporality
Very creative people get atemporal early on. Are relatively unimpressed by the “now” factor, by latest things. Access the whole continuum. Less creative people believe in “originality” and “innovation”, two basically misleading but culturally very powerful concepts.
— William Gibson
Gibson was saying that if you have a genuinely avant garde idea, something that’s really new, you should write about it or create about it as if it were being read twenty years from now. In other words, if you want to do this, you want to strip away the sci-fi chrome, the sense of wonder. You want it to be antique before it hits the page or the screen. Imagine that it was twenty years gone into the future. Just approach it from that perspective.
— Bruce Sterling
Mr. Sterling sees the time-out-of-joint nature of today’s pop as a side effect of digiculture. One of the curiosities of the futuristic-seeming information technology that we now enjoy is that it has dramatically increased the presence of the past in our lives. From YouTube to iTunes, from file-sharing blogs to Netflix, the sheer volume and range of back catalogue music, film, TV and so forth that is available for consumption is astounding.
We can access all this stuff with incredible speed and convenience, share it and store it with minimal effort. But a potential downside of this sudden “affluence” is a flood of influences that can overwhelm the imagination of young musicians, who are absorbing five decades of pop history in a frenetic jumble. Their attention is also being competed for by music from outside the Anglophone rock and pop traditions, everything from West African guitarpop to Soviet New Wave music to Ethiopian electronic funk from the 1980s.
— Simon Reynolds
The World as an Outside Memory
My mind is reeling after reading a theoretical account of visual perception (O’Regan, 1992) that goes directly against the way I viewed it. Let me back-pedal a little before getting into the details.
You might be familiar with natural blind spots. These gaps in our visual field are due to a lack of light receptors at the points where the optic nerve passes through the retina. Despite this, our perception of the external world tends to be uninterrupted. This remarkable disassociation between retinal input and phenomenological experience can be exposed with a simple illusion: close the left eye, then look behind an outstretched finger and keep focusing on that point as you slowly move your finger across to the right. Upon entering a blind spot, the fingertip will be replaced by surrounding background. Apparently, the brain fills in blanks by consulting nearby receptors and the opposing eye to interpolate missing information—that’s why closing one eye causes a disappearing fingertip. Seems simple enough, right?
However, no sources were cited for this explanation in the Wikipedia article. I searched the scientific literature and still came up surprisingly short. A recent review (Komatsu, 2006) could only offer the suggestion that “[t]he actual mechanism of filling-in might be quite complex, and there might be more than one filling-in process.” Then I came across O’Regan’s article, where he notes that for an explanation invoked in “virtually every textbook that discusses the blind spot”, serious testing of the idea was sorely lacking (arguably the first such paper to do so was published just one year earlier; see Ramachandran & Gregory, 1991).
Now the really interesting bit. He goes on to redress what he sees as a serious problem with the notion of filling-in (and other mechanisms which compensate for flaws in vision, such as saccadic suppression): “[they] all implicitly assume that what we ‘see’ has something like photographic quality, like a kind of internal panoramic ‘screen’ … or a little 3D model that preserves the metric properties of the outside world.” I’ll skip the technical arguments against the need for an internal metric representation and go to the excellent tactile analogy he provides to introduce his alternate conceptualisation:
Suppose I close my eyes and take a bottle in my hand; suppose also that my fingers are spread apart so there are spaces between them. Consider the following tactile analogy of the problem of the blind spot: Why do I not feel holes in the bottle where the spaces are between my fingers? When asked within the tactile modality, the answer seems trivial to us: Why should I feel holes there? My tactile perception of the bottle is provided by my exploration of it with my fingers… […] There is no need for an internal replica of the bottle since the bottle is continuously “out there”, and any question that requires metric knowledge can be resolved by sampling the sensation present on the hand.
And more explicitly:
We do not see a hole in the bottle where the blind spot is, nor do we see its color or surface quality as less clear in the regions we are not directly fixating, because our feeling of “seeing” comes not from what is on the retina, but from the result of using the retina as a tool for probing the environment.
What a fascinating idea! He sweeps aside all the difficult questions that currently plague vision researchers (“…optical aberrations, differences in resolution, defects in retinal structure, and the smear, and displacement caused by eye movements”) when he finally makes this grand conclusion:
Like the concept of the “ether“ in physics at the beginning of the century, the questions evaporate if we abandon the idea that “seeing” involves passively contemplating an internal representation of the world. […] I believe that seeing constitutes an active process of probing the external environment as though it were a continuously available external memory. This allows one to understand why, despite the poor quality of the visual apparatus, we have the subjective impression of great richness and “presence” of the visual world: But this richness and presence are actually an illusion, created by the fact that if we so much as faintly ask ourselves some question about the environment, an answer is immediately provided by the sensory information on the retina, possibly rendered available by an eye movement.
An extensive follow-up article by O’Regan and Noë (2001) pushes the sensorimotor framework for vision and visual consciousness even further, bolding claiming that (visual) qualia don’t exist. They characterise it as a category mistake: ”Qualia are meant to be properties of experiential states … [b]ut experiences, we have argued, are not states. They are ways of acting. They are things we do.” Thus, the pesky ol’ explanatory gap can be entirely sidestepped. This version of their paper has a string of insightful peer-reviewed commentary at the end, followed by an authors’ response. If you’re interested, it’s well worth reading. It includes (I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly) Dennett saying “boys, we’re on the same team!” and Frith being like “c’mon, there’s totally some evidence for the NCC, don’t be so pessimistic.” A veritable all-star ensemble, indeed.
Vitaliy Raskalov.
Raskalov, along with many other youth in Moscow such as Vadim Mahorov and Marat Dupri, are roofers who document their experiences. In an interview, Dupri explains his motivation:
When you stand in front of a building, you can’t hesitate, you can’t doubt. I recently climbed to the top of the statue of Peter the Great in the center of the city one night — 100 meters (330 feet) up and onto his head. We climbed up while the guards were sleeping. A weather vane was spinning in the wind on the very top. Below, the sun was slowly rising over Moscow. The city was asleep, and it was like life was frozen. I was the happiest person on Earth. I only need to look down to forget all my problems.
Of course, it’s not always roofs that they climb.
