Ah! The Grand Canyon. The majestic White Mountains of New Hampshire. The West Coast’s sea stacks and marine terraces. When I see those features, I know truth lies in the seeing. Forget all the Matrix stuff. Those places are real to the feel, and they stimulate wonder. And then there are the majestic scenes of Avatar. Wondrous indeed! But wholly made up. Fake.
As an “older” American, I can go back to a time before we had a television, to a time when I traveled via black-and-white movies with scratchy sound into sub-Saharan Africa, to the pyramids, and to the “Wild West.” Black-and-white films, mind you, not “Technicolor” with Dolby Sound. And I traveled to space on a sparking noisy spaceship with Buck Rogers. I’m sure that the actors had colorful clothing. I assume that for the galas in movies with haute couture, also. But I had to imagine the green of the selva, the tan of Giza, the green of saguaro, and those multicolored outfits of actresses walking with poise down grand staircases. All that I had to imagine. All that was a vision in the brain. The eyes? Well, the eyes were as they are now, just the receivers, not the interpreters, and with their blind spots, they even leave a tiny part of the scene blank. Not to worry, however. The brain paints in the scene, the brain is the “seer.” The brain enabled those who watched film prior to The Wizard of Oz to envision roads, yellow or otherwise.
So, I guess I can say that “way back then” I was used to “fake” imagery, to an Ansel Adams’ black-and-white majesty because I could fill in the missing color from experience with a world of color. Had I grown up in the Arctic, however, I might not have had the breadth of color in experience from which to superimpose a complete picture over the partial one. Too much monotone in regions of sea and ice.
Today, I find myself sitting in front of a computer with HD capability, and I see videos labeled with numbers like “3” or “4” for the level of detail. And yet, my eyes—that is, my brain—is no better off than it was when I was child because I realize that I might be subject to some artistic reinterpretation or computer enhancement. I noticed the click bait YouTube videos purportedly showing strikes by drones on military vehicles in Ukraine. Some of those videos are no more than game videos serving as “reality.” Fortunately, with a long history of interpreting that goes back to those black-and-white days, I can more times than not know which videos are “real” and which are “fake.” Not, I will remind you, because of what my eyes can do, but rather because of what my brain can do.
But in a world in which our ability to discern fake from real is constantly tested, I find myself questioning anything that comes into my field of view, and my brain sometimes applies the virtual realities for the “real.” And I know exactly when I first experienced this phenomenon of perception that is unique to our times. I saw a car accident one day shortly after the first season when “instant replay” was used during televised football games. Immediately after the accident—within seconds, I’d estimate—I turned my head to “re-see” it, as though I might have been watching a replay of a touchdown. The reaction was automatic. I was conditioned to see what I had not seen if, for example, I had left the TV room for a snack and had to go back for that replay. I had, as all of us have since that time, entered a period when very few “blind spots” exist. And where they do leave part of a scene blank because we were not paying attention or absent during an event, we rely on re-seeing—sometimes repeatedly and often from many different angles. I’m almost a god of seeing, and you are, too. I can go back in time to re-see, and I can adopt multiple angles of seeing. I’m used to not missing much as you are.
And in all this “seeing” both you and I have learned more or less to interpret and infer. But we are not gods, and we are not infallible, so the eyes can—sorry, the brain can—misinterpret, especially when there is an element of technical enhancement.
Take the images given to us by sophisticated, but artificial “eyes” like the James Webb Space Telescope. Recently released images reveal colorful celestial objects. But those images are computer enhancements that bring together images in different wavelengths. The color is a composite. Each part of the spectrum detected by the JWST and other telescopes merges to make the “reality” we see. Any one of the images prior to merging would seem dull by comparison to the final product. But my brain accepts the collated images as “real.”
We live in a time when we cannot trust much of what we see unless we are standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, the base of Mt. Washington, along the Big Sur, or in any of those places I knew only in black-and-white during my childhood. We are so intertwined with artificial imagery that we now have to question much of what we see. Were our ancestors plagued with this phenomenon? Maybe a little. After all, they had to interpret the world of colorless night and colorful daytime, of flickering firelight and foggy morning distortions. But our reliance on “virtual” imagery has exacerbated our confusion about what we think we see. If we throw into that confusion the purposefully misleading work of others, we have a level of problematic interpretation that generations a century and longer ago never encountered.
Do my eyes deceive me or does my brain? Does this question shade all that I experience? Does doubt in the validity of perception precipitate a skepticism that our ancestors did not have prior to motion pictures, TV, replays, and computer enhanced imagery? If so, then what stone can I kick as Dr. Samuel Johnson kicked one to determine what’s real and what’s a product of the imagination à la Berkeley?
As an “older” American, I can go back to a time before we had a television, to a time when I traveled via black-and-white movies with scratchy sound into sub-Saharan Africa, to the pyramids, and to the “Wild West.” Black-and-white films, mind you, not “Technicolor” with Dolby Sound. And I traveled to space on a sparking noisy spaceship with Buck Rogers. I’m sure that the actors had colorful clothing. I assume that for the galas in movies with haute couture, also. But I had to imagine the green of the selva, the tan of Giza, the green of saguaro, and those multicolored outfits of actresses walking with poise down grand staircases. All that I had to imagine. All that was a vision in the brain. The eyes? Well, the eyes were as they are now, just the receivers, not the interpreters, and with their blind spots, they even leave a tiny part of the scene blank. Not to worry, however. The brain paints in the scene, the brain is the “seer.” The brain enabled those who watched film prior to The Wizard of Oz to envision roads, yellow or otherwise.
So, I guess I can say that “way back then” I was used to “fake” imagery, to an Ansel Adams’ black-and-white majesty because I could fill in the missing color from experience with a world of color. Had I grown up in the Arctic, however, I might not have had the breadth of color in experience from which to superimpose a complete picture over the partial one. Too much monotone in regions of sea and ice.
Today, I find myself sitting in front of a computer with HD capability, and I see videos labeled with numbers like “3” or “4” for the level of detail. And yet, my eyes—that is, my brain—is no better off than it was when I was child because I realize that I might be subject to some artistic reinterpretation or computer enhancement. I noticed the click bait YouTube videos purportedly showing strikes by drones on military vehicles in Ukraine. Some of those videos are no more than game videos serving as “reality.” Fortunately, with a long history of interpreting that goes back to those black-and-white days, I can more times than not know which videos are “real” and which are “fake.” Not, I will remind you, because of what my eyes can do, but rather because of what my brain can do.
But in a world in which our ability to discern fake from real is constantly tested, I find myself questioning anything that comes into my field of view, and my brain sometimes applies the virtual realities for the “real.” And I know exactly when I first experienced this phenomenon of perception that is unique to our times. I saw a car accident one day shortly after the first season when “instant replay” was used during televised football games. Immediately after the accident—within seconds, I’d estimate—I turned my head to “re-see” it, as though I might have been watching a replay of a touchdown. The reaction was automatic. I was conditioned to see what I had not seen if, for example, I had left the TV room for a snack and had to go back for that replay. I had, as all of us have since that time, entered a period when very few “blind spots” exist. And where they do leave part of a scene blank because we were not paying attention or absent during an event, we rely on re-seeing—sometimes repeatedly and often from many different angles. I’m almost a god of seeing, and you are, too. I can go back in time to re-see, and I can adopt multiple angles of seeing. I’m used to not missing much as you are.
And in all this “seeing” both you and I have learned more or less to interpret and infer. But we are not gods, and we are not infallible, so the eyes can—sorry, the brain can—misinterpret, especially when there is an element of technical enhancement.
Take the images given to us by sophisticated, but artificial “eyes” like the James Webb Space Telescope. Recently released images reveal colorful celestial objects. But those images are computer enhancements that bring together images in different wavelengths. The color is a composite. Each part of the spectrum detected by the JWST and other telescopes merges to make the “reality” we see. Any one of the images prior to merging would seem dull by comparison to the final product. But my brain accepts the collated images as “real.”
We live in a time when we cannot trust much of what we see unless we are standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, the base of Mt. Washington, along the Big Sur, or in any of those places I knew only in black-and-white during my childhood. We are so intertwined with artificial imagery that we now have to question much of what we see. Were our ancestors plagued with this phenomenon? Maybe a little. After all, they had to interpret the world of colorless night and colorful daytime, of flickering firelight and foggy morning distortions. But our reliance on “virtual” imagery has exacerbated our confusion about what we think we see. If we throw into that confusion the purposefully misleading work of others, we have a level of problematic interpretation that generations a century and longer ago never encountered.
Do my eyes deceive me or does my brain? Does this question shade all that I experience? Does doubt in the validity of perception precipitate a skepticism that our ancestors did not have prior to motion pictures, TV, replays, and computer enhanced imagery? If so, then what stone can I kick as Dr. Samuel Johnson kicked one to determine what’s real and what’s a product of the imagination à la Berkeley?
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