Evolution as Cause for Pride

If all goes well, I'll be starting a stint this winter as a volunteer interpreter in the paleontology gallery at the Natural History Museum of Utah.

It is impossible to interpret paleontology without interpreting evolution. I think science education has done a poor job of this.

The resistance to evolution is essentially psychological, not religious. Attacking Creationism and Intelligent Design doesn't get to the root cause. These are empty fabrications, easily refuted with evidence and logic, and yet they withstand all rebuttal because the fusillade of reason simply passes through them. 

Science educators mistakenly argue that science and religion are "orthogonal" (a scientized word meaning that you can't measure one with the standards of the other). This approach only reveals how antisceptic scientists strive to be, doing themselves a great disservice.

Scientists and science educators should own up to the fact that science has much in common with religion, even as it has much to distinguish it from theology. As with religion, science has passion, conviction, devotion, pride, awe, wonder, and a striving for a comprehesive understanding of existence. Unlike theology, science invites questions, refutation, paradigm revolutions, and at its best, greets the great unknown with first a shrug and then a squaring of the shoulders. What we don't know, we will strive to find out.

This is how science is done. But science as it is presented in the classroom seems like catechism, barely distinguishable from theological doctrine and therefore, a potential rival to theologies of all stripes. There are scientists who embrace this, who have made a career of debunking theology, thus feeding the impression of rivalry. 

Let me clarify my distinction between religion and theology. Religion is a set of psychological questions, theology is a set of authoritative answers to those questions. 

Science is a set of methods for finding answers so that they can be reframed as further questions. It has much to say to religious impulses but it challenges those impulses to continue their inquiry. It has very little to say to theological doctrine that provides only pat answers intolerant of continuing inquiry.

The religious impulse is much stronger than any given theology, because it derives from the root psychology of the individual. We are born to wonder, to inquire, to formulate hypotheses. We are born to feel pain, and seek salves for our anguish. We are born to desire pride in ourselves and our associations. We are born to feel small beneath a starry sky and at the same time as large as the cosmos. We are born to question who we are and why. Without these religious impulses theology would find no footing in the human psyche.

Science education can connect with these psychological drives, not by asserting itself as a rival to theology but by showing a kindly regard for human nature.

When a child or adult feels discomfort at the idea that "we evolved from apes" that unease is an expression of our fragile self esteem. To imagine oneself as simply a naked ape with primate lineage and instincts feels degrading, while to imagine oneself an exceptional creation only one step removed from angels feels uplifting. 

I think what the interpretation of evolution should say to this person needing affirmation of personal worth is this: You are the sum of all the survivors who forged the path to your existence. You have their attributes built into your genes, a geneology of success. Making the best of that wonderful 3.5 billion year inheritance is your test in this life. The success of humanity in the eons to come depends on the choices you make now.

When an uplifting message is phrased as a challenge, I think it can set people in a forward direction. It can give them a way to earn their pride.

The Muse is not a Marketeer

Writers can wonder where ideas come from, but maybe a more important consideration is what the ideas stand for.

None but a blockhead ever wrote but for money, according to Samuel Johnson and Larry King. I think that is valid advice for the act of writing, but does it apply to the inspiration that prompts the writing? 

Should a writer think first about money, asking the muse for profitable ideas? Or should the writer request purposeful ideas and then dress them up to sell?

That's confidential information shared between writer and muse, isn't it? I would not decree my choice as guidance for anyone else, and I have no way of knowing if any given literary masterpiece started out as the gleam of dollar signs.

All I know is that when I try to talk myself into believing something, the contrived conviction eventually wears off. And when I try to talk myself out of something I believe inherently, the self inhibition eventually wears off. I've lived a long life experiencing a lot of wearing off.

What is true to me is what entertains me as it appears on the page, what is fun, even thrilling, to see in my mind's eye and describe with words. The muse doesn't hand me stuff ready made, it stands over my shoulder, kibitzing my own choices. 

Fun, even thrilling, for me likely would be absurd and depressing for most others. I analyze others, deriving a calculated version of how they function, which deprives me of true feelings for them but creates true feelings for the characterizations I have made of them. The best approximation I can make of Hope is to admit that I might be wrong. The best imitation of compassion I can manage is to identify with my characters' falibility.

Thus, my Muse is not a Marketeer. It does not spoon me ideas with a promising return on investment. Born naked, it is up to me to dress up for the party. I will sell myself through appearance, but that is packaging, not product.

If you want modernized Samuel Johnson, read any advice about script writing. The message is always about money: where to find it, how to deliver it by pandering to audiences. When I contrive to please others, I displease myself, which means that the essential talent in writing for hire is to repress one's well earned self loathing. 

And a screenwriter is a writer for hire, not necessarily starting out that way but any sale will make it that way. Either the script will be changed by others or others will insist that you make the changes yourself. Money becomes the salve for the wounds of indignation.

One of my absolute convictions in life is that audiences, whether reading or viewing, seek solice, forgiveness, salvation, self justification. They will accept truth only if it is kind. 

My work will never be popular because I think the truths worth writing about are cruel, and that the task of a truth teller is to show how one can cope with cruelty by refusing to practice it, refusing to let it corrupt one's soul, refusing to allow it dominance over the oases of beauty amidst bleak desert sands, refusing it by seeing beauty even in those desert expanses, and that the way to do this is to embrace one's pain and make it a thing of wonder, a reminder that you are alive.

Matrix Resolution

Ready for some fun?

For all of the philosophical musings written about the Matrix movie series, I've yet to encounter any comment that resolves a fundamental issue in the science fiction premise of the story arc. In other words, how does this fictional world, on its own physical terms, actually work?

To be more honest, I've yet to encounter a fanboy who understands as well as I do what is really going on in the three worlds of the epic: the virtual reality of the Matrix itself, the Machine World on the surface, and the subterranean home of humans, Zion. These three are tied together thematically at the conclusion, but I think it is pretty clear that nobody but me and the Wachowskis understands how.

I bought a Blu-ray set of all the movies in the series, a set that includes the most important "documentation" of the science fiction premise, The Animatrix, nine animated shorts commissioned by the Wachowski siblings (now brother and sister). Without information supplied by The Animatrix, the storyline in the trilogy has gaps that only a stickler for consistency would notice. (Who, me?)

The biggest consistency gaps are 1) the true nature of "The Source" and 2) the true nature of what Neo sees with his extrasensory perception (after having his eyes charred), which he and the philosophical commentators alike take as the machines being "made of light." In this essay I will explain that the true source and the aura of light are the same, something well foreshadowed by the storyline, when The Animatrix prequel episode, "The Second Renaissance" is included.

Here's the backstory presented by "The Second Renaissance": In humanity's desperate struggle against the machines, people seed the sky with nanobots or nanites, nano-scale particle-like constructions that envelope the planet in artificial clouds, thus cutting off the machines' source of power, the sun.

This works physically but not as a strategy. The machines adapt by using capsulized human bodies as their source of power and they control human psyches by placing human consciousness in the simulated world of The Matrix.

The nanites are the central actors in this model, even though they are seldom mentioned in either the movies or the animated short that explains the "scorching of the sky".

My contention (I'm being modest about what I intuitively know to be fundamental truth) is that over the centuries since their introduction, the nanites evolved to pervade the planet. They are the true source of connectivity, the means by which Neo can exert his virtual reality powers in the physical world. They are what Neo sees in Machine City as a aural golden glow, a flow of nanites enveloping all machinery and programs. Their power is as great as the sunlight bathing the outer edges of the atmosphere, and they can connect all partitions that the machines have made of the planet.

When Neo zaps the attacking sentinels in the physical world, falling into a coma while his psyche awakens in a limbo way station (anagrammed as Mobil Station) between the Machine World and the Matrix, he taps into this nanite ether for his zap power, and for his psychic transport to Mobile Station, not actually in the Matrix proper, and thus, not reachable by jacking in. The Trainman engineered this underground railway by programming nanite presence without realizing the underpinnings of what he was doing.

It is clear throughout that neither the humans nor the machines (even in program form as uber artificial intelligences, such as the Oracle or the Architect) understand what is really going on at the highest level. Both species are equal in their unawareness of nanite influence. They both think their reality is all there is.

I guess the ultimate revelation that they are connected by a nanite ether will have to come for both in the fourth installment, which I would title,

Matrix: Resolution

I'd write it, but the Wachowski siblings own the franchise.

Nearly Ideal Immersion

A movie maker should desire, first and foremost, to tell a good story. Immersive technology may be a means to that end, or it may be a distraction, or it might require a very different approach to storytelling.

The ideal immersion described in the earlier post took as the measure of perfection the achievement of total presence, the viewer's sense of being physically in the scene. The trade-off for achieving total presence, however, is the loss of every cinema device currently used to tell a story visually.

I experienced a state of the art demonstration of total presence immersion, Nonny de la Peña's Immersive Journalism project, "Hunger In Los Angeles", at Sundance 2012. The Virtual Reality head tracking goggles, an early precursor to Palmer Lucky's Oculus Rift device now nearing consumer release, provided a convincing, slightly pixelated stereoscopic view without peripheral vision. The virtual world was a recreation of an actual event, using an actual audio recording of it, situated in a computer graphics scene recreating the actual physical location, populated by motion capture avatars of actors portraying the actual people who were there. The whole idea was to simulate an eyewitness experience that allowed the user to bear witness from any point of view.

The demo was quite effective at showing the promise of the technology. I felt simultaneously immersed and reflective, imagining myself as a news cameraman trying to shoot the best view of the action, feeling complete personal detachment from the events unfolding. I'm not sure what the demo hoped to evoke in viewers, but what it brought out in me was the desire to shoot the scene well. I would NOT have reacted to the actual event this way if I had been there when it happened, I would have improvised a pillow under the head of the man who fell to the sidewalk during a diabetic seizure caused by hunger while waiting in a food line. But these were virtual actors, not people, and so I responded cinematically.

I reflected upon that occasion a long while afterward. It wasn't storytelling, it was event simulation, the story of which was up to the person vicariously experiencing it. I had created a story as recorded by a news cameraman looking for good coverage and cinematic composition. Other people created stories of themselves as powerless and invisible, unable to influence the events unfolding. The story as perceived was entirely in the augmented mind's eye of the viewer.

"Ideal Immersion", defined as the achievement of total user presence in the scene, is not a storytelling medium, it is an experience medium. There are no aspect ratio choices, no lens focal lengths, no camera dollies, no post production effects, no edits. The cinema storyteller is the eliminated middleman, making way for user stories.

By contrast, "Nearly Ideal Immersion" isn't an oxymoron, it isn't a lessening of an absolute. Rather, it requires a shift in emphasis from a simulation of physical presence in the scene, to the creation of an emotional presence within the story, using immersive technology. This means that the cinematic storyteller retains traditional control, with constraints, not only over the action but also over how it is shown, and that the viewer has to make a personal commitment in order to experience this immersively.

Next installment in this series of posts on immersive cinema, I'll discuss the tradeoffs for achieving balance between physical and emotional immersive presence, and the technologies for doing so.

Visual Argumentation

We all know how to argue with words. It could be argued that argument is the most common form of communication.

Is it possible to make an argument with images so skillfully that the viewer is unaware an argument is even being made?

Yes. The name for visual augmentation in cinema is montage, and it works so well because images in sequence create an uncontestable logic of their own.

Any verbal assertion, no matter how well it is backed by fact and logic, is subject to the contentiousness inherent in language. We can define our terms in opposition, we can interpret "facts" differently, we can twist what others say contrarily as if they were proving our own point.

Images are different. They are even processed separately, in the half brain opposite the verbal half. Images in succession don't follow logic, they create logic by establishing an associative chain that invites careless inference and defies careful analysis. Rebuttal of a montage with words is always a belabored point, and therefore weak. A succession of images goes by fast enough to reach its conclusion before we have time to think verbally about what we are seeing.

We filter words by what we wish to hear. To some degree we filter images by what we want to see, but visual preconceptions are vague and easily superseded by fresh images. With words, to immediately discard what you previously believed in favor of what is now being said, is a sure sign of mental illness. And yet, this is exactly the way we process images, tossing out provisional expectations to make way for current sights. If someone doesn't look as we imagined from previously hearing only their voice, the sight of them is immediately definitive and our expectations are forgotten. Seeing is believing; our visual thinking is structured to alter our beliefs in a blink of a film edit.

We have no visual language to rebut what we see, we can only choose to doubt it or to not see it at all. We cannot readily challenge pictures we view with contrary pictures of our own, and even if we took the trouble, one selective truth told by a camera does not necessarily rebut another selective truth told by another camera. More likely, the audience accepts both as alternate views.

All this is grist for making movies by editing sequences as montages. Using my own terminology, let me distinguish an action montage from an association montage. The difference between the two is not always a sharp boundary, even though they are distinct forms.

An action montage simply jumps from one point of view to another as the action unfolds continuously. The action can be as ordinary as a conversation or as frantic as a high speed car chase. In both cases, the action montage leaps from one camera position to the next as the action maintains space-time continuity. This succession of compositional framings can, in the hands of a master, manipulate the mood of the audience as they experience the scene. Viewed with detachment, an action montage is an argument that the diverse shots pieced together chronicle continuity from multiple vantage points. This contention is, of course, a bald faced lie.

An association montage, what Eisenstein created for his movie Battleship Potemkin when he established the method, shows in succession disparate images that the audience melds into an integral scene. There need not be a sense of jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint, but rather, an impression of connection between what the images show or symbolize. The holistic effect of an association montage is psychological, a cognitive and emotional summation. Again, from a detached perspective, an association montage is an argument that a visual experience consists of many facets with many simultaneous levels of meaning. This contention is in general, true, and in particular, highly subjective.

In summary, visual argumentation gains its force from logic defined on its own terms, through associations created in sequence. It can lie, of course, but perhaps its ultimate power is that the audience knowingly submits to the lie, accepting its influence over them.

Natural Scenes and Digital Fakes

The eye that knows the land notices nature's marks in the patterns of topography mantled with vegetation. 

A landscape is a like a rumpled bedspread midway through a fitful night. The knowledgeable observer sees in cliffs and swales, forests and meadows, canyons and bajadas, not a creation frozen in final fulfillment, but rather, a process with much tossing and turning yet in store.

Digital forgeries of natural landscapes luxuriate in cloned and fractal and L-system complexity, bearing only the mark of iterative algorithms. Avatar's Pandora was seeded by zeros and ones in a nursery of RAM. There is no story to be read in the marks of nature where nature had no hand.

When the Wieslander Survey crews clambered over the California landscape in the 1930s, their trained eyes observed not only the vegetation types but also the telltale signs of old burns healing. The Yellowstone fires of 1988 revealed fire patterns and subsequent regrowth as a complex mosaic of natural history. A hiker ascending a Sierra trail scarcely notices lodgepole pines in thickets where John Muir had remarked upon the open glades tended by frequent low intensity fires.

Wieslander Vegetative Type Map for South Lake Tahoe, 1930s

Muir particularly noted the signs of glaciers. In the grooves and polish of granite, in the U-shaped profile of valleys, in the isolated boulders perched upon ridges, he saw a landscape hewn by massive moving ice. Muir was a world class noticer of things in their place and things out of place.

Movie audiences are not so particular. They do not object to pretty waterfalls with no watersheds to feed them (The Hobbit) , or to mountain ranges with no faults or folding (LOTR). Even with photography of real places, few viewers object to a Monument Valley drive-in theater just down the road from a California suburb (Back to the Future III) or to slaves shuffling in chains over the Eastern Sierra on their way to Texas (Django Unchained). They accept shallow verisimilitude and impossible juxtapositions as plausible because they are used to scenery as backdrop, not as story. 

To the lover of living landscapes, scenery is a tangled story inviting unravelment. Was there ever a fiction movie that showed place authentically? Better still, was there ever a movie where Place served as a main character, in the manner of Thomas Hardy's heath in his novel, The Return of the Native?

We like to think in our vanity that a landscape is merely a stage upon which humans perform unbound fancies. But in truth, we are so bound to the land that its fate is our own. What is to become of a society whose entertainments are estranged from its realities?