Assumptions, and our maps of the world.

Yesterday my daughter and I were leaving the house, and I was locking up the front door. It was a very bright, hazy day – the kind of day where your eyes are hurting from the light coming at you in all directions at once. I looked at our glass door and saw the neighborhood in reflection – it was quite pleasant – it looked polarized, and not glaring at all. I thought, what if I saw everything like this? I’m sure I would quickly get used to it and think I was seeing reality truly. I would be deluded, in that case. But what about the way I see the world right now? Maybe I’m quite mistaken about the way I see the world, (My Republican friends would readily agree) in proportion to the confidence I impute to my world view.

I read an article from Bruce Sterling’s blog (blog.wired.com/sterling) that mentioned a Kinect hack that created a 3d model of a room from a single Kinect. The program had to make a lot of assumptions about the volume and shape of objects based on a 2d picture, and depth data, in order to make the model. No assumptions, no 3d  model of the world, no matter how simple or small the model, or the space being evaluated.

I remember a video of people talking to U.G. Krishnamurti (a man who thinks that the life of the mind is a colossal waste of time, among other things), and someone mentioned looking at objects and inferring, e.g., the back side of a tree, based on looking at the front side of it. Krishnamurti completely rejected the entire notion. As far as he was concerned, if he wasn’t looking at it, the back side of the tree didn’t exist, because he had nothing but contempt for the human mind and the uses we put it to.

I was at a performance of Lisa Markley’s music yesterday at the Denton Square, and it was very good. Jeffrey Barnes and Paul Slavens were sidemen on the gig, and the whole thing was understated and elegant, and smooth, and satisfying. But my ego was right there, evaluating the sound, putting myself in their place, telling myself that I could do as well, and so forth. But I was also aware of how I was distancing myself from the whole experience by doing this, and I was eventually able to relax and get closer to the event as it existed (not 100%! Never, not with this oversized ego.)

So, what’s the moral of today’s blog? Well, in my self-important little world, it’s that you begin to falsify reality the moment you start trying to make sense of it.