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The Object Of Objective Reality: Some Notes On Donald Hoffman

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Objective Reality Donald HoffmanA few months ago, The Atlantic published an interview with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman arguing – albeit in a limited sense – against the notion of objective reality. It’s an interesting read, but only partly due to the science. More importantly, it illustrates an overlooked concept in pretty much all inquiry: that language, if ill-used or poorly defined, will ultimately poison good ideas, and generate new objects of study that simply don’t exist in the real world. In short, if people are confused by language, allowing words to invent or hide problems, scientists, in being a subset of people, are little different here. For this reason, Donald Hoffman falls into the kind of errors that even a layperson is familiar with, since they have in fact made the same mistakes themselves. The laity is inevitably corrected, however, since the real world is pretty unforgiving when compared to academia. Yet seeing just how he errs in such a low-stakes environment might shed some light on future questions: actual questions, I mean, and not the needless complications that scientists and philosophers can be quite good at.

Hoffman’s basic thesis is irrefutable: that organisms have evolved in a way that maximizes fitness, first, at the expense of things that they might have better valued under different circumstances. This, to me, is a re-phrasing of Leda Cosmides’s and John Tooby’s classic observation that ‘we are not fitness maximizers, but adaptation executors’. Yeah, the wording seems at odds with Hoffman’s thesis, but they’re in fact arguing the same thing: that we’ll do whatever it is that we’ll do, even as physical circumstances change, or (as with human beings) culture shifts and replaces older values. So, for example, whereas human beings value truth in the abstract, they are ill-prepared for what objective reality – in the totalizing sense – really is. They see sunlight, react to it emotionally, physiologically, etc., but cannot detect, say, radio waves, or ionizing radiation, because they have played such a minor role in most of human history, and have therefore had no utility, no way of capturing our biological attention. And this is true despite the fact that visible light accounts for a tiny slice of electromagnetic radiation, meaning, we are in just this one regard cut off from a huge chunk of reality. Then, when one tallies up the innumerable other evolutionary biases, it is clear that, for all of our curiosity, we weren’t built to inquire in just this way, and are using some fairly limited and imprecise tools for this purpose all the while organizing the universe along a survivalist bias that we ourselves have imbued into it.

Ok, so far, so good. Yet the issues start to come fast when these observations get mixed up with some wacky conclusions that are not at all a given from the above premises. Let us start, then, with this study on veridical perception, by Hoffman and others, and define the term in question. The word refers … Continue reading →

Critique Of Katsuhiro Otomo’s MEMORIES (1995)

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In reading the reviews of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories (1995), one might be particularly struck by what is not said: that, for all the ways that titles might recapitulate, refract, or even turn away from a film’s content, there is almost no discussion of what the title means to the work at hand. Yes, the word is uttered early on, and has an obvious, ham-fisted, 1:1 relationship to the first of the collection’s three anime shorts, but what about the rest? There is very little to say, really, since the others tackle different tropes, and have only a slipshod connection to one another in the fact that they’re the film versions of three of Otomo’s previously written stories. In brief, whereas the title could be said to cohere too neatly with the work’s first forty minutes, the last eighty, well, cohere not at all, despite containing some of its best material. Is this an issue? Perhaps, but since it’s the least of the film’s faults, I do have an idea of what it all means, and why Otomo made these artistic decisions. Yet instead of positing an unpopular claim, first, and bracing for the fallout, I will present the evidence, bit by bit, precisely as the film presents it, so that the sum is unassailable, and that the work’s poetic status might get the treatment of a more mechanical eye.

Memories begins with Koji Morimoto’s Magnetic Rose, a highly stylized tale of an opera singer, Eva, and her chief fixation: her prior life with Carlo, a famous tenor with whom she went on to win world acclaim. They are happy, briefly, until Eva loses her voice, then Carlo, and ultimately murders her former love in order to trap him in a cycle of unchanging memories. The details are slowly discovered by a crew of scrap collectors, of whom Heintz, a father seemingly on leave from family life, is the mysterious protagonist. They witness an SOS signal in deep space as Heintz and another crew member, Miguel, go on to investigate. Once landed, the two enter a Victorian-style mansion propped up by holograms and ‘genuine fakes’ that, once discerned, crumble and disappear. At first, they do not realize who the owner of this place is, as Eva zips in and out of the landscape, inducing hallucinations that tangle up her own life with theirs. In time, however, another crew member radios from their spaceship, and informs them of what he’s found. The hallucinations grow violent, culminating in the ‘death’ of Heintz as if he were Carlo, Miguel’s imagined fling with Eva, and Heintz’s own probe into his family, leaving the viewer unsure on the question of his daughter’s death. Magnetic Rose ends with Heintz floating in space amidst rose-petals, possibly dying, and possibly even accumulating, in Eva’s manner, his own memories, and waiting for the cycle to be broken by future explorers.

It is, to be sure, an anachronistic setting: the ‘past’ is presented in Victorian, almost steampunk terms, replete … Continue reading →

Film Review Of Woody Allen’s CAFÉ SOCIETY (2016)

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Woody Allen’s Café Society opened in New York City at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas 6, a tiny movie house off of 62nd and Broadway which dedicated just one screen and two show-times to the film on its first night. A week later, it’s getting three screens at once in order to accommodate ticket sales that, while snowballing, yes, seem to still be coming from the pockets of an older crowd. There are married couples, mostly, old friends, and five or six young people in a room at capacity. The laughs, from what I could tell, come strictly from the first two. Oh, the last smiles, sure, if so goaded by the others, but does not quite share the first group’s humor. One knows what to expect. The other, likely having heard of Woody’s brilliance, once, sees a disconnect between this information and what is now on screen. One group’s smiling, holding hands, as if on the same date they were on forty years ago…and perhaps in fact are. The other, however, has no past here; has, to be sure, only Now, and thus cannot personalize Woody; cannot judge this film on the strength of masterpieces gone. One shakes its head – rightly! – at the ignorance of the first. But the other- ah, but the other can’t quite believe how much the past discolors the future, even as they, themselves, will eventually do the same, and denounce those too distant, too late to share their own peculiar bias.

To be fair, Café Society is a solid work, with some good moments and overarching artistic decisions. Yet it suffers, overwhelmingly, from what most of Woody’s films have suffered in the last two decades: massive self-borrowings that, instead of offering some new angle, tone, or shading of an old idea, merely repeat the thing with slight cosmetic differences. There are many – too many – examples of this, but perhaps a mere sampling is enough. The film opens with Woody narrating in trite terms, a la Manhattan, what the city – in this case, Hollywood – is ‘really’ like. But while Manhattan used these clichés subversively, developing Isaac’s character in a way that exposed his superficiality, Café Society’s narration is to be taken at face value, even when (as with the lesser portions of Vicky Cristina Barcelona) it is needlessly recapitulative. Other borrowings include the archetype of Bobby’s (Jesse Eisenberg) thug brother, Ben (Corey Stoll), a dilution of Crimes And Misdemeanors and the lighter portions of Bullets Over Broadway. Another is with one of the film’s primary arcs, wherein Vonnie (Kristen Stewart) transforms into a person she’s always hated, a twist that’s right out of Celebrity, despite lacking Celebrity’s deeper comments re: happiness and wisdom, and how different the two really are. Yes, viewers might fill in the blanks, as they’re used to these concepts, but isn’t that a flaw: that an artist’s moves, techniques, and the like are so predictable, that he doesn’t … Continue reading →

The Freddie Gray Verdict: A Few Words Out Of Season

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A week ago, the first ‘true’ Freddie Gray verdict came back as expected: Not Guilty. The result? Three officers are now free. Three are still left, perhaps a touch emboldened. On some level, of course, it does not matter, since the acquittal of one – as history shows – is the acquittal of all. Yet the reverse is not true, for the guilt of someone in power is never (so it’s said) to be extrapolated to power itself: what it does, what it cannot do, and where the rest of the world must go when the thing’s exercised. There are, as far as I can tell, two reasonable narratives here, but in Freddie Gray’s case – as in all similar narratives – only one has really been discussed. It is truthful, yes, and quite damning of the forces involved, but also somehow less adamant. It is less whole. It is, in a word, less dangerous. And it goes thus:

A black Baltimorean with a string of drug offenses sees 2 cops riding their bikes, makes eye contact, and flees. Perhaps he was expecting this. Perhaps he has something illicit on him. Or maybe he’d already done it so much and without penalty that it is merely the ‘thing’ to do. At any rate, he is chased, arrested, and according to the police report, is “taken into custody without incident.” It is impossible to say why he ran, exactly, since only a pocketknife is found on him: a source of controversy given that Maryland law states Freddie Gray’s spring-assisted knife was legal, whereas Baltimore law says that it was not. Once inside the van, the trip to the police station involves 4 stops, including one which brings another suspect on board, while Gray – against official policy – is never buckled in. An hour later, he is in a coma with a severed spine and fractured vertebrae, and dies the following week.

Naturally, there are problems with the official narrative. First, it is odd for a seasoned drug dealer to run without provocation, especially at a time when he was simply visiting a friend rather than making a ‘business trip’. More likely there was some sort of altercation, or an unofficial policy of harassment targeting Gray and others. Yes, it’s possible he simply feared being searched, due to the knife, but that would only be to a non-consensual search which, given the circumstances, would have been illegal in the first place, a fact the cops would likely ignore, anyway, leading to a chain of events with a similar outcome. And while flight might have been a bad move on Gray’s part, the courts have always been ambiguous on whether the act of mere running from an officer is reasonable suspicion, while Baltimore’s police commissioner claims there is no explicit law against such to begin with. Moreover, the assertion that Gray was “taken into custody without incident” is a lie, and an important one, since video footage shows Gray … Continue reading →

Pundits On Drugs

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Politics is an idiot’s game. In fact, it’s been an idiot’s game ever since the first 2 ‘geniuses’ got together in an attempt to solve a very simple issue: how, at a time when things were a bit more, well, visceral, a couple of poltroons might scheme to overthrow their supposed betters. This is, of course, a good thing, for when aristocrats conk, people will be forced to cooperate. They’ll get smarter and better organized, until a new dilemma emerges. People, after all, still need to be led. People, who’ve improved, as a whole, are still and always will be a mob, ruled by intangibles few can ever hope to master. And people, whether they’ve got their heads in the clouds or their asses in the mud, are still aristocrats at heart, and forever part of this transaction.

So what now? Enter theatrics. Sure, ‘force’ may now be out of the question, but one of the reasons why force has worked so well is that it’s just so dazzling, and not entirely predictable. There’s a mystery both to retaliation as well as its aftermath that grips society and keeps it in check. In a way, then, force is also the politics of the amphitheater, and few things are as theatrical as moral indignation, whether it’s directed at music, unpopular opinions, or the final bogeyman: drugs. The last one is especially touchy, since control (of oneself, of others) is such a deep part of the human condition, to our survival instinct, and, in people’s seemingly never-ending well of insecurity, it is never quite enough to disapprove of something. This disapproval must be elevated to policy, and the policy, in turn, must transform back into a well-cherished value, as to not ‘merely’ be law. This is why drug policy is so backwards the world over, and why, when the police is under attack, drug regulation crumbling, and the old, misplaced, child-like, rococo ‘need’ to keep everything — including people’s bodies  — under one’s own thumb is no longer so obvious, the pundits try to dazzle us, instead.

Drugs, to me, are a very clear-cut thing. And, more than a thing, they are a decision — a mode of being, really — for the thinking behind an indulgence is far more important than the decision itself. Drug addicts are sick, and I don’t mean this in the silly, PC sense of ‘diseased,’ but that they have an existential crisis that’s overtaken them, and an immaturity that feeds upon every other aspect of their lives. For every drug addict, however, there’s a dozen (if not more) drug users, because, well, people want to feel nice, and a few bucks is easier to come by, now, than in any other point in human history. Yes, the consequences of such can be destructive, but 1) the same can be said of a million other things that good sense tells us not to regulate, many of them far worse than America’s comparatively non-existent … Continue reading →