How Perception Works
A guide for the perplexed out of the dreams of Bell Laboratories
I received today an update about some gadget I helped crowd-fund over a year ago. Shipment on the product is delayed to fix some design flaws. I can imagine people being upset about the delay. I’d have been too, once upon a time.
The problem is, of course, that the delay is unquestionably good. Anything new and complex will have design flaws and need revision. The work and time to get those revisions out are essential. Just like programming—there is no reason to be upset your program doesn't compile upon first completion except impatience and unfamiliarity with the process. It will have many bugs.
Think about people upset when their flight gets cancelled due to mechanical issues. Why are you upset that your flight was cancelled? The technician who vetoed your take-off, by refusing to sign-off on the flight, may have just saved your life. You should be happy! And the desire for there to never be any mechanical issues, ever, is as unrealistic as expecting a program to compile first time, or for a brand new product to have no design flaws upon the first manufacture of its test version.
Wyndham Lewis complained somewhere about how his statements of fact were often received. He likened himself to an unwanted guest at a dinner party, rudely breaking news to the attendees that their dinner was poisoned and that they'd all need to get intimate with a stomach pump in short order. McLuhan modified the observation slightly, claiming that he felt like somebody knocking on doors to inform people that their house was on fire. Most who answered the door accused of being the arsonist.
In Dreams
The dreams of the somnambulist herd are socially constructed. You were tricked by advertisers to think that your computer was secure. That your flight will take off. That this new product will just work and be delivered on time. You were tricked by activists that your charitable donation will go toward improving the world, that the legislation being petitioned for was for a good cause. You were tricked by ideologues to believe that the vision of the future they project in their art is utopia.
Most of that is bullshit. All marketing and advertisement and activism and docudrama and every other persuasive arts are—hence the importance of studying rhetoric: self defense.
I find that the people best prepared to sniff out such bullshit are the people who get their hands dirty in the world of objects, and how objects actually work. Contractors lugging construction materials around work sites. Cooks in busy restaurants paranoid about food inspectors. Truckers and ship-workers hauling all the worlds objects across continents in real time. Programmers trying to wrestle billions of microscopic capacitors into synchronous orchestration through imposition of abstracted logic. Farmers turning land, seeds, and chemicals into harvested food. Mechanics and electricians and engineers constraining and toying with forces far beyond those of the human body; forces capable of killing anybody who fails to respect them. These are who tend to be, correct or not, more skeptical of wholly-rhetorical appeals for their sympathy.
John Vervaeke, who I often write about, posted a good summary of his model of "relevance realization” today in a twitter thread.
If I ask you to logically analyze everything in your room—you’re doomed. You can only be logical after you've done a lot of relevance realization (the cognitive process by which you discern and prioritize what is most significant or meaningful in a given context) So being rational doesn’t mean simply being intelligent or logical—it means the capacity to reflectively become aware of self deception and systemically intervene it. And you have to do it for each kind of knowing:
• procedural
• propositional
• perspectival
• participatory
I greatly appreciate his presentation of the cognitive science of cybernetic autopoesis which his relevance realization concept models. As I put it on during my psychosis, however, I found some adjustments to its formulation essential.
Ultimately—and long-time readers will be tired of hearing me say this, but say it I should—our autopoesis (or self-creation) should be grounded within a specific definition of embodiment which is reflected in the complimentary terms of physical environment. The parts and wholes which make-up the material world are the primary determinant of one's embodied being.
Technology vs. Science
A few days ago, Jonathan Pageau posted an argument against taking scientific language out of its proper domain.
Scientific is not literal in the way that people think. Scientific language is a very specific type of language that allows people to capture reproducible patterns of phenomena. To notice, to measure, and to communicate patterns of phenomena that can be measured… if I understand the measure, I can reapply the measure in a way to show that it reproduces.
People mistake scientific language which has a very specific purpose, with what they say is literal, which is that which is most fundamentally true at the lower level. But that which is most fundamentally true at the lower level is more like a phenomenal experience. It's more like the experience of the sun on your face, like the wind in your hair, like that is more grounded than scientific language. Scientific language is way abstracted.
It’s a good argument as far as it goes, but carries a big blind spot. I find it easy to accept his grounding of truth at the phenomenal level. Yet, his differentiation of scientific language from literal language ignores the vast field of technical language.
Every adult understands today, even if in just some primitive form, how movies are made. A century of the art has made metaphors like “cutting room floor” or “off-camera” regular features of our day-to-day speech. And so, when I watch a movie, the phenomenal experience of the medium is higher-level. And, in order to get down to the literal definition of what I’m looking at, I need to get into a technical language. There isn’t a way to apply the scientific method here—the furthest I could go is discover how using the actions of the rewind and play and pause buttons are reproducible! The mechanisms behind technological gadgets are not analogous to the subjects of natural sciences.
In fact, as I argued in my piece Cheating an Peekaboo Against a Bad Faith Adversary, the psychology of user interface design innovated at IBM which lead to “easy to use” computing where features were “discoverable” by “play” and “experiment” instead of technical language is hijacking the development object-permanence in children, and dissociating them from their bodies! We can not learn about our technical objects by applying scientific methods of discovery—we can only fool ourselves more by ignoring study of technical language. Of subordinating ourselves to traditions of their artisanship!
A Napkin Sketch
The capacity for better sense-making which comes from dedicated study of all our technology is appreciation for the constraints of the real world, compared to the promises of bullshit we get every day from ideologues and advertisers.
Consider art. To fairly analyze a piece, you have to understand the constrains of the medium. Watching Heavy Metal or Akira or even the space-fights in the original Legend of the Galactic Heroes OVA, I am absolutely blown away in a way that newer CG-based animations can never manage to do. This is largely owing some implicit awareness of how hand-animation works, and the scope of effort that went into individual shots and scenes. I’m impressed by magnitudes of effort.
Watching classic Looney Tunes vignettes from the studio-era, I am blown away by because of an embodied awareness of how physics works and how empathy and emotion is captured, exaggerated, and conveyed. I’m impressed by the raw talent for capturing life and imagination itself.
The ability of cartoon animators to labour in creating drawings which can evoke a perception of mechanical physics and human expression is awe-inspiring. The parts involved are frames and layers and timing and static artwork and careful allocation of time and effort. The limits of each of these things compose the constraints which ultimately fashion the whole.
The lifting of those constraints, in turn, changes the quality of my appreciation.
On Construction and Deconstruction
The materials out of which buildings or bridges are erected constitute the constraints which engineers work within—the aesthetic qualities of these materials govern how architects and artists must also operate in their aesthetic and functional roles. Siegfried Giedion's two massive books, which I spent months studying in the creation of the following video (and text version), are make up a living history of the human relation to our mechanical world.
All of this goes back to the gestalt psychology concept of parts and wholes. James Lindsey gives an excellent example today of the bad gestalt theory which is implicit in critical theory.
The way every Critical Theory works is always the same. It's ultimately a deconstructive process that takes belief in that something apart by selectively presenting the "problematic" elements and making wild insinuations and accusations (like Satan) about its impacts.
The mechanic deconstructs an engine into is constitutive “elements.” Picture it. Manifolds and cylinder heads and pistons and cams and valves, held with nuts and bolts. This is how a sane mind “deconstructs” anything into its “elements.”
The pivot of linguistics into structuralism in the '50s, and of anthropology into the symbolism of Clifford Geertz, brought the humanities into the semiotic field of cybernetic information processing. It gradually turned our perception of the world into a computer-like algebraic composition and decomposition. It's disembodied. It's computer-like. It introduces the strange topological forms of computers into our perception of the world, facilitating theories about everything-as-simulation and simulacrum in endless commodity space.
The deconstruction a theorist does on a “text” is directly analogous to the expansion of a polynomial into its factors—demonstrably so, in fact. The legacy of the cybernetic age is the confusion of electronic symbolic processors and animal brains in precisely this way. And so "deconstruction," or the perceptual work of dividing dynamic wholes into their constitutive parts, has become a virtual matter of pseudo-mathematical projection of non-physical elements. And this is totally arbitrary, because stories and life narratives and paintings are not algebraic expressions.
McLuhan offers a far-better generalization of how the perceptual faculties divide the non-material world into gestalts of parts and wholes by considering the respective grounds or "contexts" (a word I like to avoid—note the implicit reference to texts which overshadows the deeper meaning of woven fabrics implicit in, say, Henry James' short story Figure in the Carpet) of the elements of metaphor. I've written extensively on this already in Four Part Resonance. I consider it essential reading, but for now here are a few examples from that piece of McLuhan's expanded metaphors—quoted verbatim from Understanding Media—compared to the obscure two-part metaphors used by typical writers.
McLuhan: “To literary people, the practical joke with its total physical involvement is as distasteful as the pun that derails us from the smooth and uniform progress that is typographic order.”
Regular author: “Practical jokes are no pun.”
McLuhan: “For example, what is known as “job enlargement” today in business and in management consists in allowing the employee more freedom to discover and define his function. Likewise, in reading a detective story the reader participates as co-author simply because so much has been left out of the narrative.”
Typical writer: “The modern employee is co-author of his own job.”
McLuhan: “Just as the barbarians got to the top of the Roman social ladder, the Romans themselves were disposed to assume the dress and manners of the tribesmen out of the same frivolous and snobbish spirit that attached the French court of Louis XVI to the world of shepherds and shepherdesses.”
Typical writer: “The pretension of the Roman elite was absolutely French.”
This is why many critics panned Understanding Media as unreadable. They were unable to detect the nature of language which McLuhan, learning from James Joyce, attempted to elucidate in every paragraph. The language of parts and wholes, of figures to ground. He renders explicit what our natural language leaves to be implied and immersive and “symbolic.”
He was, in other words, teaching us how to properly “deconstruct” language, as per the style of literary criticism he had studied at Cambridge—the sort which was forced out by the invasion of structuralists, post-structuralists, post-modernists, semioticians and linguists and cognitive scientists, etc.
Your Habitat and your Habits
When you apply French deconstruction, you are reducing culture into a semiotic soup of “information.” That is what I’ve been calling cyberspace, and it doesn’t exist. It was created at Bell Laboratories in order to design better telephones, but somehow, like OG phone phreaks, it became our entire world.
Jordan Peterson gave us an essential lesson in his imperitive maxim to “clean your room!”
I’ve been reading a lot about Abraham Maslow lately, and while I intend to continue what I’ve begun to write about his ideas of self-actualization here, I’d like to focus for a second on the bottom of his famed hiearchy of needs. That is, room and shelter.
After my psychotic break, I spent a great deal of time rehabilitating myself to the places and routines of regular life. I got the same job I used to have in high-school and learned to do it all over again—this time while fighting off the spectres of a broken sensory gate.
I also began learning better how to cook for myself at home. I began binge watching and gradually acquiring the kitchen techniques of two YouTube chefs—Mandy of Souped Up Recipes and Chef Jean Pierre—and have entirely transformed my eating and house-keeping habits as a result.
What makes these two chefs notable, for me, is the long-form presentation of the entire process of cooking. The relation of them to their environment, to all their tools. They reveal the complete ground of process of making the food—they go back and forth, over and over, from part to whole.
My current college course on addictions counselling frequently focuses on the need to secure substance abusers secure basic needs like housing, food, and regular income. At the same time, the work of overcoming a habit or addiction entails, in my experience, falling in love with a persuit which is more captivating than the chase after the substance.
I did not sufficiently learn, growing up, how to regularly buy groceries and cook them multiple times a day in a sustainable way. I had been “securing” myself food for years prior by ordering take-out and buying pre-packaged garbage. A tweet today by TracingWoodgrains really sealed the message for me:
One line that stuck with me from my military enlistment, from an older contractor who was frustrated with my cohort’s dismissal of a tedious part of the job: “It’s like they think they’re above it. But how can you be above something you suck at?”
Indeed. How can anyone who can’t autonomously master the most humble affairs in life begin aspiring to anything higher without nagging insecurities about lifting off the ground?
I remember advise I was given as a child about the dangers of awakening sleep-walkers. When I recalled it years later, I interpreted it as an esoteric message against disillusioning people—like some sort of maxim about Plato’s Cave.
The gentlest way to reequilibrate someone closer to reality, I think, is through teaching them mastery of their modern technology—be that stove and cast-iron frying pand and refridgerator and tupperware or the full-stack computing of Free Software away from the tyranny of tech companies.
What is relevant to our relevence realization process is our material world, textually rewoven with new poetic metaphor.