I met a man in the pub over the summer. He told me the story of a Parisian man, a pimp, a dangerous character, who wouldn’t think twice about cutting you if you crossed him. He had many lives and personas which fit whatever dodgy deal he was making with a numerous variety of criminals. His lifestyle was relentless and he constanly had to avoid the authorities. One day it all caught up with him and he was being chased by the police through Montmatre and into a freakshow. He attempted to hide in the hall of mirrors where, in his state of flight, the police about to sniff him out, he was suddenly confronted with so many images of himself. He was completely overwhelmed to point that he colapsed and died befor the police got to him.
The man in the pub who told me this was apparently repeting a french author’s story and attempting to explain an earlier phrase he had used to describe human existence as “a system of mirrors”. I did not find the story explanatory in any way. But after he explained in a non metaphorical way I quite enjoyed his theory.
What I would find it easiest to describe as ’scientific reality’ (meaning the physical universe and all the laws that define it) is imposible to comprehend in a any kind of fully realised way, given a humans limited and very specific set of senses (modes of experiencing), plus the relative minuteness of our capacity to process such information, plus inadequate, construced methods of comprehension and comunication (such as language). Therefore all individual human experience of this reality is filtered and reduced even before it comes into contact with our constructed methods of understanding. Once the raw sensory information encounters this system of comprehension, from then on it is bounced off mirror after mirror of perception (it will most likely be asigned an instinctual reaction, an emotion, a name and will be merged with a barrage of similar memories), until it can only be understood as an image of original source. If that idea or perception were then to be communicated from the first human to the next,the system of mirrors only becomes more convoluted. And so on, into the realm of societies, etcetera.
Later on, thinking about this theory in cojunction with art, I
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31 May, 2009 at 11:53 am
That was in interesting story, funny even – im not sure why though. but your right, it can raise some interesting questions, especially concerning the nature of experience and sense-data.
In a way the ’scientific reality’ that you metion is not dis-similar to Representative realism, in which we sense data directly (through our senses) and the world indirectly. So that there is always a barrier between what we expereince and what is considered real – and we never directly experience anything material as our senses are created through the nerves and other sensory reactions that our brain then translates.
also, Representative Realism claims that we perceive our perceptual intermediaries-we can attend to them-just as we observe our image in a mirror.
However, as we can scientifically verify, this is clearly not true of the physiological components of the perceptual process. This also brings up the problem of dualism and its relation to representative realism, concerning the disparate attachment of the metaphysical and the physical.
then we end up in idealism – and start questioning the existence of the physical objects and the external world.
We are on a slippery slope to solipsism my friend. lol
sorry, I’m rambling arent I? have I strayed too far from the point? I think this post just got me thinking and I just needed to ramble about it even if I’m not making a great deal of sense. Interesting none the less