Zooming In on Reality
Standards for audio and video technology, the stuff behind the scenes, deep inside the computer, are based on playback equipment capability, not recording equipment.
This odd, random observation joined another seemingly random observation in my brain today, as I was listening to myself sing a Bob Dylan song … on video!
In the song “Tangled Up in Blue,“ the lyrics say “All the people we used to know; they’re an illusion to me now!” The word “illusion” collided into my mind’s assembly of what would become this article.
The second random observation is life is nothing more than an illusion!
It’s as true as anything!
In the Roxette song “Never is a Long Time,” we hear the lyric “Snow white angels run and hide, in the blackness of the night!” Along with the score, it’s downright chilling. Songwriters, tonight, have commandeered my mind!
The Song of Time
Birth and death are not illusions; the details, though, have never been revealed to us. That’s part of the grand scheme of things. How is it that an individual can exist, be awake, have thoughts and be convinced he’s self aware, while all the time the same people have invented ways to create realities that can be broken apart? If we look at audio/video technology, we’ll be able to see there is no video of me playing a Roxette song. There is no such thing!
All there is is information, bits and bytes written on a disc, in a certain order, a language. This language is read, and the computer responds by doing impressive things.
On the computer screen are millions of dots. Millions of them! Each one blinks 30-times every second. That’s called a “refresh rate,” or “frame rate,” and it’s all that’s needed to create the illusion.
Pretend you’re one of those dots. Your job is to light up, and you’ll receive instructions as to what color you should be. Thirty times a second you switch to a different color. Sometimes it’s the same color many times in a row, but you have to watch, because the instructions are created on-the-fly, and no-one knows the future colors.
So you receive the instructions and bang! You’re at it – changing colors until you’re powered down. It’s a fulfilling job, when you consider you’re part of a much bigger picture!
So these millions and millions of dots change color. So what?
There is No Spoon
Remember, there is no video of me playing a Roxette song. There are only dots changing colors, millions of them, at thirty blinks a second. But still, I can show you a picture of me playing a Roxette song; it’s very neat, a moving picture with sound! Due to the world’s obsession with this kind of alternate reality, technological leaps forward have come like a flood these past 20-years, and now they’re working on holograms! The future of these tools is real and will be determined by how much we want to create!
We’re creating reality. We can learn from this experience in a big way!
The experience of reality is based on what? … this is key … pick one:
The viewer’s abilities, or the ability of the universe to be what we see?
Think of it this way: pretend you’re not a person, but a computer, a computer that receives information, reads it and shows a result.
You go to the beach. It’s lovely.
We can’t make the ocean, change the weather, effect the colors or the scene; we can only view it. Our experience is based solely on the equipment we have to read the scene; our eyes, and our brain. All eyes and brains work the same way in this environment (more or less).
Heaven Dot Com
The vision you see is what your brain tells you; nothing more. Essentially we are all prisoners in a tech dream created by God. We can’t change the way the process works day to day. Blue is blue. Motion moves. It looks like … well, sometimes it looks like me singing a Roxette song and playing a guitar!
Comparing techs, Silicon Valley tech versus God’s tech, reveals this:
A video camera captures a scene, shown to us by nature. It holds the information, which can later be read. The computer receives this information, which is nothing but zeros and ones, representing two digits, and after reading zillions of these digits, compiles its result, an interpretation of the bits as a beautiful moving image.
When a company manufactures a video camera, they have to follow protocols so the information is in the correct format for the computer to read. That’s important! The computer reading the information is the basis of everything.
If the camera records at a frame rate computers don’t read, there is no result. The camera can’t write ANY code it wants; it has to write EXACTLY the code the computer is expecting. There is zero variance in the method of writing this information, because the thing that determines the process is the reading device, (the computer).
Computers will read 30 frames per second, and a few other rates, but that’s it! If the computer can’t read it, we see nothing, even though next year they may invent a computer that will see something!
In parallel:
Nature captures a scene, but we have no camera. We use our eyes. The scene is complete; all the information is there. The only differences are, our eyes give us more dynamic and deeper information than a camera can carry, but since there’s no camera we can only enjoy seeing the information this way once.
All the information has been laid out in front of us in an exact way that allows our brains, our human computing machines, to read the information. It comes in through our eyes and we process it, just like a computer, but super fast, instantaneously, and with more depth.
The point being, the thing that determines what we see is not the scene; the scene only exists if we sense it. That’s our reality. It just so happens the information is “written” by nature in a format we can see.
Or can we?
What if purple was really orange?
It’s possible! Who says green is anything at all? The thing that determines that green is green is our collective conscience, not anything else. We all agree. We show children the color and tell them it’s green. We could change the name, which is a way of saying the name is totally made up. What we see is something we need to describe, but our brain-computers don’t care; they’ll always show us the same thing; if the photons are lined up in a certain way, our cameras and our brains see what we call green; end of story!
Line Up Those Photons!
I can write a song that never existed before; it can hook and get into your memory, and even change your life. It happens every day! The world is an amalgamation of human perception and collective consciousness. There is little more to it. It doesn’t matter to nature what color grass is, or what we call it; it’s just “that” color. As long as the process is not broken, we all, collectively, see the same thing, and as a result we take comfort in “knowing” we understand our surroundings. We build houses to protect us from anticipated weather and feel safe, while no instructions were given beyond the interpretation of what we see around us over time.
The determiner of reality is our eyes, not nature. It’s a bit of a let down. Reality is nothing at all. It doesn’t exist in any way beyond our ability to read it, which we are very good at.
Is this good news? What does it mean?
My mind is always satisfied when I break apart reality. It never really breaks, but we can disassemble things philosophically and find solace!
Before we were born, we had no brain. Still, we may have existed.
The Floating Philosopher
Understanding that Creation is existentially beyond our ability to understand, that the substance of nature is marvelously mysterious, we may arrive at a place where we float above it all, trying to observe objectively. It’s impossible to deny we don’t create nature or the Universe; we observe it and sense it. It would be impossible to deny a claim the human spirit exists in the same way as everything else in nature; beyond human ability to intermingle or meddle. The color green we call “green.” We made up the names. The color, though, exists whether we name it or not.
It would be pretentious for us to think otherwise!
Whether we see it or not.
Whether we know it exists or not.
There are colors other animals can see, which we can not. Even electronic equipment can see colors and waves in the air, like radio waves, which we’d never know about if a scientist didn’t tell us.
Whether we know it exists or not.
It would be impossible to deny a claim the human spirit exists on a “natural” level, with all the mysteriousness that comes along with that. It would be impossible to deny that we existed before we were born.
And it’s impossible to deny that we may simply live on, essentially for a period of time we call “forever,” in a new, different, reality, once we depart from the life we’re living in this illusion.
Welcome to the Matrix!
Have a wonderful day! Forever!
###
Mark Urso
mark@markursoblog.wpcomstaging.com
@A_Candle_Lit
One Reply to “”