Sosa on Dream Skepticism

9. Are Dreams Indistinguishable in a Way That Matters? One need not be a Freudian to believe that dreams have causes, in which case most of us might be picked at random, in a futuristic scenario, and made to dream in a connected, realistic way so that our lives become lengthy dreams. Under that Matrix-like supposition, can I be said to know that I now see a hand? I might of course be dreaming in a maximally realistic way that I see a hand. Could I reason my way out by noting that, since I am wondering whether this is just a dream, therefore I cannot be dreaming? Can I conclude that this must be reality, not a dream, and that I really do see a hand? No, that certainly would not satisfy. If I wonder whether I am one of the dreamers in the first place, my doubt must extend to whether I am really wondering, or only dreaming that I am wondering.

10. Let us step back. Suppose I could now about as easily be dead, having barely escaped a potentially fatal accident. Obviously, I cannot distinguish my being alive from being dead by believing myself alive when alive, and dead when dead. Similarly, I cannot distinguish my being conscious from my being unconscious by attributing to myself consciousness when conscious and unconsciousness when unconscious. But that is no obstacle to my knowing myself to be alive and conscious when alive and conscious. So, perhaps the possibility that we dream is like that of being dead, or unconscious? Even if one could never tell that one suffers such a fate, one can still tell that one does not suffer it when one does not. Why not say the same of dreams?

I guess what Sosa has in mind is the notion that the skepticism starts with a thought about what it is like to be asleep. When one is asleep, one does not, as a matter of fact, realize it (most of the time). Even if one "thinks" about it in the context of the dream, there is no way of ensuring that one is, as Sosa puts it "really wondering" and not just dreaming that one is wondering. And that is the source of the skepticism:

1) If I were asleep, I wouldn't be able to tell I was asleep.
Therefore,
2) I don't know now that I am not asleep.
3) If I don't know that I am not sleeping, then I don't know X.
Therefore,
4) I don't know X.

But thinking about that argument in the context of being unconscious and being dead allows us to see that the first inference isn't a valid one because even though _were_ I asleep, I couldn't accurately judge the matter, so long as I am awake, I can judge just fine. That all seems actually like it might be right, and he's got an interesting point about the asymmetry here in that one does feel one can trust one's judgments about whether one is asleep or awake so long as one is awake.

But then he goes on to say that one cannot accurately think "I am asleep" just as one cannot accurately think "I am not thinking." He does this on the grounds he initiates at the end of 9. If one were asleep, one would not "really" be thinking it, but only dreaming that one was thinking it. Similarly, he thinks, as long as one is "really" thinking "I am awake," it must be true; because if it weren't, it would not be the case that one thought that one was awake.

That seems to push back the argument onto the question of how one can tell if one is "really" thinking that one is awake, or just dreaming that one is thinking one is awake -- which looks like the exact same problem Sosa started with in the first place (namely, of how one can tell the difference between being awake and being asleep). It looks like his claim there is that as long as you are awake, you can tell.

It is hard to see how this doesn't collapse into a kind of regress, because the sleeper could dream that she could tell the difference between being asleep and being awake (even if she couldn't really tell), and further the sleeper could sleep-think "I really think I am awake." But I suppose Sosa might be ready to say that it is okay that you cannot know you can tell that you are awake, as long as you can tell. And there is no danger really in believing this falsely, since even if you were "believing" it in a dream, you wouldn't actually be believing it, but just dreaming that you believe it, and you aren't really responsible for the content of your dreams. So you can't go wrong!

Consider the case of the "lucid" dreamer here to test this. The case requires a revision of Sosa's claim that if you are dreaming, you cannot "really" think you are dreaming. If you can actually be awake in a dream, and not just dream that you are awake in a dream, then you would be responsible for your beliefs. You really could have thoughts and beliefs while you were dreaming. But notice that the cases of "lucid" dreaming are co-extensive with the cases in which you can tell you are dreaming. So if such cases, which Sosa leaves out of his account, are possible, they are also irrelevant from the perspective of epistemological skepticism about dreaming without knowing it.

Heraclitus and Inception

Look at this:
24. "A man in the night kindles a light for himself when his sight is extinguished; living he touches the dead when asleep, when awake he touches the sleeper." -Heraclitus

First, clearly Heidegger is correct to worry that these passages are apparently translated by people who don't understand them.

Second, my book indicates that the word translated as "kindle" is actually the same word as the word translated as "touch." So what the man in darkness does to the light is the same thing as what the sleeping man does to the dead, and, in turn, what the waking man does to the sleeper.

So death "illuminates" the world for the sleeper, and sleep "illuminates" the world for the dead.

So say you want to make a movie about a man who is in denial -- a movie about facing facts. Well, the waking man will find the truths he needs to learn through his dreams. These are the "deeper" truths... the deeper the dream, the deeper the truth. In Inception, the truth he needs to face is the truth about himself/the world that the fact of his wife's death is showing him and this is (superficially) a incidental part of the film. But if Heraclitus is correct, it is qua sleeper that the truth he has to confront is a truth to be learned through thinking about death.

This was a really excellent film, from my perspective, in that these somewhat baroque layers actually did pull me away from myself deeply enough to access something that felt, well, real, in a way that films ordinarily do not do for me. I could feel how intensely alive these people were, how viscerally alive, as they went deeper and deeper, and time got more and more condensed for them as they were swallowed up inside an exploding expansion of a single moment of vulgar everyday time. Each moment spent in this very ancient abandoned city felt stolen, as a result, precious and, perhaps above all, fleeting; isn't this a simulation of the "authentic" experience of time? What would happen each moment if we only paid attention? The essential relationship between death and time -- that fact that in a way the film takes advantage of a "vulgar" conception of time to then be able to replicate cinematically the way that moments _are not moments at all_ but that each requires a death, that each is a death (mortal/vanishing into Time's enormous nought), that _you, being in the moment, will die_.

I mean it cheats itself because _she_ is the one who is dead, so the truth DiCaprio is supposed to learn is not the one that is all around him, the one that we are meant to learn about time or about being alive or whatever through experiencing the structure of the film. There is a pretense that the film's content is separate from its form that is not removed even after we are meant to suspect he is dreaming, which doesn't remove what, on my interpretation, would have to be a mere pretense or denial on his part that his problem with death is a problem about someone else's death. Or maybe it _is_ threatened by that final shot. Maybe we could say he is still "dreaming" only _because_ he _hasn't_ yet realized it is _him_ who is dying at every moment. Dreaming because he hasn't realized that the uncanniness of his time experience is not something separate from the "vulgar" time of waking life; thus, dreaming because he does not know that he is awake (e.g. "people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep" -Heraclitus 1), that this "dream" in the film is the reality of each moment of waking life.

Christopher Nolan evidently reads some philosophy (The Prestige is based on a common thought experiment in person ontology, The Joker's little pranks are riffs on Trolley Cases), and so I wouldn't put it past him to know something about all of this Heidegger/Nietzsche/Heraclitus. Even if he doesn't, that isn't the point.

I'm not convinced I even understand what Heraclitus is saying in order to then be projecting his or Heidegger's concepts onto the film. But I have found a starting point for understanding the film in Heraclitus/Heidegger, and I thought that it was worth mentioning.

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." - Thoreau

Lactation Lamentation

"Ah, that I were dark and nocturnal! How I would suck at the breasts of light!"

--Z

What's up with that?

Now that John Boehner will become Speaker of the House, I think it is time for a comparison between him and Nancy Pelosi:
1) In neither case is it at all clear to me why these people make good politicians. Neither of them seem to be in the least sincere in anything that they say. Perhaps this kind of public inability to project sincerity is something that comes with being more involved in arranging things behind the scenes.
2) In both cases, they have borderline freakish appearances.

I have speculated on 1 already. Why is 2 the case? Is it just a coincidence that the most fake looking people end up being Speaker of the House?

The lowest moment of W's presidency

Evidently W was deeply troubled by Kanye West saying he doesn't care about black people. He insists this means he is racist.

MATT LAUER: You remember what he said?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes, I do. He called me a racist.

MATT LAUER: Well, what he said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: That's -- "he's a racist." And I didn't appreciate it then. I don't appreciate it now. It's one thing to say, "I don't appreciate the way he's handled his business." It's another thing to say, "This man's a racist." I resent it, it's not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my Presidency.
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MATT LAUER: This from the book. "Five years later I can barely write those words without feeling disgust." You go on. "I faced a lot of criticism as President. I didn't like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all time low."

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah. I still feel that way as you read those words. I felt 'em when I heard 'em, felt 'em when I wrote 'em and I felt 'em when I'm listening to 'em.

MATT LAUER: You say you told Laura at the time it was the worst moment of your Presidency?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes. My record was strong I felt when it came to race relations and giving people a chance. And-- it was a disgusting moment.

Three points:
1) Is it really okay to be that upset about having been called a racist if you believe that being non-racist is essentially a matter of giving black people a chance? "Try us: you'll like us!" How generous of him.

2) This is the cost of the social phobia about racism. It's plain as day that only a monster would be a racist. From this principle, each of us can easily deduce that we must not be racists. I don't think stigmas like this are the best way to solve these sorts of problems. It's not clear to me whether the stigma against being a racist even has an overall positive effect.

3) Of course, a real leader wouldn't allow himself to fall into feeling guilty in the way W evidently did as a replacement for re-doubling his efforts and so on. To think as W evidently does (and is willing to go around admitting) that what matters most in a situation like Katrina is how a private citizen's remarks might make the president feel is just so childish. "Godfather, godfather, what can I do? -- You can act like a man!" His idea is he wants to go around crying about how somebody called him a name 5 years ago? Maybe it does hurt. Maybe it hurts for a reason. Tell someone who cares (or whose job it is to pretend).


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/02/george-bush-kanye-racist_n_777967.html

TED talks

I have never heard anybody say this, and it seems like a lot of people I respect like these TED talks, but I think that TED talks are basically crap. The whole thing is just designed to make you feel a certain way -- like you are learning, like technology is cool and exciting, that these people and ideas are reshaping the world -- and there are a few TED talks that contain some interesting information, but basically these are just hokey schmaltzy propaganda. The model for this seems to be Steve Jobs' Apple presentations.

What we talk about at parties

The Social Network is a well-crafted film, but are there people who actually _enjoy_ watching it? I found it exhausting. It was missing the soul of what Sorkin used to be interested in, and so it became just another exercise in writing for him.

Sorkin used to relish in his characters; the central device for doing which was self-announcement. It's the key to all his best work.

The climax of his "American President" is Michael Douglas' (re-)discovery of his sense of himself, announced at a press conference beginning with "Being president of this country is entirely about character" and ending with "My name is Andrew Shepard and I am the president." The rest of the speech is basically all forgettable bs.



The climax of the pilot episode of Sorkin's "West Wing" has Martin Sheen being introduced to us as the president for the first time by walking into a room un-announced and declaring "I am the Lord thy God, you shall have no other Gods before me." It happens at 7:40 of this clip which can't be embedded.

In "A Few Good Men" he used the same formula to build the whole film as he did in "American President" (require a character to decide whether announcing himself to the world is worth the costs to his career). In this case, it works even better because he made the character an asshole, so our enjoyment of the announcement was more complex -- revulsion and delight at once. There is something really sublime in Nicholson finally coming out with "You want the truth, you can't handle the truth!"



For Nicholson, he is announcing himself, and it was his desire to do so that Cruise is manipulating in order to win his case, but the part of his announcement that we are interested in is less the truth about himself than it is about us ("Deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall!"). And this is a fact he wants us to be troubled by as he is troubled by it (that we cannot recognize him for who he is). Curiously, we are not troubled by it. The function of his speech is to exorcise us of whatever guilt we may feel for disliking him so that he can be carried off by the authorities. The fact that he accuses us of not recognizing him is perhaps what we find most contemptible about him -- his pointing it out stops us from having to feel the pain of our failure. On the other hand, Shepard draws up all sorts of accusations against his enemies in his speech, none of which is that they haven't understood him. Because he doesn't say so in as many words, when he finally says "I am the president" we _feel_ this as his correcting the record about himself, and so we accept without having to acknowledge that this is somehow a fact that we previously failed to recognize about him. The lesson here is that being recognized and asking to be recognized are at odds with one another.

So how does the Social Network carry the theme of self-announcement forward in Sorkin's work? Mark Zuckerberg actually has no self-understanding whatsoever, and Sorkin wanted to more or less portray him as he is, so we get a character who cannot speak about himself. Since Sorkin only knows one way to make a movie climax -- which is to have someone come to an understanding about himself -- here we have a movie without a climax. As a result, it is just a series of diverting conversations -- people telling the sort of stories you tell at parties to be entertaining, and stories being told that are of the sort you might tell at a party to be entertaining (Did you know before facebook, Zuckerberg crashed his dorm's internet with a website he designed in a single night that got 20,000 hits within 2 hours?)

Sorkin tries to make up for the fact that he has a character who has no self-understanding and develops no insight about himself in two ways. One, he has Rashida Jones make this remark "You are not an asshole, you just want to be." It's the last line of the film. So we are meant to feel we've gained some access to Mark's character: he is avoiding himself. That much is true. But the remark is unintelligible on its face. It feels too generous in the context because, other than perhaps the fact he defended his friend about the chicken story, the story we have just been told about Mark does not have this as its message: the Mark we see in this film is just without any redeeming characteristics. Eisenberg could have communicated some kind of alternative possibilities regardless of the failure of the script to do so if he had used his face, but he plays the whole thing straight autistic jerk. I take it Sorkin meant to make us feel that his destiny was to be with this attractive, smart, honest girlfriend, something the film ends with him half-assedly pursuing, but it all just feels like pop-psychological bullshit. Nerds become nerds because they can't get the girls they want. It might have worked, again, had Sorkin allowed us to see what Zuckerberg's interest in this girl actually was -- to see him delight in her, share himself with her, care about her interests. Instead, we know only the fact that he wanted to be in a relationship with her. But it doesn't strike us as a real possibility for him because we have no evidence that he is so much as capable of having a relationship with another human being.

Aside from the fact that Rashida's little remark appears not to be supported by the events of the film, and appears not to make any sense (Isn't wanting to be an asshole a sign that you are, in fact, an asshole?), it is also a problem that she seems not to be in a position to speak about this man's character. Unless, that is, we are meant to believe or to learn that the truth about us is accessible to anyone at all in our presence, but, again, there is nothing in the film that would set us up to receive that message. Our assumption going in, which Sorkin uses to great effect in previous films, is that the people who can speak about us are special to us and that this fact about them binds them to us. These people are hard to find, and important to hold onto; our knowledge of each other is the mark of our sharing a common destiny. Having this random woman, who Sorkin has said is a character he invented as a representative of the viewer of the film (so, not someone in Mark's life), speak the supposed truth about Mark feels inappropriate.

All of what is unfortunate in the end of the film could have been rectified with a simple change. Sorkin could have made Emily's breakup speech the end of the film instead of its beginning. We _do_ naturally believe she has some authority to speak about Mark's character because she is his girlfriend and because it was she who set him on the life-course that he follows in the film.

The film could have started with him typing his drunk, hateful messages about his ex-girlfriend and so on, and then ended with a flashback to the breakup itself in which she gives her whole analysis of his character. In the immediate context of such a flashback, in the final shot we would read on his face something like an acknowledgment that she was right about him, and this could be taken to serve two functions. It would both establish the otherwise missing reason he wants to be with her (because she has the unique ability to show him the truth about himself) AND give us a sense of what the purpose was of taking us through the story of his life with facebook (to bring him to the point where he could recognize about himself that he did want to be with her and that what she said about him was true). If it came right before that final scene, we could feel the power of his sitting there friending her and re-freshing the page as an authentic ending to the film, the message of which would then be that everything in Mark's life (and therefore everything in the film) was only a distraction. That would have rung true for me, because it is how I emphatically felt while watching it.

Of course, on my way of doing things, we would still have two hours of distracted amusements (and they are amusing), but the distractedness of the film and of Mark's life would be redeemed at least to the extent that it does lead _somewhere_. We would feel at the end that something else actually is possible or even necessary for Mark, which I suppose was Sorkin's intention in the first place, and we would have the opportunity to respond to Mark's recognition of this fact in a way that I, at least, did not the way the film actually does end. In fact it isn't particularly clear to me that Mark does acknowledge the truth in what Rashida says. If it were done my way, we could take the film to be a study of what lessons there are to be learned by refusing to learn one's lesson. The message would be about the futility of trying to lead a meaningless life, of running away from the meaning of one's life. What we have instead is just a movie about a meaningless life, which is to say: a meaningless movie.

PS "Charlie Wilson's War" is somewhere in between Social Network and American President/A Few Good Men in that the climactic speech is not by Wilson, who doesn't understand himself, but by P S Hoffman's character, and the purpose of the speech is to say: all of this has been a distraction, even though we won the war, our doing so will not solve the problem we actually face, which we do not understand yet at the end of the film any better than we did at its beginning. If Sorkin had already developed this technique for dealing with protagonists who don't have character, I don't know why he didn't use it to better effect in Social Network. Maybe I am missing something.

Project Runway Season 8, Episode 6

By adding extra time to each episode, Project Runway has been able to integrate a 3rd dimension to the evaluation process -- the opinions of the other contestants. While this has shown up in previous seasons, it has developed to the point where the judges' authority is being called into question. This is great for me as someone who has been educated about fashion by watching the show, because I am now at a point in my fashion knowledge where I don't need to be convinced that it's not all just arbitrary, so there is no need to protect me from learning about dissent. It is like the adolescence of the show, or, more appropriately, the transition to democracy from tyranny. You still get the sense that things are censored heavily enough, but they are taking real risks with what they have left in at this point. The judges are making the contestants distraught and it is wonderful to see this conflict, and to know exactly what the contestants see that the judges don't.

I agree with the contestants. I don't understand why they chose that jumper from Gretchen, which they said women would want to wear. Women who live on another planet from me. Even more mind boggling was the decision this week.

At the same time, I don't feel totally confident in my "taste" level in part because I like some of the simpler or more obvious designs. Case in point for this episode is Christopher's little green dress, which the judges didn't like the bottom of for a reason they did not specify.

If you want to see the dress they liked, it's here. The one they should have is here.

BTW, all fashionistas should be Hegelian. If there was ever evidence of the movement of a world spirit....

Wave Race

What is great about the old N64 "Wave Race" game that I haven't noticed in other racing games is not just having to slalom through the buoys, but having to do so in the face of the chaotic waves. The problem with racing games is that racetracks are too stable of an environment, which means you don't have to be adaptive once you have figured out how to negotiate the various turns. If you introduce being thrown about by chaotic waves, then no two games are the same, which is part of the appeal of, for instance, chess.

Mario Kart tries to accomplish this with the turtle shells and so on that you can get hit by and by having moving obstacles, and that stuff makes it interesting enough, but the chaotic field of waves is part of the fabric of the game, not just a decoration on top. Racing games are about movement, and the movement in Wave Race is just way more dynamic.



Look at this guy do the stunts!!! (below)



Update: It is also possible, I just learned, to change the wave conditions on any given track!!

Adam and Eve

In the creation story in Genesis, Adam and Eve each receives as a punishment for original sin a kind of labor particular to his or her gender. Adam will be condemned to toil in the fields for food. Eve will experience great pain in childbirth. And so the difficulty of making ends mete, punishment, and pain all fit together within the ancient Hebrew perspective. The ancient Greeks related them also, but perhaps differently or not in as clear a way.

The fact of pain in the world is associated with the necessity of maintaining the species through labor in this story, and the fact that this is difficult to do (which is why it is painful) is explained in terms of the necessity of punishment as a response to sin, which is a result of God's divine rule. This is not a story about how the world began; it is a story about what pain means, just like a story about why there are rainbows or how leopards got their spots.

The work of Eden lies in the fact that it gives the ontology in precisely the opposite direction that it should. Begin with God, then work your way to pain. But what happened historically is that this system developed in the other direction (says Nietzsche). In the beginning, there was pain. We can endure pain only by giving it a meaning. This was provided in terms of punishment, justified by sin and carried out by a divine Punisher. You have to tell the story in reverse order in order to cover up the history of the concepts, which is a standing threat to their apparent explanatory power.

Caper

V. To leap or jump about in a sprightly manner.

h/t: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?src=me&ref=general