carl sagan, in his old, dusty, dated and amazing The Dragons of Eden, describes how early-day research into human cognition first came to the conclusion that visual and auditory stimulus received by the right eye/ear is processed mostly on the left hemisphere of the brain and vice-versa. the description, when first heard, can cause a bit of a shock - a little jolt of 'why me, i wouldn't have thought as much!`
now a good question to be asked here could be: why not?? why would you have not thought as much?
the same thing will happen if you try to watch a video turn off the images and keep just the sound. you will hear a dialogue and build up a picture in your mind of where the IT is taking place, what the people are wearing and whatnot. if you turn the images back on you will probably be a bit surprised - things don't look like you imagined. but what gave you the right to imagine them a certain way in the first place? were you even aware of the things you slipped into your mental picture?
i think there might be more metaphysical subtleties operating here than might be first assumed. it goes beyond the seinfeld brain x penis chess scenario.
if, jaded overinformed scientific post-modernist that you are, this doesn't at all come as a surprise to you, let's settle for this: isn't it easy to imagine a pre-scientific witch-doctor vehemently contesting this idea when first presented to it?
a first approach might try to settle the subject by stating that there are separated, non-integrated brain functions or areas (or some other poorly defined category) for the feeling of ''this is real!!'' and for the coming up with sentences such as '''this is real'''; in a broad sense different cognitive operational goings-on behind our sense of reality and our our image of reality. sagan himself talks about different processes being responsible for, broadly, intuition and abstract reasoning. well doesn't this in turn come as a bit of a shock?
but, crucially, and a bit circularly: why would i have assumed otherwise? or better yet: did i actually assume the opposite? i doesn't feel like it - it just feels like something not reflected upon. but if it wasn't reflected upon, if it wasn't construed as a concept, how come there can be any shock at all at this non-assumption being wrong? isn't there some strange discontinuity at work here, a discontinuity between assuming things for no reason and then being surprised when the assumptions turn out wrong?
an immediate amateur-lacanian flavour can be given to to all this: didn't an elective professor of psychoanalysis and literature once told me that what we think as reality belongs more to the lacanian imaginary than what lacan actually calls the Real?
what, to get a little less sidetracked, then, is an assumption? can it be defined from sagan's vaguely cognitivist point of view?
Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind posits that the comic effect is an evolutionary reward system responsible for the survival of those brains better able to find fault on their mental models - more mirth-pleasure means more auditing of mental models for inconsistencies.
interestingly, according to this cognitive take on the brain, there is only a comic effect when a joke undermines or undoes an UNNOTICED assumption made in the course of building the mental model. it's the little things that enter the picture without being seen that posed a danger to survival, and humour brings them out to the fore.
to go back to 90s sitcom, for example: in seinfeld's 'the parking space': george says that because elaine moved the car rearview mirror he got discombobulated, to which she replies - like you've ever been combobulated. assumption breaks, mild hilarity ensues.
this seems distantly related to the odd fact that special effects on movies, much as computer generated environments in games, tend to look absolutely gorgeous when you first see them but starkly dated as soon as an improved version comes out. through some sort of reverse uncanny valley (an uncanny peak!?), when first presented to good special effects the brain goes Whoa, This Is The It. This Looks So Real. I Doubt Reality Itself Even Looks This Real. a year later you feel like you were just fooled by it. it feels like we can only detect visual flaws after having built up some intimacy with a better simulation. all the flaws you couldn't notice before suddenly scream up their presence. is it the case that those unnoticed absences are allowed to remain quiet and harmless in the shady assumption-zone of the brain until challenged?
(funnily enough, reality itself doesn't do as well, as a basis of comparison, as more and better special effects.)
this could also be what makes an accent an accent, and so hard to pin down: not differences in the way people perceive the sounds, but the tiny divergences between the way they DON'T perceive them. an accent sounds out because it hurts the way sounds are supposed to be articulated. speech works best when it's fully transparent, automated, made invisible. is this invisibility the same as that of our mental models; the actual presence of a million things not considered?
on quite the other direction, it could also explain a bit about the opacity of language, about the fact that things are never really fully communicated. things are of course not just things, or words just words; they are the little visible bits of vast hidden relations that the speakers may not, likely won't, share.
and while we're at it, let's just posit that this assumption-level is what's behind the weirdness of experiencing massive differences in cuisine. if you are a wobbly western and go to a real chinese-food restaurant in china you will be shocked in more ways than there are ways to describe being shocked. arab food, as a counterpoint, tastes definitely different - but different in ways that don't challenge the assumptions on top of which we build the very notion of what food is. its tasting different actually bears testimony to the fact that arab food is similar enough to western that your taste buds/brain patterns are able to build comparisons and identify discrepancies. actual chinese food, on the other hand, will just leave you dumbfounded and vaguely concerned about your bowels, your identity and your sanity.
analogously, i think the assumptions might be the things that strike us the hardest when we look at, say, the crazy hairdo's on an 80's movie. cultural differences being large enough - and let's face it, the 80's are like another planet - it's not the superficial differences that make us giggle, it's something more fundamental, something that goes beyond what we can see and down to the level of actual shock.
in his post on confucius and theme parks, suman gupta raises a point that that might be put as: the functional purpose of a theme park is to flood you with so much saturated meaning that the things you see entrench themselves in your mind as if they were simply always there, present and true. a theme park 'confirms the presumed significance of its theme'. it does, in this sense, the opposite of a history major (or good comedy).
through this overflow of signs, the things being presented become assumed as true, become entrenched in the presumed world as if they were quite simply a given part of reality. they reach down to that level of silent, present-through-its-absence conceptual framework. there might be reason to believe that this powerful, all-informing vacant space beneath supporting the conceptual networks that we can actually see is the seat of ideology
if that's the case, it would be yet a bit more support for the often-held position that realism might not have as much to contribute to an understanding of the universe as poetry, or formal stylish adventures, or surrealism itself. what part of the brain works the mythopoetical?
and, finally, it feels as if concepts always have at least these two parts: the unseen assumption, and the visible part of what is actually thought. what is thought, the appearance of the concept, is just this last-minute shell that closes down the tension between a silent assumption and a certain environmental input. dualities abound
and that's how we humans go about or daily regular busineses, ridden with pesky ontologically questionable blind spots, presuming most of the real, all the while quite convinced of the materiality of 'things out there'. or, more generally... having no idea how the fuck the reality principle works. and that's all somehow functional, as well - to perceive something as a thing we rely on everything we don't immediately see about it. in that way blindness is a requirement of seeing.
for instance, why i am always so unwilling to edit, proofread or even read these posts? could it be that different operational complexes in my brain do the jobs of coming up with things to write about and looking at the finished product as such? is this what is behind the age-old feeling that things are always less interesting as written arguments than as insight? that insight loses something when noted down and actually communicated?
(don't answer that)
no wonder reality is so fucking murky
