Believing things that are not true

June 29th, 2006 Fred McVittie

In order to perform efficiently it may sometimes be necessary to behave as if one believes in things that are not objectively true, (but may nevertheless be subjectively ‘real’). For example, there is no good evidence for the existence of ‘the self’, in fact there is a good deal of evidence from psychology and neuroscience, as well as less scientifically from certain branches of cultural theory, that the self-concept is a fiction or fabrication. Nevertheless, it would be suicidal to live one’s life in accordance with this belief and immoral to regard others as similarly lacking. A more extrapolated example of this might that of belief in the existence of the human soul. There is clearly no evidence for the existence of a soul, yet a belief in the concept of a soul is a useful tool for optimising performance in key areas associated with the arts, morality, ethics, relationships, etc. It is hard to imagine how soul and gospel music could have developed without this totally groundless, but nevertheless useful belief.

This approach reflects that suggested by Hans Vaihinger in his Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911; The Philosophy of “As If”), and later taken up by the American Pragmatist philosophers.

Posted in Belief, Fiction, Performance, Philosophy, Self, Soul, Vaihinger, Hans | No Comments »

Presence and ‘Presence’

July 12th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Presence (in the sense of ‘telepresence’) is the cognitive immersion by a human operator in an environment which is not the ‘actual’ environment occupied by their physical body. A prototypical example is the virtual presence one can experience within a VR setup, although partial immersion is common in a range of new and traditional media; the novel, the play, the movie etc. More generally, presence is the immersion of oneself in the reality of lived experience. Immersion, or even absorption or dissolution, can be seen as the unproblematic lowering of the boundaries between the individual and the environment, such that the person and the environment are seamlessly connected. For virtual immersion, and correspondingly a feeling of ‘being present’ to occur in non-actual environments, the experience should be as veridical as possible, which means it should produce an integrated embodied experience. Non-immersion, in novels, VR, or in lived experience, gives one the disorienting (or just plain boring) experience that life is elsewhere.

The experience of ‘presence’ within the context of theatre is also a function of a boundary, but in this case it is a boundary produced by the fact that performance is almost always ontologically separate from lived experience, and the performer themselves are almost always ontologically (and physically) also separate. This separation conveys the very strong message that the entities and events are beyond a boundary corresponding to the boundary separating the non-immersed individual audience member and their environment. In this sense, the logic of theatrical performance automatically mitigates against the audience having an immersive experience, or of seeing the ‘presence’ of the performer. Not only is the stage activity fictional, it is also ‘unreal’. The various compositional and scenographic conventions which theatre history represents can be seen as solutions to the first problem, that of the anti-immersive nature of theatre. The extent to which a performer may be said to ‘have presence’ is a function of how well they are able to also cross this ontological barrier between the unreal and the real.

Posted in Boundary, Fiction, Performance, Presence, Telepresence, Theatre | No Comments »

Universal Physics and Rational Physics

July 22nd, 2006 Fred McVittie

The term Universal Physics here refers to the set of extra-scientific (1) beliefs and theories about the physical world which have claim to universality, particularly those beliefs which concern matter, energy, and their interactions. These beliefs differs in significant ways from Rational Physics. In Universal Physics;

• There is no clear distinction between those aspects of the world which are external to the self, and those which are internal; i.e. there is a significant overlap with what Rational Physics would refer to as psychology.
• Entities and phenomena are proposed which are not acknowledged in Rational Physics, and which would otherwise be referred to as ‘magic’, ’superstition’, or ‘religion’.
• All descriptions are in natural language, no mathematical formulation is used

1. The theories and beliefs of Universal Physics are often held to be temporary and ‘pre-scientific’, to be replaced by the more ‘objective’ knowledge created by rational scientific processes. The term ‘extra-scientific’ is used here in preference to ‘pre-scientific’ to indicate that such beliefs may not be replaced in this way, but are usually held alongside scientifically formulated theories of Rational Physics.

Posted in Fiction, Naive Physics, Physics, Science, Universals | No Comments »

Spurious Constructions

July 23rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

Organised theoretical edifices, including scientific theories, metaphysical systems, and belief complexes, often contain entities which we may have no direct evidence of, but which must be posited to exist if the theory/belief is to maintain coherence. Such entities may be inferred circumstantially and may eventually turn out to be valid and ‘real’, or may be found to be purely fictitious. Non-real historical examples of such entities include epicycles, luminiferous ether, caloric, and ‘muelos’. An example of such a postulated entity which was subsequently acquired reality status is the planet Uranus, discovered not by observation but by inference, based on perturbations in the orbits of other heavenly bodies. It is tempting to assume that scientific progress and the dominance of rational physics in formulating evidence about the real world would reduce the reliance on such speculative entities, or at least that once an entity was found to be fictional that it would cease to appear in discourse (in the way that caloric does not routinely appear). However, this is not entirely the case, sometimes such fictions are allowed to survive in the language and in conception because they provide a particular human function related to the embodied nature of subjective being, as opposed to the disembodied nature of objective knowledge. Examples of such fictional entities might include: energy (as a substance or force), colours (as distinct, bounded entities), weight (as a property of substances and objects).

Routine discourse which includes reference to abstract concepts which can only be understood through the use of these spurious constructions, which function largely through the application of metaphors.

Posted in Belief, Fiction, Metaphor, Substance, Theory | No Comments »

Conceptual Entities

September 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The realm of thought and ideas does not (cannot) meaningfully discriminate between the real the fictional. Terms such as ‘fiction’, ‘metaphor’, ’symbol’, etc are about the status of certain ideas held in the mind when compared to their ‘real’ counterparts the in outside world, these terms have no significance with regard to the ideas themselves. We do not have ‘fictional’ thoughts. In the realm of thought a soul is as real as a hand.

Posted in Fiction, Soul, Touch | No Comments »