Play It Again Sam Ocean Beach

(Last week, I wrote about re-enactments and the intentions behind their use. Why re-enact the past? Different kinds of re-enactments were discussed: re-enactments that purport to be real and re-enactments that re-focus our attending on specific details, in some instances details that have been disregarded or misunderstood. That essay also suggested that the real problem might exist the brain: how we wait at and perceive images. This essay continues where I left off and takes it a bit farther. — E.M.)

Although in that location have been many studies of optical illusions and perceptual errors, at that place are several recent studies that focus on the nature of attention and how nosotros await at moving images.

In a still photograph we may impose a context and a narrative on the image we are looking at. In moving images our attending tin can wander or be deflected – but the moving image moves on. We may be looking elsewhere when things are happening, just that doesn't hateful things aren't happening.

Since the late 19th century researchers take been aware of the phenomenon of saccades, the rapid movement of the eye, every bit we shift our attention from one affair to another. Every bit a issue, vision itself is discontinuous. We construct a "map of reality" from saccades much as a movie editor puts together a scene from individual camera takes[i].

Just as vision is discontinuous, there are also certain kinds of discontinuities in a scene that is consciously constructed, such every bit in film editing. A glass filled with h2o in one shot is empty in the next – even though the scene is meant to play continuously in time. These are chosen "continuity errors." There are at to the lowest degree three Spider web sites and a dozen books devoted to continuity errors[ii]. Why? Why are some people so obsessed with continuity errors? Is it that simply God can contrive a "perfect" reality, and any homo-made simulacrum must be filled with defects?

What about our perception of reality? (Reality presumably has no continuity errors.) We assume that there are no continuity errors in our perception of things. Our brains readily recoup for saccades. I talked to Dan Levin, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, who has been involved in various studies of continuity errors in film and otherwise.

DAN LEVIN: The interesting thing nigh continuity errors is they reflect the understanding that filmmakers have had for a long time nigh perception. Psychologists take only recently caught up to them. Filmmakers accept had to do what our perceptual systems do – put together different views into a coherent understanding of a scene as a whole. And in learning how to exercise that in the early on 20th century, they discovered that continuity errors often don't go noticed. And so they realized: we're not keeping track of all this visual detail in our head. So [Dan] Simons and I started off with that observation and just did some experiments. Went from there, upping the ante.

ERROL MORRIS: Was in that location one specially continuity fault that caught your attention?

DAN LEVIN: The sometime Kuleshov and Pudovkin experiments. For example, the artistic geography experiment where they took different shots of unlike locations in Moscow, and cut them together and then they look similar a coherent whole because the event was coherent. There must have been a lot of discontinuities in lighting and groundwork betwixt the shots, and people didn't notice. Kuleshov noted in his writings, pretty explicitly, that you lot can become away with continuity errors. Then at that place's their informal experiment with the different body parts of actors and actresses. He'd prove the hands of ane extra and the feet or other trunk parts of different actresses and put them together. And people idea information technology was one person. The thought was at that place must have been a lot of differences that went unnoticed. And given that Kuleshov had noted them, we were enlightened filmmakers had known about this kind of thing. And then when nosotros moved on from simple failures to detect continuity errors in things that y'all weren't necessarily looking at in a scene, similar the change is someone'southward scarf. We had read some developmental research suggesting that yous could get away with a lot more than that. You could substitute one thing for another, fifty-fifty if a person'due south looking right at information technology. And nosotros did the experiment and plant out that you could substitute i actor for another in a movie and people wouldn't notice.

We heard about this picture – "That Obscure Object of Desire" – where Buñuel switched out the actresses playing the main role. And I went and read a bunch of his biographies, and in a couple places he claimed that audition members failed to notice. We would show it to people and, certain plenty, they would fail to observe that Conchita is played past two actresses.

And the absurd affair – he starts off with Conchita existence played by one actress, and then there's a scene with neither actress in it, then in that location'southward Conchita played past the other extra. And throughout the film he gradually pulls them closer and closer together, until right across cuts he'south substituting one extra for another.

["That Obscure Object of Want" was released in 1977. Information technology provides a perfect blend of random violence and emotional disconnection. It reminds me of Samuel Beckett's description of beloved as a class of "lethal glue." As Conchita and Matthieu torture each, other diverse explosions occur, an occasional mugging, a holdup, a radio bulletin announcing the spread of an incurable virus, and other scenes suggesting the imminent breakup of everything. I suppose one could make too much of the fact that Buñuel used two different actresses for Conchita (Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet). Merely it feels primal to the moving picture. The reasons for Buñuel's decision are unclear. Perchance sheer perversity. Every bit explained by his scriptwriter and longtime collaborator, Jean-Claude Carrière, Buñuel had toyed with the possibility of ii actresses playing the same role, but then said, "Let's give it upward… [Information technology's] stupid… a complete joke… the whim of a rainy twenty-four hour period." A couple of days into product, Buñuel all of a sudden stopped shooting, called his producer, and insisted on going back to his original idea. According to Carrière, "Maybe he was secretly feeling that he needed two." Regardless of Buñuel's existent intentions, it gives the film a strange, disjointed graphic symbol, every bit if his ultimate intention was to trap the viewer in an extended continuity mistake. When I watched it recently, I already knew that at that place were two actresses, so I was hyper-aware of the differences between them. It had the effect of driving me crazy. I preferred one extra to the other, then I kept waiting for the preferred actress to reappear. – E.M.]

DAN LEVIN: I watched the whole affair on fast forward, because I'm mostly not a Buñuel fan, but it was actually interesting to see how cautious he is at the beginning of the film with those substitutions. He does the substitutions with other scenes in between. And and so in the final few scenes with Conchita in them, i actress walks out of the frame, the other, into the frame. He never does it immediately across a cut. There is a moment between the Conchita #i and Conchita #two exchange. Our experiment was very similar to that.

ERROL MORRIS: But why don't you similar Buñuel?

DAN LEVIN: I don't know. The male-female affair is so aggressive and negative. With "Obscure Object of Want" information technology's just such a grim and nasty and angry interaction between this man and woman.

ERROL MORRIS: Aye. Peradventure Buñuel sees love as a series of continuity errors? People assume there are no continuity errors in reality.

[Information technology's a version of Bishop Berkeley's esse est percipi – to be is to exist perceived. When a rabbit disappears behind a log and and then reappears, what makes us believes that it is nonetheless in that location when nosotros tin can't come across it? Is the disappearance of the rabbit a continuity error? Berkeley solves the problem by introducing God. Who guarantees the connected existence of the rabbit when we can't see it? Information technology is God. God is constantly looking. – E.M.]

DAN LEVIN: Mmmn. Yeah. We've done inquiry on the relationship between people's beliefs about what they think they tin meet and what they actually can encounter. There are accidents called tractor-trailer under-rides. A semitrailer jackknifes across a highway. The trailer goes into a slip and then the trailer part of the semi runs across lanes of oncoming traffic. Cars will come downwardly the highway and just run right into the trailer office of the semi. And people are killed. Later investigation often reveals no skid marks, no signs of evasive driving. The commuter simply totally ran correct in to this barrier in the middle of the highway. Actually grisly accidents, as well, because they often involve, as y'all can imagine, the summit of a tractor-trailer hitting someone at neck level. Expiry by decapitation followed by inevitable litigation that often rests on arguments about who should have seen what. At that place are these advertizement hoc assumptions about what must accept been visible to a normal driver. And jurors have to brand use of their lay understanding of what kinds of things are consistently visible, and they assume that pretty much everything is, unless you're boozer or asleep. But if you lot really understand that our awareness of the visual world is selective, and it'due south contingent on the kind of things we expect, the kinds of things that nosotros know about, then yous might better sympathise that someone could have run into this thing and not have been comatose. Information technology is just unexpected stimulus. Most of the expected information is in that location. The line on the route is at that place – that hasn't changed – but the unexpected data doesn't automatically enter our sensation. We've washed experiments where people are watching a video and y'all just shut the video off for 2 thirds of a 2d, and then you start it over again. If people aren't expecting it, a adept percent of the fourth dimension they won't notice that either. You just turn the thing blank. So, the thought is that our awareness of visual information is heavily contingent on the kinds of things we know to look for. And if something isn't in that category, and we're not trying to find information technology, it's possible that we won't be aware of it, even if it takes up a huge percentage of our visual field.

[If the earth ceased to exist for ii/3 of a second would we fail to notice? – Due east.M.]

DAN LEVIN: One of the bug with people with schizophrenia and sure mental illnesses, they're enlightened of the wrong things. A properly functioning visual organization needs to limit itself to just beingness aware of the correct things. And using all the knowledge and tools that information technology has available, that your whole psyche has available to it, to choose what to be enlightened of finer.

ERROL MORRIS: Well, doesn't Borges have a story ["Funes, The Memorious"] where Funes, his fictional character, remembers everything?

[In Borges' story, Funes prefers non to over-simplify. Meliorate to enumerate everything. Natural numbers for example. Give each its own name, non as role of a natural progression, simply a discrete entity. – Eastward.1000.]

DAN LEVIN: In that location'south "Due south" [Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevskii] in Alexander Luria's "The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book Virtually a Vast Memory." The guy who remembers too much stuff and, consequently, isn't all that abrupt. He can't think. He can't read because all this stuff's coming up, all these images. A cognitive system that processes only a small corporeality of information is probably a more effective i.

So y'all know ane of the things is it'south like shooting fish in a barrel to make people out to accept crummy visual systems, to be stupid. But that's the mode the organization has to piece of work in lodge to be useful.

ERROL MORRIS: To suppress, to align, too as to bring forwards into conscious awareness.

DAN LEVIN: Yeah. Aye. And then both of those things are of import functions, potentially: keeping the irrelevant stuff out and choosing the relevant stuff correctly.

[Of course, it's blatantly round. How can you know what's relevant and what's irrelevant in advance of finding out what's relevant or irrelevant? If nosotros define equally "relevant" only that information that we are aware of, the question of what is relevant loses relevance. – E.M.]

ERROL MORRIS: And here's my question. Why are people so interested in continuity errors in movies? What's that about?

DAN LEVIN: I don't know, maybe it'southward about being the adept. Beingness the person that sees something that other people don't see. Being enlightened of the deep workings of the movies or something like that. That's my guess.

ERROL MORRIS: The person who pays more attention than anyone else?

DAN LEVIN: Aye, the super attentive person, there's this kind of thought that "I'm super attentive, I accept a super attention organisation. I see all this stuff."

ERROL MORRIS: Merely your conventionalities would be, of grade, that since they super attend to all this stuff, they're probably ignoring something else.

DAN LEVIN: Yep, they're not paying attention to the stuff they should be paying attention to, which is the story, the ideas of the filmmaker, all this absurd stuff. And a lot of psychologists take argued if you're actually paying attention to all this detail stuff, you're missing the skilful stuff. You're missing what you need to be paying attention to. And some have argued, for example, that individuals with ADHD or other problems with attending have a problem because they're paying attending to all those useless details and non the narrative.

ERROL MORRIS: But would the claim exist that our experience of reality itself – put bated the movies for the fourth dimension existence – is filled with continuity errors? We don't have to business organization ourselves with them considering they're but not of import to u.s..

DAN LEVIN: Aye, yes. And then that'due south our real world experiment. Then you tin can substitute 1 person for another, and people won't discover. And there are all sorts of ways in which objects change unexpectedly. If you're looking at a coffee cup and of a sudden it gets rotated or you lot move around it and the handle now is visible. Yous look at it 1 moment, it's gone; another moment, information technology's there.

ERROL MORRIS: Don't we try to make a consistent story for ourselves?

DAN LEVIN: Mm-hm.

ERROL MORRIS: And then that in the effort of consistency, certain details have to be suppressed?

DAN LEVIN: Yeah. I think that'southward definitely truthful. There are all sorts of interesting ways in which you can study the procedure of making a consistent story. Nosotros tell the story of events using our agreement of people's beliefs, desires, and goals. And then nosotros organize these stories around concepts that aid united states pay attention.

ERROL MORRIS: I've been criticized for using re-enactments in "The Sparse Blue Line," a flick I did twenty years agone.

DAN LEVIN: Yeah, I saw information technology when it came out!

ERROL MORRIS: Really?

DAN LEVIN: Yes, just later on college. I saw it at our local theater.

ERROL MORRIS: I used to tell people I was only re-enacting subjective accounts, I was never re-enacting reality, per se. Now I look at it differently. Information technology is a part of an investigative process. I take a retrospective verbal account, and then endeavour to bring the audience'south attention to a specific item that will allow them (and me) to think about some detail, what it means, what it tells yous almost reality. It allows you to think about a scene in a different way.

DAN LEVIN: Well, I'll tell yous, all these years later that license plate, and the milkshake falling on the ground are still in my caput?

ERROL MORRIS: Actually.

DAN LEVIN: Yep. I've seen it twice. I saw information technology one time when it came out, and so once some number of years ago. And those footling details, the shake falling – it must have had something to do with the fact that the policewoman was in the incorrect place.

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. I was just writing most the milkshake. How it's meant to capture the question of whether the policewoman was in or out of the car when the shooting occurred. Then it stands in for that question. It's designed to make the audience remember, "Where was she?"

DAN LEVIN: Aye. You take a perceptual detail, or an object, or something like that. And if information technology's it interesting enough, and yous're compelled, you beginning from there and commencement reconstructing and start pulling on the story that must have led to that.

ERROL MORRIS: We make a series of inferences. Nosotros start to construct stories around an object.

DAN LEVIN: Yeah, yep. There'due south something mutual between that procedure and the process that people go through when I ask them in experiments, well, if you were watching this moving-picture show and the scarf suddenly changed, would yous see it? And by virtue of the fact that I've even mentioned the scarf, people get-go saying, "Well, you know, if the scarf was there, I would've been thinking about her dress, blah, blah, blah, and the conversation…" So they immediately construct these stories around these visual details. They stick them in the narrative. Considering according to what we've argued, that'southward actually the only style we have of thinking about abstruse things.

[Nosotros start to construct stories around an object. But which object? Our visual field is ordinarily littered with them. Signal out a scarf and the narrative changes. And if the narrative doesn't include a scarf, we fail to notice it. Lie detectors and writers nearly lie detection often neglect this point – which is at the middle of the argument. We tin can lie and not know we're lying. Nosotros tin think we have seen something and exist mistaken. We can neglect to encounter things that are right in front of our eyes. Nosotros can exist distracted. We tin be concentrating on the "wrong" thing. We can be self-deceived. We tin fail to see the relevant information. – E.One thousand.]

******

There isn't a faithful replica in the encephalon of reality, of what is existent and what is imagined. Furthermore, aren't mental images photographs in the mind? This is not as preposterous as information technology may seem. Early theories of mind imagined that our visual processes were at the very least analogous to photography. And perhaps it was more than than just an analogy.

The relationship between images in the mind and moving picture and still photography has been of interest since the beginnings of photography – even earlier move pictures and photography. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a much-quoted passage from his "Biographica Literaria" speaks of the try of creating "that willing intermission of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith [that] tin bribe us into a voluntary submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all our judgment derived from abiding feel, and enable united states to peruse with the liveliest involvement the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards, genii, and hugger-mugger talismans."

Regardless of what Coleridge originally intended – peculiarly when he was in the eye of some wildly extended opiated doggerel – the "willing interruption of disbelief" has been used as a catchall phrase to describe how we are to look at movies. Inappropriately, it seems to me.

The difficulty with images is not suspending disbelief but rather the contrary – suspending our natural trend to believe in their veracity. The seeing-is-believing principle. The kind of re-enactments I accept in mind are not based on trying to fool you lot into assertive that something is real that is non. Nor are they based on the suspension of atheism. They are non asking united states to suspend your disbelief in an bogus globe that has been created expressly for their amusement; they are asking the opposite of us – to study the relationship of an artificial globe to the real earth. They involve the suspension of belief – not atheism. The audience is existence asked the question: did information technology happen this mode? The kind of re-enactments I have in mind makes us question what we believe and brings us deeper into the mystery of what happened.

Continuity errors are a compilation of all those errors that we don't ordinarily see. Merely there are different kinds of continuity errors. Our interest in the continuity of the picture show narrative prevents us from seeing the mistakes in how a motion picture is put together. Some other example of a continuity error is how we fail to see how our mental narratives forbid us from seeing evidence – that there may exist a discrepancy between how nosotros come across the world and the evidence we have at manus. This is, of course, what happened in the Randall Dale Adams case. Normally, the errors are in a faulty simulacrum of reality, a movie. Just can't a picture show point out that nosotros have in our minds a faulty simulacrum of the world? Aren't they all examples of how narrative trumps show? Someone one time argued to me that information technology is perverse to correct visual mistakes using a visual medium, simply is it any stranger to correct verbal mistakes in a exact medium? I don't think so, equally long as the visual medium – like movies – contains language.

Dan Levin wrote his original papers on "change blindness" with Dan Simons, professor of psychology at Academy of Illinois. Simons went on independently of Levin to write on "inattentional blindness," an issue that also has enormous relevance for how nosotros await at movie and how nosotros expect at the world. I asked him to ascertain the difference.

DAN SIMONS: "Change blindness" is typically a instance of something in a movie that is different from how it was a moment ago, and people don't notice that information technology was missed in the editing or it was missed in the original script continuity. "Inattentional incomprehension" is a failure to observe something that'due south fully visible and right in that location in front end of you in a unmarried frame.

ERROL MORRIS: Doesn't that mean that we fail to discover important details?

DAN SIMONS: I frame it a trivial differently than that, and I think Dan Levin probably would, likewise. For the near office perception does a keen chore at giving the states a sense of what's of import in the world. And continuity errors, for the most office, are not important at all. They're picayune stuff that doesn't affair to the meaning of the theme.

[Merely why are they "piffling?" Couldn't information technology be that they are "trivial" depending on what our interests are? Depending on what we're focused on? To assume that we are e'er focused on the right stuff considering the right stuff is what we focus on, sets up a rather sad circularity. – Due east.M.]

DAN SIMONS: People fail to see things when their attention is divided, only it's exactly what our system should do if you want to be able to focus and non be distracted all the time. I see these errors as a consequence of limits on how much we can be enlightened of it any instant, and given that our arrangement seems to be limited in this style, that's a cracking way to build a arrangement to accurately perceive what's out there nearly of the time. For the nigh role, we perceive the world pretty much truthfully.

ERROL MORRIS: But if nosotros perceive the world truthfully –

DAN SIMONS: That doesn't hateful that we have a photograph in our heed or a video recording in our mind of what happened. But what we focus attention on for the virtually function represents the meaning of what's in that location. For the most part we don't observe things because they don't matter.

[The circularity reappears. Is it that we don't find things considering they don't matter? Or they don't matter because we don't observe them. Unfortunately, nosotros often fail to observe things that practice affair. – E.M.]

ERROL MORRIS: How does the brain know what to focus on and what not to focus on?

DAN SIMONS: That's a actually of import question: What does draw attention and what doesn't? The gorilla thing goes back to the idea that when you are focus your attention on doing something–

ERROL MORRIS: The gorilla thing?

DAN SIMONS: The experiment is pretty straightforward. You just force people to focus their attention on one aspect of what'south going on.

[Simons and his colleagues devised a game and videotaped it. There are two teams – one dressed in white shirts, the other dressed in black shirts. The white-shirted players throw a basketball to each other. The black-shirted players throw another basketball to each other. The viewer of the videotape must count how many times players wearing white substitution the ball.]

DAN SIMONS: They watch the game, and in the middle of it the gorilla appears.

ERROL MORRIS: A guy in a gorilla conform.

DAN SIMONS: Actually, a daughter in a gorilla conform.

ERROL MORRIS: O.K.

DAN SIMONS: The viewer is so intently focused on counting these passes that they just don't report information technology[iii].

ERROL MORRIS: That's it.

DAN SIMONS: That's basically information technology. We sit down them in front of the telly and say, "Okay, are you ready?" And equally soon as they're ready, we printing play and say, "Okay." And as soon as they're finished, we'd ask them a sequence of questions, and nosotros really practice this in writing. Nosotros'd hand them a paper that would say, "Did y'all find anything? Did you notice anything unusual? Did y'all notice anything other than the players? Did you notice anyone other than the players?" And then the final question would be, "Did you lot observe the gorilla?"

Sometimes if we'd ask, "Did you notice anything other than the players" they'd say, "Well, in the back of the scene, the letter of the alphabet 'Southward' was painted on a couple of the walls outside of the elevators that were in that location," and that was considering we were actually doing this on a floor in the psychology building at Harvard that was about to be renovated. The "S'south" meant: salvage the walls.

So, they noticed some details. Simply if they had noticed the gorilla, they didn't report annihilation and then were surprised when nosotros'd tell them nigh it. We'd actually rewind the record – we did this physically with record at the time – and accept them see it again for themselves, so they'd know that we weren't really showing them a different tape.

ERROL MORRIS: Were they surprised?

DAN SIMONS: Oh, yeah, yes. If they missed it, their reaction was, "I missed that?" They were kind of shocked. It's a really hitting effect, because the intuition is then potent that if there'south something distinctive or unusual or potentially important in a scene, it volition take hold of your attention. And that intuition is difficult for researchers to override. It took me years to get to the point that I could show this video to people and be pretty confident that people would miss the gorilla. I'm still kind of apprehensive. I continue asking myself, "Volition they meet it this time?

ERROL MORRIS: Merely they don't see it? Non in any real sense?

DAN SIMONS: There's a scientific debate over whether they meet it at all, whether it'due south candy at all. The light from information technology is hitting their retina, and so it'due south being processed at some signal. But it's not clear whether it's reaching awareness or not. They certainly don't report it, and they seem surprised when you tell them about it.

Figure provided past Daniel Simons.

[The "S" on the wall is interesting. If Levin and Simons are right – that nosotros nourish to the of import stuff – how come up nosotros see the "S" but not the gorilla? How practise we know what is important and what is not? Why is the "S" more important than the "gorilla?" Or is it the other way effectually? Why does Simons run into the "Due south" as unimportant even though many subjects run into the "S" and fail to see the gorilla? Just because nosotros see something, that doesn't mean information technology'due south important, and just because something is important, that doesn't hateful we see it. Maybe the "S" is a secret sign, a clue, similar something in "The Da Vinci Code." Perhaps the "S" is important. The "S" could be an inadvertence, a piece of reality sneaking into a scene that is "about" something completely different, or information technology could be deeply significant. Information technology could be a sly reference to "South" in Luria's business relationship of the mnemonist – a kind of self-referential psychologist's joke. Or if I were a member of Homeland Security, it could exist 1 of those signs designed to actuate an Al Qaeda sleeper-cell somewhere in the Midwest. How can we ever know what is inadvertent and what is meaningful? Furthermore, can't the inadvertent sometimes exist meaningful? – East.M.]

******

It is 2008, and I am at the Berlin Picture Festival for the premier of my new moving-picture show, "Standard Operating Procedure." At a press conference my use of re-enactments in the moving picture is beingness criticized. "Why re-enactments?" "I liked everything but the re-enactments." "Exercise you have to use re-enactments?"

My experience in Berlin makes it clear that the issue of re-enactments has not been laid to rest. Why the use of re-enactments? They redirect our attention and allow the states to see things that would be otherwise invisible. They let us to come across the gorilla. A reporter asks, "Aren't re-enactments always visual?" I reply, "I don't call up and so. At least not for me. They can be visual, literary, auditory – annihilation you might want to imagine."

In the movie "Casablanca," for instance, it is auditory. It is Sam's (Dooley Wilson) repeated playing of "As Time Goes By" that triggers the re-enactment of an unfinished love story: first Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and and then Rick (Humphrey Bogart) asks the song to exist played. (The flashback to the "past" and so the return to the "present" from the flashback is framed by a shake-like fetish-object, a glass tipped over – by Ilsa in Paris and by Rick in Casablanca.)

Anybody knows the most famous line from the movie "Casablanca" isn't a line in the motion-picture show "Casablanca." When Ilsa enters Rick'due south Café Americain, she says to Sam, "Play information technology, Sam." Only everyone remembers, "Play it once more, Sam." And then why does anybody call back the line incorrectly? I have a unproblematic theory. Because the additional word "again," clearly captures that something is beingness repeated, something is being re-enacted.

Suddenly he pounds the tabular array and buries his head in his artillery. Then he raises his head, trying to regain control.

RICK
What's that you're playing?

SAM
Just a little something of my own.

RICK
Well, stop information technology. You know what I desire to hear.

SAM
No, I don't.

RICK
Y'all played it for her and y'all can play it for me.

SAM
Well, I don't recall I can remember information technology.

RICK
If she can stand information technology, I tin can. Play information technology!

A flashback. We are back in Paris. A flashback that explains that they are in honey and that the globe is going to hell. An unresolved flashback – where Rick is standing on a railroad platform reading a annotation from Ilsa: "Just believe that I dearest you."

Paris scenes from Casablanca.

The montage ends. Nosotros are back in Casablanca in the re-enactment of a love affair. An attempt to understand something from the past, to answer the questions: What happened? What went wrong? Did she always really love me?

RICK
How did you arrive?

ILSA
The stairs from the street.

Ilsa comes over to meet him.

RICK
I told y'all this forenoon y'all'd come around, only this is a little ahead of schedule. Well, won't you sit down?

ILSA
Richard, I had to meet you.

RICK
So information technology's "Richard" again? We're back in Paris.

**********

I had a flashback of my own.

Information technology is 1970. I am in Oxford and ensconced in a typing-room on the top floor of the New Bodleian Library with piles of books around me. Not much has changed in forty years – except the location. I am struggling with R. Yard. Collingwood's "The Idea of History." (Collingwood was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics at Oxford. He died in 1943. "The Idea of History" was published posthumously from collected material assembled by his educatee T.M. Knox.)

Nothing that Collingwood wrote is easy to read, and this book is especially dense and difficult. All the same, at that place is a Collingwood quote from "The Idea of History" that is incessantly suggestive – even though I was unclear then and am nevertheless unclear now what he meant past information technology. He had written, "History is the re-enactment of the past in the heed." It seems possible that Collingwood might have been interested in the milkshake, as well.

Collingwood at the end of "The Thought of History" writes about his endeavour to projection himself into history. The passage occurs at the end of several hundred pages of assay. His words never seem to completely capture what he is struggling with. And and then the fog suddenly clears, and he writes as if from an Firmament height:

…the historian… can recover the thoughts of others; coming to think like them at present fifty-fifty if he never idea like them earlier, and knowing this activity as the re-enactment of what those men once idea. We shall never know how the flowers smelled in the garden of Epicurus, or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair equally he walked on the mountains; we cannot relive the triumph of Archimedes or the bitterness of Marius; only the testify of what these men thought is in our hands; and in re-creating these thoughts in our own minds past interpretation of that evidence we can know, so far as there is any knowledge, that the thoughts we create were theirs.

This was Collingwood's impassioned dream: that we tin faithfully re-enact the thoughts of the past in the mind, that history is the combination of evidence and our attempts to rethink the thoughts that produced it. I share the dream.

Collingwood is not merely writing well-nigh the past. He is also writing about the nowadays. Experience is not unlike history – just closer to the states in fourth dimension.

Photography provides an interesting instance of this. We remember of photography as instantaneous. The movement of photons bouncing off an object, refracted through a lens to a photographic emulsion, the resulting chemical reactions, all of these things take identify within a very short span of time. What about my perception of an object? How quickly does that occur? I hold an orange up. Is my perception of it instantaneous? How well-nigh my consciousness of it?

I know the orange isn't inside my head. Photons have bounced off information technology, entered the lens of my middle and impinged on my retina. Electrochemical signals have been transmitted down my optic nerves, and information has been processed in the various parts of my brain. It isn't instantaneous. It all takes time.

Re-enactment is non so much a visual activity, as information technology is a conscious activity. It is the procedure through which we imagine and re-imagine the earth around the states. The important affair to remember is that everything we consciously experience is a re-enactment. Consciousness, itself, is a re-enactment of reality within our heads.

[Acknowledgments: Many of the ideas in the above essay come up from Charles Silver. I have as well benefited enormously from ongoing discussions with him. The essay has also benefited from the editorial communication of Rosie and Amanda Gill, Ann Petrone, and Elizabeth Shelburne, and I would like to thank Marc Hauser for calling the piece of work of Levin and Simons to my attention.]

The Divine Comedy'due south Firmament illustrated by Gustave Dore.

FOOTNOTES:

1. There have been various explanations for saccades, merely in part they are due to the fact that just a small fraction of the retina, the fovea, provides the resolution needed for seeing detail. As we become interested in different parts of an image, the eye moves so they can be brought from the outlying areas of the retina to the fovea.

2. Motion-picture show Mistakes, Nitpickers, Continuity Corner

3. Ronald Rensink at the University of British Columbia studies a similar topic: change incomprehension. He has posted a number of videos.

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Source: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/play-it-again-sam-re-enactments-part-two/