On Movement

While cycling at the weekend I was gripped by the illusion of movement...

Sure I blogged this before: when a kid my mother made one of those flick book jumping men by drawing the progressive frames of the stick man jumping on the corners of a book and then flicking thru. I forgot how it worked and when I tried it for myself I drew the same man on each page duh. When I realised I had to draw each frame it took the magic out of it rather.

Question though: how do the individual static men become a moving man? And more importantly is a "real" moving man just a collection of static frames. Is movement real?

Well I don't know but what gripped me is that there is no difference. The flick book man moves just as really as the "real" material man! There is only one type of movement. Watching a movie we never stop to think that the people in the film are not real, indeed they are not even a single entity by 24 pictures a second being flashed up in front of us. From this we isolate "thought" entities, which we then link between frames as single entities and the differences in placement becomes movement. It is the same process as 3D where the slight differences between our two eye images "becomes" the sense of 3D. This is easily tricked in the cinema, or even more simply in autostereograms. It is the same also with orange: it can be created by a single wavelength of light between 585–620 nm or by combining red:green:blue in the ratio 2:1:0. The orange phenomenon is the same regardless how it is made but there is no thing called orange in the second example. So movement, 3D and orange can all be simulated by illusions that are exactly the same as the "real" thing. These phenomena are thus not to be likened to the "real" things. But, as argued in previous posts, phenomena are all we experience; the rest is interpretation, projection and imagination. Scientists like to call their imaginery world the "real" world, but no-one has ever seen an atom they have only seen an image of an atom, no-one has ever experienced matter or energy, they have only experienced data regarding what matter can do phenomenally. These hidden things are just that: hidden, and therefore they reside in our minds not in "reality"... simply because if they remain hidden how can we know them? What dazzles me and shows up the ignorance and fanatical dogmatism of some scientists (not mentioning names) is that they believe their imaginery worlds to be better than any other imaginery worlds! No matter how much evidence is accumulated one can never jump from phenomena to existence because existence is a myth! Anymore than one can leap from sequences of frames to "actual" movement. "Actual" movement is a myth.

Brain scientists know that there are parts of the brain that respond to movement and pathologies in these parts of the brain produce very odd symptoms. One woman on TV said that crossing the road was very difficult for her now because she would look up and see a car far off which was stationery, and she would go to cross the road and it would still be stationery and then all at once it would be putting its breaks on and be right next to her. Yet it is a mistake to argue that these parts of the brain cause movement preception because this would be to infer that there was some "real" movement in the brain that caused the perception of movement... SRH alert. With the new ontology we argue that the science has discovered that these brain centres are alternative names for the what we normally call the phenomenon of movement.

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So actually we get to Zeno's Paradox here. Is the path of an arrow a series of discrete places, or is it continuous. And that links with digital computing and the fact that movement cannot be represented in a computer; only discrete states can be stored in a computer and the computer moves by discrete transformations of these states. And this links with the difference between countable and uncountable numbers and the Continuum Hypothesis - the question of what if anything (and the hypothesis says there is nothing) links or lies between the two. How do we get from series of discrete events to a continuum? It happens whenever when the mind interprets things as "movement", whose essence is continuity, but to the understanding it is a mystery.

Similar mysteries exist when we try to understand how the mind goes from a phenomenon or an experience to the name of that thing, or the description of that thing. How does the mind describe something that has no description? If it had a description before the mind described it then what is the mind doing? And if it has no description before it is described then how does the mind know whether it is describing it correctly?

This is all (unfortunately for me) at the core of the SRH. What I hoped would be simple is not. It lies in the realm of "normative" assumptions. We have to begin somewhere and description is just one such place. It is impossible to describe the process of description because logically we are using the very thing we don't understand to try and explain what we seek to understand. It is exactly that problem of impredicativity, but writ large and deep. What formal way of demonstrating this is there?

Again I refer to Hegel's excellent use of it to found Phenomenology. What, he asks, is the purpose of rational investigations to determine the validity of Reason? (Referring to Kant et al.). If Reason is faulty then so will the arguments be that arrive at that conclusion so the conclusion itself will be in doubt. We can only assume that Reason is what it is. This is the point about God: Man has to accept somewhere that things just are as they are and questions beyond that are unanswerable, mysterious and wonderful - "wonder" (from Plato) being the impression of the world on the innocent and undogmatic mind.