Random Noise and Holism

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PREFACE - for Mick

I started this paper before I had sufficiently realised the significance of your excellent essay. So, I am inserting this short explanatory introduction as you and I (as far as I understand it) represent two different and valid approaches to supposed "Random Noise" holistic interpretations. I find your essay to be profound and significant, and describing why Photography has the qualities that it does because its images always endow ambiguity, because they only deliver frozen stills of what is still in the process of change. It explains your necessary preoccupations in both your ideas, and your produced photographs, and is crucially important.

Interestingly, I am NOT a photographer, but nevertheless I too am struggling to extract the invisible components of change in seemingly static, stable situations, BECAUSE at some point, they will reveal themselves in an Emergence - an interlude of relatively sudden Qualitative Changes. I too start with multiple, simultaneous material processes that are very quickly hidden within a "Balanced Stability" of seemingly static Forms or Patterns. But, of course, it is actually a still-active state and certainly not an unchanging one.

So, in BOTH our cases, your condemnation of removing the seemingly Random Noise is absolutely correct (and for the reasons you say), Noise is NOT what it seems, but the only route to revealing what is hidden beneath our extractions and our interpretations. Destroying Noise is typical of all Pluralist study, which only sees essence in the overt relations which can easily be extracted.

Needless to say, I too want to "analyse-the-fog", but I am not dealing with a Static Photograph, but instead, an active "Balanced Stability", where the thing I want to remove is the obvious "pluralist Balanced Stability" relation, hopefully leaving only the previously hidden nut both active and required factors necessary to complete a Dialectical Analysis.

Finally, there is a whole other contribution encouraged by the "Random Noise", which is the constant, and oft-employed ability of the Brain to "fill an ambiguous Gap with "fitting" images from Memory!

 

 

In a paper by Dr. Mick Schofield - who is a Lecturer in Media Studies, specialising in Photography at Leeds University, England, and a long time collaborator with me on the SHAPE Journal - he raises a whole range of important questions concerned with the illusions unavoidably triggered in the perceptions of viewers from within photographs, containing excessive blurring or graining.

Now, as I am an almost-blind philosopher and scientist, myself, I have been plagued also, by something clearly related to these phenomena, but in my case involving Direct Seeing of the World. Considerable losses to the macular regions in both of my eyes have also led to aberrations in viewing that are definitely not there in the Real World being observed!

The main problem in my case was soon diagnosed as the Charles Bonnet Syndrome, which in the more extreme cases of vision loss, led to revealing important brain functions, which were also clearly everyday useful parts of normal Direct Seeing, but, involving not only less precise information from the Non-Macular areas of the retinas, within my eyes, which it appears, from my investigations and considerations as being wholly replaced by "tilings" taken from recent or older limited-and-squared-off remembered samples, or, alternatively, from still currently available images, taken from seen-areas, that "approproiately" exist all-around the missing direct view, with tiled exact copies - "filling-in any blanks", in other words NOT entirely using actual direct images, of what was being looked at then and there.

It is a well-known trick by magicians, to purposely draw your attention away from where they are doing something, that they do not want you to see, to an area of the real scene, that your brain is no longer receiving as a direct view, BUT only via these repeated memory tilings in which you are not really seeing the present moment, but static fragments of the past. So when he brings your gaze back, in that directly viewed place, real current information is again used, so the magician's hidden trick magically appears!

Now Dr. Schofield is concerned primarily with what happens in observing a photograph, and particularly when the captured image contains a great deal of confusing Noise, and apart from his valid and important contribution, it seems highly likely that "insertions" similar to the ones I have described above could also be involved here - for, as the above trick proves, this neurological process appears to be happening extensively all of the time, but mostly away from the primary focus of the observer's eyes.

Now, this area only came to my attention because being a sufferer from the Charles Bonnet Syndrome, I am also daily concerned with attempting a valid Holistic-Stance-Criticism, of the usual descriptions of natural phenonena, that has prevailed ever since the Greek Intellectual Revolution of the 5th century BC. For, thereafter, Mankind, on having discovered Pluralist Rationality within the building of the Discipline of Pure Forms alone (namely that of Mathematics), quite validly, about forever FIXED Relations, and finding that a valid Approach, extremely beneficial in that area, were so enamoured of its power, that they immediately and wrongly applied it, wholesale, to both General Reasoning and All of The Sciences too. Indeed, from that Intellectual Revolution right up to the present day, that gravely mistaken Stance has been largely maintained as such, in both of these important areas of Reasoning. So, crucially it applies in most Cerebral Reasoning, AND, even more importantly, in the description, interpretation and explanation of observed phenomena! We look for single causes, acting alone, as Fixed Natural Laws, and ignore not only the many others acting simultaneously, BUT significantly also their mutual qualitative effects upon one another too.

And such an omission also leaves out all Qualitative Changes, for "Fixed Natural Laws" can only SUM, and therefore only Complicate, rather than Develop! A whole rich and important set of these effects are ignored, and wholly static and unchanging areas such as photographs will NOT benefit by a return to the very same fixed image, whereas repeated returns to what initially seems to be a fixed situation in Reality, can and does deliver the subtle changes that make for alternative interpretations as The Buddha so profoundly observed in his Loka Sutta.

Let us be resolutely holist, and state that Noise is due solely to multiple simultaneous contributory causal factors - of so many different processes and their relative proportions, that the result appears "totally Random", with every direction and speed of the causing processes so reasonably evenly shared as to give a false impression of reflecting none of its many contributions!

But in any direct viewing situation the variety of possible contributuons is never infinite. Indeed the evident natural stabilities (that regularly present themselves and persist for very long periods) seem to infer both an increasing limitation upon the number of such factors, and the tendency to filter out completely the more insignificant ones, along with the preponderance of almost direct opposites to diminish the effect of those opposite processes, while maintaining them as still existing balanced pairs.

Now this alternative conception, would make destroying the confusing background Random Noise, the equivalent of throwing out the baby with the bathwater!

"Why?" 

Because that Random Noise is a still existing collection of simultaneous processes, currently subdued, but nonetheless vital, as balances change within the overall mix.

And what should be removed once it has been established, must be the clearly evident ones, leaving what is left to deliver its effects, and probably showing different effects and extractables, thereafter.

This paper and discussion follows on from the issues raised in the last issue of SHAPE Journal (Truth and Illusion, Special Issue 70). You can read the full edition here

Marxist Theory Today III

Eadweard Muybridge: Dancing girl. A pirouette (2)

The Long-awaited Breakthrough

A major breakthrough in my Marxist philosophy just had to come, and it happened in a very surprising area - the application of multimedia techniques in aids for the Teaching of Dance Performance and Choreography!

The unique cooperation between a world class researcher in dance teaching, and this physicist/computer-expert, led to a product which won a British Interactive Video Award (BIVA) for excellence. And, as the research proceeded, with ever-new objectives, and unavoidable constant changes in both equipment and software, major questions became totally unavoidable.

Yet, before that position was reached, another change of job, was necessary. Apart from this work with my Dance colleague (which later got her a PhD), little else was going on in that institution. I applied for and got a professorial level post in London University as a Director of Information Technology. But, as usual, the emphasis changed: in London I had to undertake the design and commissioning of a Campus-wide Fibre-Optic Network, which I successfully achieved within the next 18 months, while keeping contact with my Dance Research colleague back in my old institution.

But, ill-health due to a chronic illness over the last decade, finally caused early retirement, and a cessation of all undertakings, to at least recover to some extent, though it was clear that I would never be able to return to full-time work. As I slowly improved, I took to making toys for my youngest two children, mostly in wood, which both I and they enjoyed enormously. After a Drakar, a Brigantine and a Tug for my lad, I constructed a Noah's Ark, a historic Mail Coach and a Gypsy Caravan for my girl.

NOTE: I haven't mentioned it here, but I have married twice and have five marvellous children, all of whom, at this time of writing, had obtained degrees in a wide variety of subjects, and some had gone on to Postgraduate qualifications too. They have also given me 10 grandchildren and one great-grandchild!

A remarkable post-retirement interlude then ensued, involving irregular work with my Dance colleague, ostensibly on a series of new multimedia aids building upon the gains made in our award winning Dance Disc, but also, for me, posing new philosophical questions involving the unstated premises underlying what we were trying to achieve, and a realisation of how both the idealist philosopher, Friedrich Hegel, and his leading student Karl Marx had addressed such problems.

Finally away from the constraints and requirements of employers, I was addressing what I knew were the central questions in literally ALL serious research. And, the fact that this particular undertaking was about problems in Movement and Dynamics, made it ideal for addressing fundamental questions head-on!

Gjon Mili - 1947 strobe shot of Nora Kaye dancing on pointe

The problem had been noticed 2,500 years ago by the Greek, Zeno of Elea, who had accurately revealed problems with his famous Paradoxes.

Each case addressed the incompatibility between the two concepts of Continuity and Descreteness, which Mankind always switched between pragmatically in attempts to address problems associated with movement. Zeno's Paradoxes such as Achilles and the Tortoise and The Arrow made our lack of rational reasons for our switching very clear.

Hegel, some 2,300 years later, had finally addressed the problem philosophically, and had found a solution.

He realised that the regular occurrence of such Dichotomous Pairs of contradictory concepts, always arose from the very same premises, if they were significantly flawed. Such Pairs always delivered a rational impasse, and without significant changes in those premises, we would NEVER transcend that rational HALT. Instead, we would leave it unresolved, and merely cause investigators to pragmatically choose whichever of the pair allowed a successful continuation. But Hegel found a solution!

By successfully revealing all the often unstated premises in a situation, he was able to attempt changes in those premises, which, if appropriate, transformed the Impasse into a fork in reasoning, in which sound reasons could decide which way was correct.

He called his method Dialectical Reasoning, and though he considered it only as applicable to Human Thinking, his best student, Karl Marx, realised that it was applicable to conceptions about Developments of any kind, whatsoever. So, he transferred Hegel's achievements, wholesale, into a Materialist Philosophical Stance: so, for the first time, it could be applied across the board, and crucially to both Social Development in History and to Science itself!

The problem with capturing dance, could not have been closer to what was, clearly, the crux, all the way from Zeno to Marx!

Movement, when analysed, can never be delivered only by descrete positions (Stills): for, in addition, where it came from, and what was to follow, must also, somehow, be delivered too.

And, that requires a time-based context (a Movie).

Yet, without precise positioning-information (only accurately-available from high-resolution Stills) NO precise dynamics could be captured and delivered. And, this was the case both in correct performance within a Dance Piece, and, crucially, also in the choreography involved when creating such movements.

Millennia had passed with such instruction being by "do it like this" - purely by demonstration, by the choreographer or someone he or she had very fully instructed, by those very same means.

You could (and did) get away with it in performance instruction, but only with dancers present who had correctly done it before.

But, teaching choreographic creation of entirely new movements and pieces was never conquered.

My colleague's purpose was to attempt to solve the problem using Video and Film, but she soon found it impossible due to acute problems in accurate Access, and major difficulties in precise and revealing Control, using the available technology of the time.

I was able to proffer a possible solution via precise and flexible computer control of such footage, delivered from a Laser Disc, as well as delivering synchronised simultaneously presented views from different angles, and even detailed close ups. Both Access and Control were sufficiently delivered for most of my colleagues requirements to be provided.

It enabled a major step-change in what my colleague was attempting, but alone it wasn't sufficient, and the universal switch to Digital footage from Analogue footage made it impossible to deliver, as we had successfully achieved all our objectives with the prior format.

The philosophical problems were clearly unavoidable, and the Marxist research as well as that required within Dance Instruction came together, and I was able to finally crack both!

Well, "crack" is, of course an over-statement: for to become a real, producing Marxist theorist would take a great deal of time: but I was finally on my way!    

This post is part of a blog series entitled Marxist Theory Today, which is turn, forms part of our grand Shape Journal series on Marxism & Physics.