Special Issue 70: Truth and Illusion

Read Special Issue 70 of the SHAPE Journal

This special edition of the journal is co-authored by science philosopher Jim Schofield and artist researcher Mick Schofield.

Art, Science and Philosophy all share the same ontological quest of approaching truth, albeit with very different methods, ideologies and results, but there are countless pitfalls along all three roads, and many of them share the same origin. All three rely on appearances and forms as their basic material. Even the most apparently unmediated of these, are still Abstractions from the material world, and can already be deceptive. And that is long before we start categorising, rationalising, manipulating and combining forms, in all the elaborate ways we have learned to do, but which ultimately push these forms further from their original contexts in reality.

We primarily rely on our senses to confirm whether forms are true or not, but many philosophers over the centuries have shown that this can be a mistake. Optical illusions are often used to demonstrate how we cannot trust our senses - that there is some barrier between us and the truth of the material world we observe. However this is a limited view - it fails to take into account the fact that most of the time our senses serve us very well, we find our immediate realities completely intelligible. They also fail to take into account a key paradoxical fact, that illusions can actually give greater access to reality, than our senses alone can offer.

Think of the mirror, for example. Until we encounter a reflection we have no idea what we look like.

A reflection is certainly an illusion however, and one we routinely trust to tell us the truth, despite the fact that it flips the entire world front-to-back. For Jacques Lacan the mirror illusion was fundamental to how we see ourselves and our relationship with the reality around us. The mirror stage is a crucial phase in the development of human infants, where the ego begins to develop as we see ourselves as an ideal image, and fundamentally separate from others for the first time. Before this, according to Lacan, we live in the Real Stage, where we are only concerned by our immediate bodily needs and a lived unity with our mothers.

Another crucial illusion we rely on to access information about ourselves and the world, are moving pictures. These are based on photography, which also makes clever use of mirrors and tricks of the light, to present authentication of how things look. The photographic illusion, while synonymous with evidence, is compounded when we use machines to play back one photograph after another. All moving images present a basic illusion of movement - a motion that is constructed from a series of stillnesses. This isn’t how motion works in reality at all - and yet, we have simulated it well enough to trick the eye with ease.

The illusions of moving images provide us with reliable evidence of things all of the time - augmenting our senses and providing access to aspects of reality we could never approach without such technological prostheses. Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin talks about this in his famous essay on The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction, calling this new technologically-aided sense, the optical unconscious.

But there are certainly limitations to our amazing inventions. We become so reliant on them for information, we cease to notice their shortcomings and distortions of the truth. Jim Schofield’s research with Bedford Interactive into the capturing of dance on video for motion study, showed how much dynamic information is lost when we rely on a series of stills to record it. His use of Zeno’s paradoxes and dialectical reasoning in attempting to resolve the problem shows this is more than just an issue of inadequate technical solutions. The very contradiction of trying to understand motion through stillness was bound to surface sooner or later, even if this particular illusion is adequate for most purposes.

This conundrum also reminds me of Henri Bergson’s view of our cinematic view of reality - another philosopher influenced by Zeno. Bergson used the “cinematographical apparatus” as an analogy for how the intellect attempts to deal with truth - always fragmenting, abstracting, analysing phenomena into discontinuous constituent parts, and then attempting to understand the dynamic whole from these debris.

“Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially.” Bergson, 1907

The video camera is a science experiment. It takes small pieces, samples, data, and tries to understand the dynamic whole. But something is always lost. Such illusions can be very useful, the difficulty then lies in working out what isn’t translated, and the extent to which we might be kidding ourselves.

As Jim Schofield investigates in his paper on Charles Bonnet Syndrome in this issue, a form of illusion lies at the heart of vision itself. As with Bergson, this isn’t just about technology, or even scientific methods, but about the ways we think about reality, and maybe even something fundamental about how our brains work.

Mick Schofield, October 2020

Read Special Issue 70 of the SHAPE Journal

Lacan on the idea of 'Natural Law'

To extract a natural law is to extract a meaningless formula. The less it signifies anything, the happier we are. This is why we are perfectly happy with the achievements of Einsteinian physics. You would be wrong to think those little equations of Einstein's that express the relationship of inertial mass to a constant plus some exponents have the slightest meaning. They are pure signifiers. 

Jacques Lacan (1993) The signifier, as such, signifies nothing 

The Contradictory Processes of Stability & Development

Introduction

In addressing Stability effectively, we must understand four sets of processes:-

I: How it originally emerges
II: How it finds a self-maintaining-Balance
III: How it is undermined and finally collapses
IV: How it then recovers from a Nadir of Dissociation

Now, in posing it in the above way, we are really positioning our analyses well beyond the particular contents of these important occurrences. We are, in fact, going beyond the Physics or Chemistry of what is happening, to a more general meta-dynamical-level, indeed the famous Dialectical Level.

But, though Dialectics releases us from the misleading bounds of the usually entirely pluralistically-pursued disciplines, it presents us instead with the currently hard-to-employ, and very different, holistic approaches demanded by Dialectics.

Indeed, the required answers will still have to be revealed in the appropriate primary discipline levels. They can, with a great deal of study, be wrested from the old pluralistically-studied areas, but only by transferring our basic assumptions and premises, to a very different dynamical perspective.

For, while traditional disciplines find all their Ground in-Stability-alone, Dialectics focuses our attention upon the determining Dynamics-of-Change occurring in real multi-factor situations. And, this-alone allows the understanding of real qualitative developments - those involving significant major changes, and even actual Creative Emergences delivering the wholly New!

Now, in spite of consolidating a few concepts at the Dialectical Level, to remain at that level can easily turn any analyses into mere, if dialectical, descriptions alone. Dialecticians, like Slavoj Žižek, do indeed describe a wide range of real world situations dialectically, but he regularly falls short of explaining anything in many of the areas he addresses.

I must concede that he does get closer to the mark in his "explanations", when dealing with Psychoanalysis, due to his admiration for, and study of Lacan, but, that is eminently possible without making the necessary transition from Idealism to Materialism: in other words both Žižek and Lacan remain as purely Hegelian Dialecticians - as idealists!"

Psychoanalysis; Dialectics; Idealism
https://experpractice.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2013/08/07/zizek-how-to-read-lacan-ch5/

Žižek recently included a chapter on Quantum Physics in one of his books, which, without-a-doubt, proves the above point emphatically. For, his evident ignorance of Physics allowed him to claim that the currently dominant tendency in Sub Atomic Physics (embodied in the ill-famed Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory), as being "on the same side" as himself and other "Marxists".

As both a professional physicistand a Marxist, myself, I couldn't believe it, so I undertook a detailed critique (published as Special Issue 50 of SHAPE Journal in April 2017 on the Web), which exposed that ignorance very clearly, and also demonstrated that he is far from being a Marxist.

The lesson for this paper was emphatically proved! It isn't sufficient to apply Dialectics to a serious discipline, without being an expert in that area of study too. Indeed, absolutely all the principles established in the Meta-Discipline of Dialectics were initially discovered within a single particular discipline: and though that was initially only in Thinking (by the idealist Hegel), Marx's transference of all the gains achieved in Dialectics, into the very different Materialist Stance, extended the possibilities enormously!

He was able to apply them effectively in his primary area of study and qualifications, namely History, but in then turning his attention to Economics, he effectively had to become a professional Economist to carry it through. It literally took him the rest of his life, to complete that vital process.

You couldn't just apply general principles, as Žižek does, you had, always, to actually re-discover them, and in so doing, greatly enrich them via every new area addressed. And, as with all Materialist Theory, these too must be verified within Reality itself, to be also be justifiably included into the Higher realm of Dialectics.

Now, this introductory short paper cannot deliver a full account of all that is involved. But the work has been undertaken, and will soon be made available online.

Past relevant Issues of the SHAPE Journal already available are:-

Special Issue 1: The Theory of Emergences
Special Issue 3: The Theory of the Double Slit
Special Issue 48: The Limits of Žižek
Special Issue 50: Žižek's Ontology of Quantum Physics

It also might interest readers that we are imminently publishing the 100th Issue of SHAPE Journal
after eight years since our launch of

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