II. Pixel Delta: The Blazing Engine of Curiosity

Nicolas Benjamin
Aug 28, 2017 · 13 min read

Δ. Or why you can do better than Ulysses & Dante

Shakespeare’s Ulysses desired, like many of us, to ‘know the whole world’ (Shakespeare, 1602)— Photo by Robson Hatsukami Morgan on Unsplash

In what crucible is a new pixel, a building block of knowledge, formed? Either through deductive reasoning, where a “luminous axiom”¹ springs fully formed in your mind from what appears self-evident; or through inductive reasoning about particular observations in the world of senses.

When the Outside, encompassing space and time and everything strange or charming in between, doesn’t jive with what’s inside your head, you become aware of this difference. Assuming you overcome the impulse to double down on your beliefs, your mind begins the process of forging a new pixel by reasoning inductively from your senses.

Your mind begins the process of crafting a new pixel — Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Your mind filters, sorts, selects, contains, and bestows meaning to an element in the endless stream of external data flooding your senses. Of these cognitive processes, the last two, containment and giving meaning, forge the raw data into a pixel. This pixel is placed in your long-term memory: the bag of holding of your imagination. This is the inventory of your mind’s virtual reality. It represents your subjective experience of the universe mediated by your senses. But there is a difference between what you experience, and what exists out there: The virtual can never be real. The essence of your understanding is, in effect, rooted in this difference.

Where does difference arise? You see, your body and embodied mind are embedded in reality. And yet, no matter how real reality seems, it is divorced from the reassembled version of reality inside your head. This sensorial rift is the Veil of Isis, masking nature’s truths from your piercing gaze.

All truths wait in all things — Walt Whitman

The quest to peer behind the Veil and glimpse the truth in all its naked splendour is the search for Objective Truth. The love of wisdom, from the Greek philo-sophia — the desire to know — is the most powerful drive to which humanity’s greatest thinkers owe the motions of their minds.

The love of wisdom… and wine — Anselm Feuerbach, Das Gastmahl des Platon, 1873

What’s behind the Veil is the subject of fascinating studies: A famous psychological experiment demonstrates how we perceive difference in our environment, like doing a double take on a strange split-second glitch in the matrix: Patients are shown a sequence of playing cards in short, controlled exposures. Some of the cards display anomalous properties — for example, a red spade, or a black heart. The patients start off by identifying the odd cards as normal ones. Their alarm bells have not yet gone off, and their world is still unshaken.

As the exposure time is progressively increased, they notice something wrong with the cards — A black heart cannot possibly exist. They become confused. The jarring difference between reality and their expectations manifests itself. Should they deny this difference, or question their internal model? The fact that they want to know the truth pushes them to reassess their model to fit the new evidence and most, if not all anomalies are finally identified. As Thomas Kuhn observes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,

In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.²

We humans cannot simply plug into reality and experience it as it really is; we must rely on sensory experience (this particular epistemic position is called Empiricism). In so doing, we reassemble only a portion of what is.

You cannot simply plug into reality ; you experience the virtual — Photo by Sergey Galyonkin (some rights reserved)

What’s behind the Veil?

But light is not the only natural phenomenon humans don’t fully experience.

This honeybee’s eyesight is five times faster than yours — Photo by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash

Your common household shark uses electrolocation to navigate by electrical current in dark and murky waters. The dreaded vampire bat smells warmth with thermosensing proteins concentrated in its nose — eerily convenient when considering your blood is warm. The garden variety snake smells in three dimensions by tasting air on its tongue. The flighty fairy fly swims through air — because it’s so tiny, air feels viscous to it the way water feels to humans. Many more organisms have abilities that lie behind the Veil, just out of reach of your mundane homo sapiens experience.

Sharks navigate by electric current— Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

But hey, why stop at organisms? Having spent billions of years evolving sense organs attuned to the very large, no life form known to humanity naturally possesses the capacity to observe the infinitesimally small — The quantum world is indeed mind-bogglingly stranger than biological fiction. Photons don’t experience time; from their perspective, they simply arrive when they depart. Entangled particles instantaneously exchange information about each other over large distances in a process called quantum teleportation. Light’s ability to shape-shift between a wave or a particle depending on how it “expects” to be measured in the future leads physicists to grapple with oddball consequences: Light’s “decisions” exhibit backward causation, possibly causing the effect to happen before the cause, i.e., its past configurations may be dependent on its future causes.

And you? How do you stack up against these X-Men-worthy abilities? Well, it may not sound like much, but you think therefore you are. You’re able to see what’s wrong, ask ‘Why?’, and imagine whole universes to dive into and find your answers. These universes may not be real, but they owe their vividness and intricacies to the most powerful system we know of, the human brain, the architect of the virtual.

Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?

Our ‘direct’ experience of the world through our senses is virtual reality too. For our external experience is never direct; nor do we even experience the signals in our nerves directly — we would not know what to make of the streams of electrical crackles that they carry. What we experience directly is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious minds from sensory data plus complex inborn and acquired theories (i.e. programs) about how to interpret them… Every last scrap of our external experience is of virtual reality. And every last scrap of our knowledge… is encoded in the form of programs for the rendering of those worlds on our brain’s own virtual-reality generator.

Louis Menand paraphrases the American philosopher Charles Peirce on the enigmatic and ultimately unknowable nature of reality,

There was no way to hook up ideas with things, Peirce thought, because ideas — mental representations — do not refer to things; they refer to other mental representations. When we hear the word “tree,” we do not perceive an actual tree; we perceive the conception of a tree that already exists in our minds.

As Heraclitus, the great Presocratic philosopher and change bringer, once put it: “Nature loves to hide.”³ This is the illusion. Even with the aid of the mighty scientific method, the cunning truth recedes from view, and all we’re left with is another clue. The great quest to rend the Veil and grasp the ultimate Real is, for all intents and purposes, a dead end (feel free to disagree with me and go down this metaphysical yellow brick road — but watch your step).

There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see — Edward Fitzgerald

All life forms evolved behind their own veils, past which they could not see. All of us possess some fragment of a larger truth we can never wholly grasp. Our senses evolved not to understand the world, but to improve our chances of survival. On a cosmic scale, it is only recently as a species that we’ve created the scientific tools to see further. We’ve turned our scientific minds toward nature, allowing us not just to survive, but to thrive.

You interpret shadows — Image credit: Fulvio Spada

We’ve established that, right now, you huddle in the shadowy recesses of your senses’ camera obscura, tirelessly puzzling over the moving pictures of reality your sensory apparatus casts on the white canvas of your mind’s eye. All you see is pictures. You are Plato’s shackled prisoner in the world of pictures, forced to interpret alien shadows flickering over the cave wall you face, without any “real” knowledge of their underlying causes.

Just as when you sleep, your brain dreams a dream which you simultaneously believe, your own virtual reality is such a plausible rendering of the Outside that you suspend your own disbelief and fall for its story. In other words, you believe what you see is real, when it is not — take note, flat-earthers.

The camera obscura, a room with an aperture or hole in one wall, focusing light from outside into an image — Image credit: unknown

Why do you want to know what’s behind the Veil?

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality. — Nikos Kazantzakis

You try anyway, and you can better understand your experience by increasing your pixel resolution. Since your pixel lens bends reality, your interpretation requires continual reflection and revision if you are to arrive at a more solid understanding of what’s behind the Veil. And for this, you’ve got a quality for which, luckily, humanity is notorious:

But if thou thyself hast a will to listen, let them bind thee in the swift ship… Homer, The Odyssey (Murray, 1919) — John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891

Curiosity: the yearning for the siren song, the hunger for knowledge, “the art of asking questions.” (Manguel, 2016). In his exposition of Ulysses and Dante’s human nature, Alberto Manguel elucidates their respective journeys in search of the ultimate truth (emphasis mine),

Ulysses’ quest leads him physically into a maelstrom that swirls his ship around three times and then closes the sea over the crew; Dante’s leads him poetically to the final point of coherence.

‘There in its depths I saw

gathered with love in a single volume

the leaves that through the universe have been scattered.’

Dante’s vision, in spite (or because) of its immensity, prevents him from translating that volume into comprehensible words; he sees it but he cannot read it. Assembling books we mirror Dante’s gesture, but because no single human book can fully translate the universe, our quests resemble Ulysses’ quest… Every one of our achievements opens up new doubts and tempts us with new quests, condemning us for ever to a state of inquiring and exhilarating unease. This is curiosity’s inherent paradox.

There in its depths I saw gathered with love in a single volume the leaves that through the universe have been scattered (Longfellow, 1867) — Gustave Doré, The Empyrean, 1868

This echoes the famed Socratic paradox: the more you know, the more you know that you know nothing, to which must be added a postscript: the more you wish to know, the more you come to know — fearless questions and childlike wonder unspool like two golden threads; first follow the thread of questions into the heart of wonder; then follow the thread of wonder to the heart of wisdom. Wise up: There’s a world to know!

Any discovery at all is thrilling. There is no feeling more pleasant, no drug more addictive, than setting foot on virgin soil. — E. O. Wilson

Deep within the labyrinths of your mind— Photo by Daniel Burka on Unsplash

You have come a long way. You’ve leapt over the rift between the real and the virtual, and followed the thread undaunted deep into the labyrinths of your mind. At last, you find yourself face to face with the shining twin cores of curiosity’s blazing engine:

  • The correspondence gap between what you observe and expect, and
  • the coherence gap within your existing repertoire of pixels — a nagging doubt that two or more of your beliefs may contradict one another.

These are the whirring dynamos that generate “pixel delta”, the difference between what you see and believe.

Pixel delta: you’ve felt its pull before — that overpowering intuitive current in the ocean of curiosity carrying you away to distant shores; the nagging cognitive dissonance demanding that you close the two gaps by asking ‘Why?!’ Pixel delta drives you to set out like a modern day Dante or Ulysses (albeit with better instruments, and hopefully better luck) in search of the sharper pixels with which to refine, or overthrow, your incomplete or obsolete model. For Kuhn,

Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated… normal science...[This] opens a period in which conceptual categories are adjusted until the initially anomalous has become the anticipated.

You’ve witnessed pixel delta in the observations that drove Darwin to break with creationism in favour of natural selection, Copernicus to overthrow geocentrism with heliocentrism, or Einstein to displace Newton’s theory of gravitation with his own general theory of relativity. Each of these luminaries observed anomalies in their supposedly self-evident pixels, made intuitive leaps outside the world they knew, conceived of conceptual models that corresponded and cohered with their observations, and brought these shiny pixels back, shifting all of science to a whole new paradigm in the process.

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why. — Albert Einstein

Armed with your versatile array of scientific pixels, not even the most complex phenomena you observe may withstand your razor-sharp mind. If you think about it, this ever-present Delta between the virtual and the real is the limitless source of fuel that powers your blazing engine of curiosity. Without this difference, you would not ask why, for there would be nothing new to know. How sad such a static world would be.

The motivation to minimise the difference between what you think you know and what is out there is in essence the distillation of humanity’s curiosity. It is the primary catalyst in your scientific search for meaning — this impetus is your inheritance, Human. It is your burning urge to ask why, to ponder the great questions, to sail beyond the sunset, where none have yet set hoof, claw, foot or tentacle — to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die (Tennyson, 1833) — Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

In Part III., we bring to life a universe using only our imagination, steal fire from the gods, and slice the world into pixels with this one groundbreaking principle of scientific inquiry:


Glossary of terms:

  • Coherence gap: an (internal) measure of the relative truth of a statement based on whether or not it coheres with related statements.
  • Correspondence gap: an (external) measure of the objective truth of a statement based on how close it corresponds to something in the world.
  • Deductive reasoning: reasoning from general premises to a specific, certain conclusion.
  • Delta (Δ): the quantitative difference between two states, admitting of change.
  • Pixel: a rather loose conceptual metaphor for the building block of all knowledge, referring to real or imaginary entities, processes and properties.
  • Pixel delta: an unresolved difference between two pixels, i.e., what you think you know, and what your data tells you.
  • Pixel lens: the conceptual model through which you experience reality, comprised of a multiplicity of pixels.
  • Empiricism: the epistemic position that nothing can be known about reality without relying on the senses.
  • Inductive reasoning: Reasoning from evidence supplied by specific observations to a general, probable conclusion.
  • Veil (of Isis): the barrier separating the mind from nature’s truths.

References:

  1. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. 1962. University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print
  2. Heraclitus. Fragments. Penguin classics, 2003. Print
  3. Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications. Penguin books, 1998. Print
  4. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. Farar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002. Print
  5. Manguel, Alberto. Curiosity. 2015. Yale University Press, 2016. Print
  6. Tennyson, Alfred. Ulysses. 1833. Poetry Foundation, 2017. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses. 22 Aug. 2017. Web


About the author:


Fires In Our Minds

It begins with a seed: That we wish to know; that we can in fact know. Fires In Our Minds seeks to share our passion for cross-boundary science, tech, philosophy & poetry, reunite the scientific and literary spheres, promote a generalist mindset and cross-pollinate amazing ideas.

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Nicolas Benjamin

Written by

Fires In Our Minds

It begins with a seed: That we wish to know; that we can in fact know. Fires In Our Minds seeks to share our passion for cross-boundary science, tech, philosophy & poetry, reunite the scientific and literary spheres, promote a generalist mindset and cross-pollinate amazing ideas.

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