What is Reality? #9 #cong23 #reality

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1. Humanity is incredible for their collective ability to create and imagine.
2. Reality is defined by our collective narrative and stories.
3. Reality is a collision between the observable and the imagined.
4. Shaping reality, especially in the day/age of AI and all of its permutations, must be grounded in who we are as creative, sentimental beings.

Dave Graham is a research technologist and the technology advocate lead for Dell Technologies’ Office of Research where he focuses on how technologies are integrated into organizations, society, and their potential for global transformation.  He is currently working on his PhD at University College Dublin – SMARTLab looking at how data is used to increase social agency.

You can follow Dave’s daily musings on Post.News, read his Substack thoughts or check out his photography on Instagram

By Dave Graham

What is reality?

Take a look at the picture presented here. What do you observe?

On first pass, I’m sure that you notice the line of separation down the horizon, separating the two halves of the picture. There are coloured leaves, resplendent in their autumnal finery; the water is still, reflecting mirror-like the sky and the traces of flora that find themselves front and center in this idyllic scene. It’s a tranquility that speaks of preparation, of stillness, of potential. It’s a capture of reality.

On second look, there are perhaps other things that catch your eye: the darkened corners, the almost too-reflective water on the lower half of the picture, the slight blurring of leaves on the trees. There seems to be an almost casual distortion in parts of the image as if some digital thumb swooped in and mucked about with the pixels, upsetting their natural order.

Your brain has determined one of two things in this moment:
1. This is nothing more than a picture showing a tree reflected in the water.
2. There is something amiss with this picture which may mean it’s altered or generated.

So, which is it: which explanation is real?

The human brain is an amazing computational instrument. It can reason, project, control, and otherwise fuse together thousands of inputs at once, creating an awareness, a synthesis of understanding. It’s something that philosophers and scientists throughout the ages have struggled to fully understand and, of late, have attempted to model in silicon and hardware to create things like artificial intelligence and neural networks. The complexity of our creation belies the infinitely complex interconnections between chemicals, electrical signaling, and perhaps, a deeper unseen aspect. Whatever is composed out of the chaos of our cortices, it holds true that we are masters of narrative, of creation, of reality.

The picture you see here was captured no less than 24 hours before writing this piece, near a pond a scant few kilometers from my residence. The fall air was still, the water placid, and the leaves on the maples and birches were stunning. As I leaned over the water, watching for the reflections to align just-so, I was rewarded with momentary calm and reality was captured.

With a slight tweak to colour (I prefer my reality a bit darker than lighter), I noticed that the image was a perfect mirror of itself. That up could be down and down, up. That reality wasn’t constrained to the cardinal directions of captured 3 dimensional space: it could exist completely upside down or right side up. Would the story change, I wondered, and would it represent the same truths of the moment in which I observed it?

I created a reality out of a momentary capture of photons hitting an electrical sensor and simultaneously my optic nerves. My brain flipped the image, letting my neurons do the dirty work of interpreting the scene in meaningful ways. On my laptop, I engaged in digital arbitrage, exchanging light for dark, up for down, reality for a narrative of my own devising. I created the foil for today’s story, an image to back a narrative, a device.

Reality is what we define it to be. I’ve provided my version of reality through an image here: I’ve taken a pastoral scene, flipped it upside down, and made you consider what I’ve done. If you were casually browsing through a collection of photos, you’d more than likely miss what I had done. You’d have seen the darkened corners, the slight blurring and perhaps ascribed an artist’s aesthetic to it: “Ah, this photographer didn’t get their focus correct” or “It’s a bit dark…why do they edit it like that?” It’s easy to pass over because this slice of reality doesn’t jar the senses, doesn’t force a fusion of sight, sound, touch, and emotion. It just is.

The struggle with our definition of reality is that there is an inevitable collision between our reality and that of others.The galling violence we’ve seen displayed via various media outlets over the last year point to this very ideal. There’s a collision between the reality of our daily lives and that of the greater world around us. Our inoculation from war, from violence, from the depravity of humanity allows us to very narrowly define reality to what is directly in front of us, what we can taste, touch, smell, see. When confronted by an outside reality, we have no box to put it in; it affronts our hallowed senses, our stories and we are galled by it.

Reality, then, is a construct of our imagination, composed of our senses and assembled together from the rudiments of experience. It’s a constant metering and evaluation of what lies before us: the click of these keys, the movement of letters on a screen to form words, the vibrant beauty of an idyll captured not so long ago. It’s a story composed for an unconference, a stroll through the meadows of a caffeine-and-ADHD addled mind, and the ideas that reality is a creation, beautifully ugly, of our own devising.

I suppose the grand challenge (and what I’ll leave you with today) is to understand more how reality is shaped: by experience, by novelty, by intersection and to make it life-defining. I challenge you to understand how your reality is shaped by the stories of others and the stories you write for yourself. How can the tide of humanity’s experience be channeled to create a more wholesome reality for all while simultaneously be true to the story of its creation?

Thoughts for another day, another unconference, another journey through the solemnity of the woods outside my domicile, in a world that is more upside down than right-side up in my reality.

May it ever be so.