Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Imagination And The Bias of Set and Setting

Imagine a small room with five people in it who knew only the others who were gathered in it, and beyond this facet of that odd fact, all they knew was what were the furnishings contained within it as well. All of them, due to the nature of this situation carried on a continual dialog as to the nature of their own situation and everything they discussed was recorded. Perhaps this room was made of bone and was a human skull.
Then, they simply vanished while the room remained essentially the same and five more, new inhabitants entered the room and began a extension of the original conversation that due to the vanishing of the original participants was the same conversation in a discontinuous format. They eventually find the recording and while the basis of the conversation was the same as far as the questions, considerations posed, as well as other parameters, by comparing their own conversations with the previous one, they were surprised that some of their own ideas were not factored into the original conversation. Memory, variability, set and setting and discontinuity as existential props for the gist of the conversation, while the language remains invariable as far as the semiotic cues that form the architecture of that reality by way of referents. Perhaps this imaginary situation was conceptualized centuries ago and instead of a human skull, the room was envisioned as a cave.

"The idea of an observation selection effect is maybe best explained by first considering the simpler concept of a selection effect. Let's say you're trying to estimate how large the largest fish in a given pond is, and you use a net to catch a hundred fish and the biggest fish you find is three inches long. You might be tempted to infer that the biggest fish in this pond is not much bigger than three inches, because you've caught a hundred of them and none of them are bigger than three inches. But if it turns out that your net could only catch fish up to a certain length, then the measuring instrument that you used would introduce a selection effect: it would only select from a subset of the domain you were trying to sample.

Now that's a kind of standard fact of statistics, and there are methods for trying to correct for it and you obviously have to take that into account when considering the fish distribution in your pond. An observation selection effect is a selection effect introduced not by limitations in our measurement instrument, but rather by the fact that all observations require the existence of an observer. This becomes important, for instance, in evolutionary biology. For instance, we know that intelligent life evolved on Earth. Naively, one might think that this piece of evidence suggests that life is likely to evolve on most Earth-like planets. But that would be to overlook an observation selection effect. For no matter how small the proportion of all Earth-like planets that evolve intelligent life, we will find ourselves on a planet that did."

-Dr Nick Bostrom

Mistaking a referent for a measurement. I am reminded of Einstein when I ruminate on the fact that the most elegant ( simple) questions are the most profound. The same would apply to the answers that remain tenuous. Overwriting or superimposition by way of scripting in narratives reminds me of a channel wherein the flow. the forces, the parameters of the plastic fluidity of the medium carried within it are measured within an architecture incapable of measuring itself.
I wrote this and you are reading it but it is not a conversation and what we exchange is a set and a setting, and what lies between them that we cannot ascertain is the force that is a driving wheel to this dynamic, not what we already "know".
What we could learn has a delimited potential comparatively, if all of this could be reconfigured as to the set and setting but it cannot because of the room we sharing the habitation of has dictated the terminology of our dialog as well as the potential of a greater coherence.
However there is a force we term imagination that is the basis of deconstruction as well as allowing or more accurately, reconfiguring the categories that allow us to consider "impossible" possibilities that have an existence and yet are not materialized by referents, whether by our senses nor by language. Consider the utility of imagination as well as it's architecture and how it may inform our study of the paranormal. Consider that language at it's root is a self organizing form and dynamic of raw energy and that imagination is the recombinant genome of a certain transference between language and another equally vital realm that is embryonic to potential in the relationship between the observer dynamic and the resultant effects of how one has observed or measured the referents of observation, in terms of novelty versus the limited aspects of the channel we move along within, being unable to measure it by our own architecture.
Herein lies perhaps an unknown force that turns the liminal axis of the paranormal between the observable and strange effects of a deconstructive and recombinant agency that can create a bridge between the material and the immaterial, the possible and the impossible, between logic and dream scapes. In other words imagination may exist beyond the parameters we assign to it by observer selection effect.
If this is so, we have no language for this. It is neither fish nor fowl nor flesh.
As a isthmus variant of prosaic caricaturisation, it is both observable and yet is not, and yet what is seen and what is not seen from this platform is intrinsically variants of the same modality in terms of the depth of materialization and the breath of being recognizable all of which is based upon relationships of comparability otherwise, it would never be "noticed" in it's liminal dynamic.
One could consider that there is absolutely no separation of any contingency except by the act of observation.

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