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Magic

When I was young I thought about consciousness and the various ways people present reality to themselves and others. I studied literature because I was interested in perception - not so much in stories, but in the way characters were presented and scenes were described. I thought I wanted to write fiction but realized I wasn't much of a storyteller. Though I could write well, I wasn't into plot, the construction of conflict and resolution. I wanted to show people as they are (so I started writing nonfiction instead). Spinning forward, my later career has focused on social networking, communication, and community-building, all stemming from my fascination with the social construction of reality.

The New York Times has a great article called "Sleight of Mind," about a recent gathering of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Las Vegas. The subject of discussion: how show biz magic leverages perceptual constraints to hack our assumptions about reality. They talked about things like qualia, "the raw, subjective sense we have of colors, sounds, tastes, touches and smells."

The crunch of the crostini, the slitheriness of the penne alla vodka — a question preoccupying philosophers is where these personal experiences fit within a purely physical theory of the mind.

That's the mystery: if we're just meat, where does that poetry come from? How can we imagine something like "spirit," if we're really just a bag of chemicals simmering at 98.6 degrees fahrenheit? Being conscious of consciousness takes you to the heart of the mystery.

Toward the end of the article, the author runs into philosopher Daniel Dennett.

If the hardware and software could be made sophisticated enough, there would be no functional difference, Dr. Dennett suggested, between a human oenophile and the machine. So where inside the circuitry are the ineffable qualia?

Retreating to a bar at the Imperial Palace, we talked about a different mystery he had been pondering: the role words play inside the brain. Learn a bit of wine speak — "ripe black plums with an accent of earthy leather" — and you are suddenly equipped with anchors to pin down your fleeting gustatory impressions. Words, he suggested, are "like sheepdogs herding ideas."

As he sipped his drink he tried out another metaphor, involving a gold panning technique he had learned about in New Zealand. Lead and gold are similar in density. If you salt the slurry with buck shot and swirl the pan around, the dark pellets will track the elusive flecks of gold.

With a grab bag of devices accumulated over the eons, the brain pulls off the ultimate conjuring act: the subjective sense of I.

"Stage magicians know that a collection of cheap tricks will often suffice to produce 'magic,' " Dr. Dennett has written, "and so does Mother Nature, the ultimate gadgeteer."

jon posted this at 5:53 PM
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