SpiralTruth

Alan Watts was one of my favourite philosophers and I think his talks on zen are absolutely essential for anyone in the western world who hopes to understand the discipline. If you listen to enough of his talks, you’ll find that they tend to repeat a few central themes that Watts was obsessed with – the notion of irreducible rascality, buddhism as a dialog, the perils of being too serious about life, and so on. Some may find this repetition annoying – evidence that Watts never had all that much to say. I find it endearing. The man had his issues, but he understood a few things about life very well, and he chose to focus on those things, patiently explaining them in as many ways possible to as many as he could. One of my favourite talks, mainly due to its relevance in today’s very fast paced, technology-driven world is the “Reproduction” talk. And it goes something like this…

From very early on, humans have been obsessed with reproducing reality. First, there were the painters who would try to capture it on canvas. And, depending on how good the artist was, a painting could represent a person, place, or thing very faithfully. Someone who had never met that person, never been there, or never seen that thing could get a pretty good idea of what they were like…

Eventually, we invented the camera. At first, it was blurry and cumbersome, but in terms of being able to capture and store reality, it was a giant leap forward. Blurry as it was, it helped keep that memory of “Grandpa” sharp in our minds…

Add some colour to that photo and you have an even better representation of reality.

But to truly know some people, you had to know how they moved. A static photograph could never capture what it was like to be around them. And so we came up with the motion picture and we could see them move over and over and over again.

You can probably see where this is going. Add sound to the motion picture. And colour again. Add more definition to the picture. All of this in an effort to make it more like you were really there. All in an effort to capture reality and play the good parts over and over again.

Here’s where it gets a little more interesting…

It’s conceivable that we will eventually move the motion picture into a three dimensional reproduction of reality. Back in the sixties, Watts talked about holograms, but it could be VR helmets, implants hooking directly into the visual cortex, contact lenses that allow us to overlay our vision with something pre-programmed, or even something like those silly Roy Orbison-like glasses I had to wear to watch the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (or any of the other 3D movies that are in vogue again).

And after we manage to completely virtualize vision, won’t we go on to touch, taste, and smell? That’s kind of how these things go. We hit technical barriers from time to time, but driving us through them is this intense obsession with making our own realities, being able to save them, replay them, remix them, and so on.

But what about when we manage to do all that? What then? You have total control over your reality, and you’ve effectively dreamed thousands of dreams in whatever you think Paradise is. You’ve experienced it all to the point of it all becoming completely boring. What could you possibly do to bring back the excitement?

Watts suggests that what you would do is figure out how to trick yourself into forgetting that what you were experiencing wasn’t real. If you could immerse yourself into a great story without knowing what the outcome would be or how the characters in it would react to you – well, that would be an adventure, wouldn’t it?

Conquering nations, saving damsels in distress, and all the other typical adventures would eventually become boring too, of course, even when you were convinced that they were real. You’d eventually realize that to make winning truly fun, there has to be the possibility of losing. And the more you go on a particular type of adventure, and the more you go on adventures that you always win, the less adventurous they become.

So the next step is to make the story more complex, to avoid all the stereotypical heros, villains, settings, and plots, to become more and more lost in a “real” story. And given the pace of technology, it’s likely if we ever got to this point that we would be able to do it a lot. It would be like dreaming a new life for yourself every night. Except, the dream would have such high fidelity that you wouldn’t even think to question its reality until you “woke up” from it.

After building it up to this point, letting our imaginations soar with the possibilities, and making the idea of living in a virtual world so real that we almost begin to wonder if we’re in one right now, Watts lets us in on his game: “And so here you are at this lecture, not having the slightest clue as to what you really are.” (or something like that!)

Because this is what Watts is suggesting – that you are someone or something else who has decided that it would be fun to play you for a while and that will play another complex human being with a completely different set of hangups, expectations, talents, and dreams when this “life” is over.

Well, he’s not really suggesting it. He’s just saying that it could be the case, that it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for the way things are. And if it makes life more exciting or more bearable than another worldview, then why not look at things this way?

Those with a background in Hinduism will see parallels to Brahman (which is basically seen as a consciousness behind everything that dreams us all up). And Watts tells a similar story with him: If you were a being with infinite power to do anything and an infinite lifespan, what would you do? His suggestion is that you would eventually try to forget that you were the supreme being you really were, to convince yourself you were something ordinary, and then eventually wake up to your true nature.

I like that story too. Perhaps I’ll write it up at another time. But for now, I’ll let you all wrap your heads around this one as we get closer and closer to reproducing reality on our own terms.