Philosophy of noise

I was in a conversation yesterday in which the subject came up of how science interacts with the prevailing metaphysics of society. For example, the 1st century B.C. poem On the Nature of Things by Lucretius was rediscovered fifteen hundred years later, an event which injected Epicurean philosophy into European thought, leading to various modern, essentially atheist, views that the universe is directed of the movement of atoms — not by the will of gods.

At first blush, it would seem that my own research on procedural texturing and modeling has been similarly Epicurean, since it builds up the world around us from a set of essentially random primitives. But that’s not quite right. In fact the core idea of my approach to procedural modeling is that any observable signal can be perceptually modeled by some appropriate noise-based function — as long as it is a noise-based function that imparts the same subjective impression as the original signal.

This is very freeing. For example, to model the shape and movement of a cloud or fire, we don’t need to compute the actual Navier-Stokes equations for turbulent flow. We only need to understand how people perceive clouds and fire as sets of somewhat noisy signals.

So really, my texture work isn’t so much an expression of atheism as it is of phenomenalism, in that the true nature of the world outside of humans simply doesn’t matter, apart from its effect on our own human perception.

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