Ken’s Blog

Two times in the last few days people close to me have done things that seemed to me, in the moment, really destructive, or aggressive, or self-destructive, or potentially self-sabotaging, or some combination of all of the above. In both cases I responded by feeling anger, but pretty much backing away from the situation in the moment, until I could find time to process my feelings.

It’s not so much that I am afraid of expressing anger. It’s more that I don’t want to say things that I don’t really mean, based on some unformed mental model of what’s going on. After all, it’s a lot easier to make situations worse than it is to make them better.

In both cases I eventually got to a place in my own head where I could separate myself from what had happened. One conclusion I’ve reached from this is that I often become angry at people when they act out of some subconscious directive that seems destructive or self-destructive. And that’s a mistake on my part.

It’s a mistake because I am generally assuming, in that moment, that they know what’s going on. “If it’s obvious even to me what game they are playing here,” I tell myself, “then surely it is obvious to them!”

But no, it is not obvious to them. They don’t know what game they are playing. They don’t even know they are playing a game. That’s the whole point with this subconscious thing.

We all sometimes do or say the most absurd things, and the people around us may be mortified, yet we yourselves may have no idea, in that moment, that we have crossed any boundaries. Because it’s our subconscious doing it, acting out of some important emotional need that our conscious mind cannot access.

Our subconscious, of course, really sucks as a long term planner. So when it decides to take action, it will often do so in ways that will come across to other people as very agressive or self-destructive, or at the very least unsettling.

On the other hand, these subconscious minds of ours are pretty darned awesome. For one thing, without them we probably wouldn’t fall in love all that much, and the human race would have died out long ago. So when they end up popping up in the darnedest places, I guess we should cut them some slack.

have you ever tried
to catch that exact moment
when you fall asleep?

I was having a conversation today with some colleagues, where we were discussing a proposed virtual reality experience. As you may know, I am particularly keen on VR experiences that people share with each other, rather than ones they experience on their own.

So at some point in the conversation I said: “Reality is what we all agree it is.” After I said this, it struck me that this way of framing things is actually quite useful.

To be human is to be in a world of other humans. If your concept of reality differs in some essential way from everyone else’s, then you are alienated. Most people in that situation are quite unhappy, and find it hard to function.

When we are little children, we usually believe that “reality” is a fixed thing, tied mainly to the physical: This is a rock, that’s a tree. But as we grow up, we start to understand that the aspects of reality that really matter to us are the ones that allow us to interact with other people.

So as technology evolves, “reality” evolves along with it. In 2016, it is perfectly reasonable for you and me to have a conversational chat even when we are thousands of miles apart. In Shakespeare’s day that would not have been reasonable.

The same principle applies to all of the magical-sounding things that will soon become possible thanks to virtual and augmented reality. They won’t seem magical at all to people who grow up with them. They will simply be ordinary aspects of reality.

Because there is one thing about human existence that never changes: Reality is what we all agree it is.

I’ve gotten into a habit recently when I watch TV, and I can’t tell whether it’s a good thng or not. As I am viewing a show, several times an episode I will find myself saying the next line just before the actor says it. This seems to work pretty much every time, for high quality shows as well as for silly action shows.

Does this mean the shows are bad? I mean, if you can predict the next line of dialog, doesn’t that mean something’s wrong with how these shows are written?

I’m not so sure. In fact, I think that very predictability is deliberately written in. At the end of the day, TV shows are comfort food. We don’t watch them to change our life. We watch them as a source of reliable entertainment. What that little screen really wants to tell us is that our world makes sense.

Sure, bad things happen to people on TV. But they happen in a safely fictional universe. And next week our fictional friends are right back on that screen again to tell us more stories.

Note that this rhythm is quite different from that of cinema. A film can afford to shake you up, to mess with your head in the service of art. Nobody is expecting you to come back the following week to see the next episode.

And so that little voice in my head that tells me the next line of dialog is probably no accident. The writers of TV shows want you to feel at home, to believe that you are hanging out with old familiar friends, with people you know so well that you can finish their sentences.

If nothing else, that makes it a lot easier to sell you stuff. 🙂

If you look at the puzzle piece I showed yesterday within the Soma cube (the Soma cube was invented by Piet Hein in 1936), you can see that it takes up 4 out of the 27 positions in the assembled 3x3x3 cube:

I am showing each of the component cubes as transparent blue, except for those inside the puzzle piece, which I am showing as transparent white. You can see that the puzzle piece traces a path first right, then back, then down.

Showing the parts of a 4D hypercube puzzle is a little trickier. I don’t just want to show an exploded view, because I’d like the player to be able to see the puzzle as though it were a physical object, and rotate it interactively.

So in addition to left/right, down/up, and back/forward, I am adding the additional dimension of in/out. You can think of it as a kind of extra perspective dimension, as though things look smaller as they retreat away from us into this fourth dimension.

Looked at this way, here is a puzzle piece within the 4D hypercube puzzle. You can see that it takes up 5 out of the 16 positions in the assembled 4x4x4x4 hypercube:

Again, I am showing each of the component hypercubes as transparent blue, except for those inside the puzzle piece, which I am showing as transparent white. You can see that the puzzle piece traces a path first out, then right, then back, then down.

I have been playing around with creating a particular kind of simple four dimensional puzzle. And I’ve been trying to keep it as simple as possible,.

You may have seen those 3D puzzles where you need to assemble several pieces, each of which consists of several little cubes glued together, to form a single larger 3x3x3 cube. In that puzzle, the pieces can look something like the shape below (which consists of four little cubes):

I’m working on the same thing for four dimensions, except for a 2x2x2x2 hypercube. The equivalent of the above puzzle piece would consist of five hypercubes glued together, and the larger hypercube would consist of 16 little hypercubes altogether.

Of course you can’t build a 4D puzzle in the physical world, but you can build it in virtual reality. So that’s at least one thing VR is good for. 🙂

At some point in the last few months I found myself typing the words trump news into Google, to learn about the latest outrageous event. At first I thought that I was the only one doing this. But I have come to realize, after talking with a number of friends and colleagues, that a lot of people are doing pretty much the same thing.

We all seem to have started doing this independently. Only afterward did we find out that the people around us have been doing it too.

It’s like standing on the shore and staring off into the distance at a ship that is slowly sinking down into the ocean. Sure, it’s a disturbing sight, but you really can’t look away.

Each time the next crazy thing happened, I’d think to myself that this would the limit. Things couldn’t possibly get nuttier. If a candidate for President of the United States has already declared that he wants to build a three thousand mile long wall and deport all our nation’s Muslim citizens, how could he ever top that?

But then he says that Brexit will be great for the UK economy, and then he says that Vladimir Putin is the best ally of the U.S, and then he decides not to endorse Paul Ryan in the GOP primary, and then he gets into a personal grudge match with parents of a slain US soldier, and then he doesn’t know that Russia invated Ukraine, and then, and then, and then…

He has now coyly suggested that gun toting NRA supporters should “take care of” Hillary Clinton . What could he possibly say to top that?

Part of me thinks there is no way he could say something even more disturbing or scary during this election cycle. But another part of me realizes that there really are no limits here.

I guess, for the next 88 days, I’m going to keep doing those Google searches.

I went with a friend this evening to see Then She Fell, loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This is an immersive theater experience in which every audience member is taken on a unique journey.

We were split up at some point, but that was ok. At the end, my friend and I got to compare notes, which was part of the fun.

She and I had had nearly the same experience, as it turned out, but not quite. For one thing, we had seen things in a different order. Ultimately though, that didn’t matter, because it wasn’t so much a story, as it was a journey. Narrative is powerful, but so is sensory immersion. Then She Fell is definitely the latter.

One day it might be interesting to see this sort of thing in virtual reality. Some obstacles remain though, maybe insurmountable ones. Eye contact, for one. Every time an actor in Then She Fell looked at you, he or she was really looking at you. You could feel a powerful sense of being seen, of the fourth crumbling in that moment.

Only real life can do that, at least for now. Ultimately though, who knows what will become possible? Someday theater may escape the bounds of physical reality entirely.

Old ideas of “live performance” may eventually need to be replaced by new ones. Perhaps this will be a good thing, or perhaps not. Hopefully, what is essential will always remain.

I am optimistic. As ever. 🙂

In yesterday’s post I posed the following question:

If I spend a lot of time nurturing a character in a computer game, and that character “dies”, is my feeling of loss fundamentally different from my feeling of loss if a person in my life dies?

For me the answer is yes. As I mentioned yesterday, I was surprised to learn that not everyone agrees.

I see the fundamental difference as this: In the former case, I am the only mind to consider. Yet in the latter case, I am dealing with an entire other sentient being, one with feelings toward me that more or less match my own. I have lost a reciprocal relationship.

Surely there must be a fundamental difference between the loss of such a connection, and, say, the loss of a favorite wristwatch. I claim the two situations are very different. But perhaps someone has a good argument for why the two situations are fundamentally the same.

I had a very profound conversation with a colleague this evening about the difference between our relationship with our fellow humans and our relationship with artificial beings.

If I spend a lot of time nurturing a character in a computer game, and that character “dies”, is my feeling of loss fundamentally different from my feeling of loss if a person in my life dies?

To me the answer is obviously yes. To my colleague the question — and its resolution — was more nuanced, which surprised me.

I’m still thinking this over, and I will probably have more to stay on the subject tomorrow.