All Most Reality

   What we perceive as reality is quite likely fools gold, or at least it could be viewed as such.  Software has become quite adept as manipulating what we do or don't see, much in the way that data compression works, both in what we view and what we hear.  A typical MP3 recording removes approximately 70% of the "unnecessary" (to our ears, anyway) audio; and for video it is even more striking as explained in this fashion from Quartz: Discrete Cosine Transform is then used to “map an image space into a frequency.”  This is where the math gets complicated, though the idea is simple: identify the least-necessary information in the picture and get rid of it.  Low-frequency parts of the image represent gradual color change, like the sky; high-frequency parts represent lots of color changes in a small space, like leaves on a distant tree.  Viewers notice if you skimp on the former; less so on the latter.  The DCT process identifies what you can safely get rid of.  It gets even more complicated (a new compression service is on the way) but basically it comes down to some of what we view or hear as "reality" is for the most part only a small portion of it.  And by now you're probably wondering just who those people are in the pictures and what do they all have to do with  this.  Well, those "people" were created by a computer and don't really exist.*

   Which brings us to the remake of The Lion King.  I recently went to see it in 3D since 1) I had never see the original movie or play and basically wanted to know what all the fuss was about, especially with all this Elton John stuff being revived; and 2) it was all filmed in virtual reality first, then film cameras later (what??).  And unlike computer graphics where tidal waves crash over the White House, this method of creating movies was being labeled "the future of cinema."  Here's how the piece in WIRED explained it: Favreau (Jon Favreau whom you may remember from being Pete Becker in Friends and from directing Elf) and his crew shot The Lion King as one would any conventional movie: with dollies, cranes, and other tools that let cinematographer Caleb Deschanel get just the right angles.  There were even lights and cameras.  It’s just that the cameras and lights were nowhere to be found...A decade ago, James Cameron’s Avatar pioneered a technique in which actors wearing motion-capture suits could be filmed inside digital backgrounds in real time.  Later, on films like Ready Player One and Solo: A Star Wars Story, filmmakers started using VR headsets to examine the virtual world and even plan shots.  What Jon Favreau has cooked up for The Lion King transforms VR from a handy filmmaking accessory into a high-powered, improvisational medium in itself—a Pete Becker–sized leap forward and a stirring reminder that VR is changing the world in ways you don’t need a headset to see.  If I didn't know the background of the film or how it was made, I would wonder just what exactly I was watching and how did they film it --the cascading waterfalls, the sparks of fire floating in the air, the stampede of endless wildebeests, the closeups of each animal, the camera in the center of a herd of zebras-- in parts it was as if I were on an actual safari (in my opinion).  One only has to glimpse at the promotional image below where nothing is real, not the lions or the sky or the plants or the rocky soil that tumbles away beneath you.

Promotional image from the remake of Disney's The Lion King

    The BBC series on underground Italy perhaps shows this method in a simpler fashion (although there is nothing simple about it) as their laser scanners track tunnels and pathways down to the centimeter and somehow put it all together in a ghostly fashion.   In the episode on Venice, the host wears his virtual reality headset and stands on the top floor of a building where certain people (such as Casanova) were tortured, but he is able to peer through the floor and see the elaborate guest suite just below.  When he asks to view it he merely moves his head and, as if in an elevator going down, moves through the flooring and arrives comfortably in the lower room, now staring above at the beautiful fresco adorning the ceiling (and telling you, the viewer, that guests here would have no idea of what was happening just above them).  An earlier episode on Naples takes you through an entire underground city, one built and later buried when Vesuvius erupted, and one on which the current cities of the Naples area sits; the virtual reality allows you to interpose the two cities as you go from underground amphitheater to above ground plaza...the two somehow working in conjunction, just one being history and the other being what is now.

    Which brings us to déjà vu (French for "already seen").  Said this in an earlier piece in Quartz: While déjà vu is instantaneous and fleeting, déjà vécu (already lived) is far more troubling.  Unlike déjà vu, déjà vécu involves the sensation that a whole sequence of events has been lived through before.  What’s more, it lacks both the startling aspect and instantly dismissible quality of déjà vu.  A defining feature of the normal déjà vu experience is the ability to discern that it isn’t real.  On encountering déjà vu, the brain runs a sort of sense check, searching for objective evidence of the prior experience and then disregarding it as the illusion that it is.  People with déjà vécu have been known to lose this ability completely.  A piece in 2006 from The New York Times put it this way: Take a moment to remember what happened during your day yesterday.  Images and sounds begin to flash through your mind: people you spoke to, places you went, meals you ate.  One scene cues up another, leading you on vivid tangents as you cycle through the day.  Now ask yourself: how do you know that you are remembering those images as they happened, not altering or inventing them?  The question sounds inane at first; you were there, after all.  But what is it about those images that makes them authentic to you?  Try inserting a completely false memory into your day, say that of running into a celebrity.  You can picture it, sure, but it doesn't feel real.  Why not?  Memory, like most systems we depend on continually, tends to fade into the background when it's working properly.  Only when it fails or misleads us do we begin to ponder its mechanisms.  The structure of memory has for centuries been one of psychology's most intractable mysteries.  To the extent that science claimed to understand it at all, memory was seen as a kind of filing cabinet in which recollections were neatly stored, retrieved on demand and occasionally misplaced. neatly stored, retrieved on demand and occasionally misplaced.  The research of the last three decades, however, has shattered that metaphor.

    So what happens with translators** and the version we hear (think something as simple as subtitles in a foreign language film), or trolls*** or a host of other applications.  Or dementia.  91-year old author Warren Adler, whose wife has dementia and no longer recognizes him, told AARP's magazine: The profound irony of these terrible last moments of our charmed life together is that while her memories of those days have passed on to oblivion, mine remain intact and, by some odd miracle, enhanced.  I can remember every facet of our life together, from my first glimpse of her lying on a beach blanket at age 19 in a pristine white bathing suit -- a stunning, slender beauty who put Cupid’s dart right in the solar plexus of my 22-year-old self, a dart that’s never been dislodged in nearly seven decades.  It would be natural to dub this vivid recall an extraordinary gift, but I must confess that it has become more of a burden.  Where has my sweetheart gone?  Yet she is alive.  Her heart beats, and, believe me, some remnant of her beauty remains, though the memories that are so intense and rich to me are totally gone for her.  I am imprisoned in an empty cell.   The earlier NY Times piece tried to add another explanation of déjà vu: Dual-processing explanations assert, essentially, that two normally separate brain processes are activated at wrong times.  Imagine two heads of a tape player, one recording memory and the other playing it back.  If the brain begins playing back while it's recording, the present might feel like a memory.  Neurological explanations involve small electrical signals gone awry.  If two signals carry information from the senses to the brain, the theory goes, a delay in the second signal might cause it to feel like a memory.  

    Maybe life is like that, a series of memories built atop on another, one perhaps buried or just hidden but accessible, much as the virtual reality comes together with their scans, ever changing, ever adapting, able to disappear or collapse on each other.  Does the dementia patient merely lose access to one or more sets of memories and has to rely only on the backup sets?  Are those memories still there or just jammed up somewhere?  Is their life any less "real" in this new stage than the one others on the outside are seeing?  With such apps as Face2Face, Cupace and others, it can be difficult to distinguish what's real and what isn't (NOTE: these tools are often used by hackers to extort money, a "sibling" or "friend" saying that they've broken down or been robbed and need you to send them some money...such face swapping tools can even work for live videos so that you can view your "sister" or "friend" pleading for help on Skype or WhatsApp; this is a classic scam and one which has fooled many people so be careful and double check such calls [the scammer will tell you not to hang up or to call anyone else, just to send the money, thus avoiding you checking]...these apps are growing more and more sophisticated by the day and do indeed, appear very "real").

    So what IS real these days?  One has to ask if our life is even real or just a Matrix-like movie.  How would that be possible?  How could systems store and compress enough information, every movement, every message, every thought?  Or would there only be a need to store only what we can comprehend...life as a JPEG or pdf or ZIP file, visible and understandable to us but far from being UNcompressed (the term used when opening a compressed ZIP file).  Storage in today's world of data jumps every 1000-fold, so megabytes become gigabytes...then jumps to tera- (nearing our estimated brain capacity), peta-, exa-, zetta- (estimated Internet usage), and more.  The estimated world data usage in six years will 1,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of information.  How to store all of that?  But before you marvel at such figures, one needs to remember that our DNA (and that of most every living being) can store much more.  Said New Scientist some years ago, just a teaspoon of DNA would hold all of that information.  So perhaps the question shouldn't be how or why to store it, or to wonder how it all works or if it's even real or not, but to simply enjoy what we have here in front of us, to marvel at a handful of dirt or the colors of leaves in the fall, or even the world of animals and organisms making their beds ready for the winter (I hear them constantly at night, rustling through the dried and mulched leaves I've raked into the back).  Bees getting ready to hibernate (most go into the ground for winter), earthworms, ants and others, tunneling and making yet another world underneath our feets as they have for far longer than us...cities under cities, waiting to be discovered or scanned, waiting for us to just open our eyes and to enjoy life as it IS and not how it is imagined.


*WIRED has been covering virtual reality for a number of years but this "test" is a good one for your friends, a double page full of faces and one leaving you to guess which ones are real and which are generated by a computer.  The "woman's" face in the top right corner was the one which fooled the most people (it's not real).

**Tim Parks wrote in the London Review of Books: A translator is thus asked first to be enchanted as a reader, then to reproduce that enchantment for new readers in another language; captured, then capturing.  It’s a tall order.

***Enter Camille François whom Marie Claire described as a person who: ...took on harassment campaigns targeting civilians, one of whom was Filipino American journalist Maria Ressa, who, after reporting on a troll army harassing critics of President Rodrigo Duterte, became a target herself, receiving up to 90 threats an hour.  “People have this idea that women get harassed online but that it’s kind of like bullying from classmates,” François says.  “I don’t think they really understand that governments use harassment to silence women journalists, women running for office, and women human-rights heroes.”  She analyzed the attack against Ressa and identified the troll farms --organized operations of people paid to create online content-- behind it, many of which were then shut down.