Disturbing.
Unfortunately, you don’t need fancy computers and high tech 5-senses interfaces to get this effect, where your reality is distorted by filters in your head. This is the human condition. We do it all the time.
Here’s an example: a comic book used to manipulate the wetware in kids’ brains to make them think gay people are wicked.
We grow up with these little modules planted in our skulls by well-meaning families and friends who also have them in their heads, and it isn’t a little box mounted on our necks that we can conveniently rip out to perceive “reality”. There ain’t no such thing possible — it’s implicit in the modeling of the world we see around us, because we don’t accurately “see” the world, we build it. Everyone is walking around in a virtual reality all the time, and what matters is how well it reflects an underlying substrate of matter and energy, how well it allows us to interact with our fellow avatars, and how much damage and how much benefit we provide to each other. This is true not just for them, fellow liberal/progressive secular humanists, but for us.
The people who made that anti-gay comic are using a version of virtual reality that creates enemies all around them, and justifies wrecking their lives. It’s also kind of crude and generates a blocky, black & white universe that doesn’t have much nuance or fine detail.
How’s yours doing?
The mildly deranged penguin says I’m Ok.
Yeah, they worked so well at getting everybody to avoid using the sinister [Latin] by teaching all lefties to go right handed. That worked so well. Means people are all just tabla rasa and can be molded into any shape through proper teaching.
Comic books a useful tool
/sarcasm
You lost me there, PZ. (It doesn’t seem to work as sarcasm.)
Otherwise, I agree with you.
How’s yours doing?
I’ve got a Vaporeon, and just need a few more candies to evolve my Bulbasaur.
so, okay, I guess. I’m really having trouble getting the timing on gym battles down.
It is worth reiterating
that reality is what’s “out there”, but what we see,feel,smell,taste,etc are merely perceptions. Inputs to feed the image we build in our brain that usually models reality accurately. Easy example is effect of drugs on reality.
This is where “optical illusions” come from. Our brains assemble images of reality using “shortcuts” that can be exploited to produce paradoxical images.
Also, look at the phenomena of pareidolia, where blobs of random noise can suddenly look like a face (EG Jesus on toast).
As much as we like to think our eyes are biological cameras recording reality exactly, it don;t work that way. Our eyes don’t “see”, our brains assemble an image with input from the optic sensors in the eye. Rephrasing. The eyes are simply an input device to the wetware in our brains that assembles the images our consciousness uses to perceive the world visually. (and wetware is NOT software, the brain is not a computer.)
gak. not my place to lecture, just sharing my “perception” of that organ in my head.
Wetware is not software; but software does have the same problems as wetware when it comes to processing reality in real time. Computer vision deals with abstractions of what its sensors report, not the gestalt. It will be subject to similar things in the way of optical illusions.
Was that really meant to feel like a grounded version of Ender’s Game, where VR game players are actually controlling robots that are fighting with real people on the other side of the globe?
If not, still my reaction to that video. At first I thought is was going to examine the psychological impact on people who get too absorbed in their VR gaming, The final scenes brought up the Ender’s Game analogy.
Good. There are birds, sunflowers, and pollen gatherers. Have enough money to put seed out again.
The film was interesting, but I guess I must be broken in some way, because virtual reality like that doesn’t interest me at all. (Yes, The Matrix bored me silly.)
slithey tove… @ # 7: … a grounded version of Ender’s Game, where VR game players are actually controlling robots that are fighting with real people on the other side of the globe…
Read Joe Haldeman‘s The Forever Peace for a closer-to-home (Latin America) elaboration of that concept, only 17 years from now.
Why the heck is the godly ex-gay going on about homosexuality with a serious trauma patient in front of him?
Christofascists have figured out “manga” is “hip” with the kids, I see.
About twenty years after the fact.
Numerobis @10
Pfft. The dying kid is already saved! His life on earth is no longer meaningful. Paramedics are less important than Jesusmedics.
dick @ 3
Assuming the sentence structure is what confused you, I’ll rearrange what PZ said:
It’s not sarcasm. It’s quite straight-forward.
Why would a company doing that sort of thing need to fool people into doing it?
We’ve got folks who do that IRL now, risking themselves and braving many privations to do so.
Being able to do so while being in a comfy room would have volunteers lined up around the block.
And aren’t our current non-humanoid drones more effective in any case?
It was a well-done video, but the moral issues raised are, IMHO, passe’. How many people here know someone who, with the blinders removed, would happily go “Wait – we’re shooting real sand ni**ers? AWESOME!”
Or am I missing the point?
Ooo, I liked that movie short. I didn’t see Ender’s Game, so didn’t see the twist coming.
As someone said, at first it looks like a commentary on VR addiction, which would be kind of trite, but then it’s more of a story about our creepy real-world relationship between war gaming and actual war. Just take army-sponsored first person shooter propaganda games or drone pilots a step further and here we are…
As for the anti-gay stuff, eeeiewww.
great post! all people create the world they live in in the mind and interpret the inputs of the senses with the ideas they have learned, We take those thoughts about the interpretation of our senses and think up other concepts about how the thought go together. I do not have the vocabulary nor the ability to say it as simply as “The Professor” alas but that is why I like reading here.
To answer the question is it varies over time but mostly not too distorted I hope.
The thing about all devout religious is their rigidity their surety of their “view ” of reality everything they do is about shoring up and re-enforcing their concept their interpretation of the inputs of their senses. There is simply no questioning allowed.
For all the christians protestations of protecting the innocent and holding the innocent in high regard they expend a tremendous amount of personal energy condemning each other and everyone else for the temerity of being innocent and being themselves different than them.
uncle frogy
Anyone else think it’s really despicable for gay-bashing Jesus-freaks to ape the style of anime, which partly gained popularity in the West due to queer themes that hadn’t been allowed in our mainstream media?
Also, aren’t very few people Christian in Japan? Why do Christians need to keep stealing artistic styles from the secular or Satan (take Christian rap, Christian metal, etc)? Surely all their faith and inspiration from God should lead them to make *real* art, not just shitty appropriations of real art.
In addition to the aforementioned ender’s game parallels, I also saw elements of Prez, an excellent satirical comic from a year or two ago, where the US military drones were controlled by vaguely sociopathic gamers. But this was probably in development before that, knowing how long animation takes.
Anyone read Terry Pratchett’s Only You can Save Mankind? Its a similar concept, although the ‘reveal’ is much more ambiguous.
M Monkey #13, thank you. Your interpretation is in line with what I would expect PZ to say, but what was written made no sense, to me. (But I do get accused of taking things too literally.)
So let let me get this straight (pardon the pun), an EMT is treating what looks like a seriously injured patient. Said arsehole then takes time out from treating said patient to lecture a kid about the ebuls of being gay. Clearly ranting about bible verse is more important than someone’s life.
Also don’t EMTs work in pairs? Where’s the other dude? Protesting a insurance company subsidizing contraceptives?
zibble@17, only about 2 percent of Japanese are Christian of any sort. The biggest Christian populations in Asia are in the Philippines, which is majority Christian, and South Korea, where the population is roughly 30 percent Christian.
As for the art in that comic book my guess is that the artist was probably into manga and anime when they were younger, but haven’t looked at more recent material, as what they’ve drawn here looks kind of dated.
gijoel @ # 21: … an EMT is treating what looks like a seriously injured patient. Said arsehole then takes time out from treating said patient to lecture a kid about the ebuls of being gay.
Note that the patient’s skin looks darker than that of anyone else in the scene. So long as he’s safely muted and strapped down, how could his life matter more than lecturing against Teh Ghey?
So the Doctor says: “And “born that way” is a bunch of Hooey! When I was a Homosexual 30 years ago, Nobody ever said that – nobody – Not once Never. They hadn’t even thought of it yet.
So it wasn’t part of their PR Arsenal!”
And of course the good Doctor brings in the old hot button chestnut of the Homosexual as sexual predator along with a not so subtle hint of pedophilia.
But of course the Doctor is lying 30 years ago, (Which is 1986), Gays and others were indeed saying Gays were born that way so the statement that 30 years ago no one no where said Gays were born that way is a complete and utter lie. Goebbels would be proud.
IOW…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rAOyh7YmEc
@ Pierce #23 Jesus, you’re right. *vomits in a corner.
gijoel@21: Minimum ambulance crew is two, but that means the other person could be driving. Of course in that case, why are there two non-patients in the back of the bus?
Speaking as former volunteer EMT, usually, the only reason to have someone other than the patient and emergency responders in the back of the ambulance is if the patient is a non-English speaker and a translator is needed. Sometimes, if they didn’t have another way to get to the hospital, we’d let a relative ride in the front, especially if the patient was unconscious and couldn’t provide certain admission information, but that’s one person.
One other thing, while our minimum crew was one driver and an EMT, we typically met a paramedic at the scene, so there’d be two people working on the patient in the back. For all I know, services where the paramedic is part of the crew have a minimum crew size of three.
And no, we didn’t waste time lecturing people at the scene about irrelevant crap.
Oops, just noticed they’re outside of the ambulance. Maybe the other crewmember is putting away unneeded gear. Don’t need the stair chair once they’ve got the patient on the stretcher after all, and don’t want to leave it at the scene either.
pacal@24: “But of course the Doctor is lying 30 years ago, (Which is 1986), Gays and others were indeed saying Gays were born that way so the statement that 30 years ago no one no where said Gays were born that way is a complete and utter lie.”
Not that it vitiates your general point, but just for the record, this particular tract appears to have been first published no later than 2002, 30 years after 1972.
Did anyone see Toys?
Why were the civilians running toward the heavily armed robots?
pacal@24
I’d be interested to know just how wrong the EMT in the comic is. How far back did people first realize that homosexuality had a biological component? I’d imagine that it’s actually a bit further back than 1972.
Even if people had only started saying that people were born gay recently, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. It just means that the biological component of homosexuality wasn’t discovered until recently. Our understanding of psychology and neuroscience advances over time. So not only is the medic’s claim wrong, it’s also irrelevant.