Flashes of Reality

Everyone probably knows this, but a movie is a lot of single photographs that are strung together, flashing by very quickly, one after the other, giving the impression of motion. You can make one by drawing pictures on the corners of the pages of a book and flipping through them quickly. Pretty tedious and the librarian tends to get pissed off. Anyway, the principle works the same for television and digital video (which is what most televisions are these days). For video, it is even more tedious because each frame (photograph) is made of hundreds and hundreds of little lines, and each line is made of hundreds and hundreds of little dots.

Let's go back to the standard movie analogy because it makes it a little easier to follow. In between each photograph, there is a black bar. It's used to create a frame of reference for each individual photograph, enhancing the impression of motion. If you've ever seen an old movie that looked jumpy, it can be because some frames are missing, usually because the film broke and it had to be spliced. Sometimes, the person splicing the film wasn't very good at it, and they changed the size of the black bar between the pictures. A movie works, because our sight and cognition works at a particular speed. Not everyone is the same, but we are close enough that the standard frame rate, 30 frames per second, works for most of us. Not all of us? No, but if your experience with movies is the same as it always has been and you don't know about anyone else's subjective experience, how would you know the difference? That's important, we'll come back to it.

Reality is (could be?) like a movie. Each individual instant of subjective reality is like each individual frame or photograph in a movie. Since the only thing we can experience is our consciousness during each instant, we don't see the black bars between each frame. And, since we don't see the bars, we can't say with any certainty how big they are or how much objective time goes by between them. So each glimpse of reality, lasting for a small instant, is separated by, well, nothing for some unknown span of time. Our consciousness is switched on for an instant, and then switch off again for some unknown duration. We have no idea what happens between the flashes of consciousness, or even if anything happens at all.

Remember what I said about subjective cognition? The part about not really knowing if your experience of viewing the movie is the same as everyone else's. The same question exists for the idea that our reality consists of instants of consciousness separated by nothing (or maybe something, we'll never know). For you and I to interact, our flashes of consciousness have to coincide. When we have a conversation, my bits of consciousness that flow by while I am speaking to you have to coincide with your bits of consciousness while listening to me. Or do they? I'm sitting here, writing this blog entry, and no one else is watching me. My glimpses of reality don't necessarily have to coincide with anyone else's but my computer and it doesn't have a subjective reality. However, when you read this blog entry, it has to have left some trace of itself in between the points at which our instances of consciousness coincided. Or take a simpler case. I carve my initials in a tree, and you see them ten years later. There has to be some trace of the world around us that persists between the flashes. The answer is (according to some) that reality isn't something that just happens with or without us. Going back to the movie analogy, when I film a movie and you watch it, we create an instant of shared consciousness of each frame that goes by. Every time our instants of consciousness coincide, we create a reality that carries along with them. Our flashes of consciousness are synchronized with each other, for brief moments or long years, subjectively, that is. Those flashes of coinciding consciousness can be synchronized with countless other instants experienced by countless other people, creating a universal reality, as far as we can tell, anyway. The point is, you and I don't have to have similar perceptions of the instants of reality, or even flashes that are objectively shorter or longer than one another. Our consciousness just has to collide with one another's to create a shared reality.

But wait, there's more. Stay tuned...