So I was watching What the Bleep do we know? Because it has my Portland, my beautiful Portland and quantum mechanics and other cool shit. They have a lot of radical ideas in that movie presented in digestible sound bites. I’d forgotten that there was one thing I could never quite wrap my head around, and it’s the simplest thing, it’s presented as a fact, though the conclusion on perception is interesting, I think the fact is bullshit.
It’s repeated twice and then occurs in a dream of Marlee Matlan who is sort of the fiction narrative object lesson that runs through the documentary. The story is that the natives (bugged me that they were called Indians) on the Caribbean Island Columbus found while he was lost, couldn’t perceive the schooners because they had never seen one. That the shaman noticed the ripples displaced in the water and after a few days could see the boats and he told the others and they could see the boats because they trusted the shaman.
The movie goes on to make an interesting point about perception, and makes several interesting points about all sorts of things. But that story sounds like bullshit. It sounds like one of two things; 1) A bad translation told to some Spaniard or Italian sailor who was keeping a journal or 2) A sheepish lie to explain to every other native along the path of destruction how the fuck they let those sons-a-bitchs just pull into the harbor.
Otherwise you’d really have to believe these particular people were the dumbest and least curious humans ever to stand erect. I don[‘t think it’s the human tendency to not see things they don’t believe, although it’s kind of hard to collect data on all the shit people didn’t see, my experience has been the opposite tendency; to make something even more fantastic out what they see. A pretty classic modern example would be how many actual weather balloons get mistaken for UFO’s. I’m not saying the skies aren’t full of little green men or that the FCC or air force is always telling the truth when they say ‘it was a weather balloon’ I’m just saying there’s a tendency to go the other direction with our perceptions.
Now, things outside our frame of reference are another matter entirely. Someone who has never seen a mechanical airborne device might not have an opinion on airplane from weather balloon to alien invasion, but that’s a lot different than not seeing it. Keys, when we are in a hurry we can’t seem to the keys laying on the desk a foot from where we thought we left them. Invisible shit, we can’t see invisible shit, I’m not sure there is invisible shit but if there is we can’t see it. Yes, there are a lot of very subjective things about our perceptions, the sum total of which you might even call personalities; but I don’t think three large ships full of lost Europeans fall under the sub-heading unperceivable.
Ok, shutting up now. If you haven’t seen what the bleep do we know; see it. If you have seen it; see it again.
Spent, I’m spent.
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