Atheistic world view

We're ultimately as purposeless as the very process which brought us into existence. Life's just an accident and so are you.

You can find short term reasons for living like you're here because your parents wanted to have children, etc., but ultimately you're just an accident and so are your parents. Life is one big accident.

You serve no purpose, you'll cause no lasting effect, and in the grand scheme of things your life is utterly meaningless. Without a Creator in the beginning, there was nobody around to put you here on purpose which means you aren't here for a reason.

It's that simple.

Our worth is ultimately subjective. You might think you're worth something but someone else might think you're worthless, and as long as there's no transcendent Assessor to have the final say, no one's ultimately right or wrong.

You don't actually have a right to live; you just prefer not to die. Someone else on the other hand might want to kill you regardless of how you feel about it, and who is to say that they're wrong? In the absence of absolute morality, power reigns supreme; the strong survive and the weak get exploited.

Free Will?

Watched this movie simply because i was interested in rotoscoping. I found this idea really interesting READ IT!!
Script of the movie Waking Life, based on Tara Carreon's transcription

(Philosopher professor talking in his office - University of Texas: Austin philosophy professor David Sosa)

"In a way, in our contemporary world view, it's easy to think that science has come to take the place of God. But some philosophical problems remain as troubling as ever. Take the problem of free will. This problem has been around for a long time, since before Aristotle in 350 B.C. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, these guys all worried about how we can be free if God already knows in advance everything you're gonna do. Nowadays we know that the world operates according to some fundamental physical laws, and these laws govern the behavior of every object in the world. Now, these laws, because they're so trustworthy, they enable incredible technological achievements. But look at yourself. We're just physical systems too, right? We're just complex arrangements of carbon molecules. We're mostly water, and our behavior isn't gonna be an exception to these basic physical laws. So it starts to look like whether its God setting things up in advance and knowing everything you're gonna do or whether it's these basic physical laws governing everything, there's not a lot of room left for freedom.

So now you might be tempted to just ignore the question, ignore the mystery of free will. Say "Oh, well, it's just an historical anecdote. It's sophomoric. It's a question with no answer. Just forget about it." But the question keeps staring you right in the face. You think about individuality for example, who you are. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices that you make. Or take responsibility. You can only be held responsible, you can only be found guilty, or you can only be admired or respected for things you did of your own free will. So the question keeps coming back, and we don't really have a solution to it. It starts to look like all our decisions are really just a charade.

Think about how it happens. There's some electrical activity in your brain. Your neurons fire. They send a signal down into your nervous system. It passes along down into your muscle fibers. They twitch. You might, say, reach out your arm. It looks like it's a free action on your part, but every one of those - every part of that process is actually governed by physical law, chemical laws, electrical laws, and so on.

So now it just looks like the big bang set up the initial conditions, and the whole rest of human history, and even before, is really just the playing out of subatomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws. We think we're special. We think we have some kind of special dignity, but that now comes under threat. I mean, that's really challenged by this picture.

So you might be saying, "Well, wait a minute. What about quantum mechanics? I know enough contemporary physical theory to know it's not really like that. It's really a probabilistic theory. There's room. It's loose. It's not deterministic." And that's going to enable us to understand free will. But if you look at the details, it's not really going to help because what happens is you have some very small quantum particles, and their behavior is apparently a bit random. They swerve. Their behavior is absurd in the sense that its unpredictable and we can't understand it based on anything that came before. It just does something out of the blue, according to a probabilistic framework. But is that going to help with freedom? I mean, should our freedom be just a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system? That starts to seem like it's worse. I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving.

So we can't just ignore the problem. We have to find room in our contemporary world view for persons with all that that entails; not just bodies, but persons. And that means trying to solve the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility, and trying to understand individuality."

Good discussion on this topic here

I read this article on Hard determinism. Links to the idea of Free will and physics introduced in the previous excerpt. DNA, besides shaping our morphology, contributes greatly to our personality and behavior. Many scientists claim to have overwhelming evidence that the genetic code predetermines human aspects, from habits to likes and dislikes. If this is found to be true, then the case for determinism grows with every advance in this area of research-humans have no choice in their lives but to live as biologically motivated beings limited by what DNA spells out for their lives.

Eye Tracking

Eye tracking measures the movement of your eye and the point of gaze relative to your head. There is technology available that can track your eye movements using a camera through a computer. This is used in psychology, and for market research and to determine which layouts and designs for web pages attract more views and hold people's attention for longer.
EyeTracking is able to deliver accurate statistics on where and how people are looking at dynamic media. Applications include in-game advertising effectiveness, TV commercial evaluation, and sporting event sponsorship measurement. Information delivered shows not just that an ad appeared on screen (‘air-time’) but actually answers the real question of – “how many people actually saw my ad?”

Some problems with the accuracy and relevance of the results from the eye tracking studies are the knowledge the person has before had, or if they have been asked to complete a specific task when looking at the images.

In this example, the Russian psychologist Yarbus who was studying eye movements of people in the 1950's and 60's discovered that if the viewer is asked a specific question then their eyes concentrate on that part of the image, and that when observing a face your gaze tends to jump between the mouth and eyes.

Found a site that uses the eye tracking progam to generate painterly looking pictures from photographs. The pieces of the picture that you look at more appear to be more in focus, see pictures below.









The white circles on the first picture shows where the gaze of the eye was fixed, and the size of the circle indicates the duration of fixation (The scale on the bottom left corner of the first picture is one second). Interesting that the points you focus on become the only points in focus. I would love to use this eye tracking program to draw with, or to do some sort of social experiment or a work that people could interact with.

Colour Perception & Theory

Looking at illusions involved with colour such as the same colour illusion shown above. Squares A and B appear to be different shades of grey but in the second picture the line joining them shows them to be the same. Very interested in illusions and how perceptions of a colour vary from person to person.

I've been looking at how we percieve colours, colour blindness etc and found out that women percieve a broader spectrum of colour in the red orange range, and that men are more likely to be colour blind. This is because Women have two X-chromosomes; men have only one X-chromosome and one Y-chromosome. Because this color vision gene resides on the X-chromosome, rare detrimental changes at this gene cause color-blindness in males, whereas females are likely to have at least one good copy of the gene. Yay.


Looked at Goethean Science, and his approach to colour theory. It was dismissed in his time in favour of Newton's particle theories on light because Goethe's approach to science was intuitive rather than rationalistic but now has been given the credit it deserves. His theory that light was a wave ost out to Newtons particle theory but now we know that both are true... remember the experiments from 7th form physics, light has both particle and wave properties.

The above diagram shows light and dark spectra – when the coloured edges overlap in a light spectrum, green results; when they overlap in a dark spectrum, magenta results.

Chaos

The image above was made using the chaoscope program. It doesn't render very nicely but you get an idea of what can be achieved with it. I like the random appearance of the strange attractors and the fact that they were made using a mathematical formula. Spanish Artist Elena Asins uses this approach with her work to create.... She is a pioneer in applying structuralism and computing to art. KA PAI.

Chaos has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. It's found in flowing water, the stock market, celestial orbits, coastlines, weather...almost anything that's difficult to predict. What these systems have in common is that in order to know what will happen in the future, we need to know everything about the present with absolute precision.

Chaos is everywhere in nature, but it was a surprising discovery that it also appears in simple systems of equations . You can read a very mathematical definition here

Marcos Novak

Liquid architectures. Really good article here.
"I became curious about living
membranes and skins as architecture. Modelled on the
structure of the skeleton and the circulatory and nervous systems, most architecture is based on hierarchies of lines leading to nodes, a system which is ill-suited to provide ubiquitous services".
The image to the right shows some of his work concerning echinoderms and exoskeletons.
echinoderms are simple animals lacking brains and complex sensing organs, they also have a radial symmetry instead of bilateral like humans and mammals.


I like how he has made alien looking shapes based on organic creatures. His work looks futuristic and i love the 3D shapes that look random but aren't.

Greg Niemeyer+ Chris Chafe

An animation showing the levels of CO2 over the course of a day at a conference the artist attended. Greg studied classics and photography in Switzerland and he is now a digital artist. He wants to enhance human experience through his use of technology in his works. I don't like his photography i think it looks pretty amateur in comparison to his digital works. He likes to juxtapose the concepts of technology and nature.see video of CO2 levels here

I have been looking at this a bit through fractals and divine proportion occurring in nature, maths found in nature etc and mathematical properties of nature. If possible i would like to juxtapose concepts of mathematical equations modeling nature and naturally occurring phenomena. Looking at the chaos theory (which i know i very limited amount about), i find the concept intriguing that in theory an equation could be made to predict the weather, it makes me think that there must be an equation for everything, that everything can be pre-determined like fate.
He works a lot in collaboration with Chris Chafe, who uses the computer to aide and enhance his musical performances.
Greg Niemeyer has done research for new sound synthesis based on physics models of mechanics in musical instruments.
I would like to use some element of physics in my work, something to do with light or sound waves and exploring their properties through an interactive installation.