What does “physical” mean.

Chomsky points out that we have lost all consensus and intuition about what should count as physical. That may be so for the theoretician, but for joe soap, when he bangs on the table and insists “this is real, this, this”, what does physical mean for him? If asked, he will insist that something is real if he can see it with his own eyes. But there’s a big haptic element too: Doubting Thomas had to dip his fingers into Jesus’s wounds. Presumably there is an acoustic element to it, as the big trio of vision/audition/touch are inseperable and almost interchangeable (haptic-visual sensory substitution is possible, but haptic-olfactory never would be). The evolving fake reality of the video game is a good place to look: there’s all three there, and no attempt to do smell or taste.

 

Another farmer….

The Pink Monkey project is underway. Hans Rosling is on board.

 

I am this poem

 

Anamorphosis and Tronpe l’oil

Both anamorphosis and Trompe l’oil demonstrate that:

“what you see has a great deal to do with where you are looking from”

which should allow some nice illustrations: examples here