156. USE YOUR ILLUSION - Magicians and Reality
Tonight I am off to Wolverhampton to see magicians, Penn and Teller, do their thing. It has made me think about the idea of “illusion” - something philosophers of perception are very familiar with. Illusion poses a problem for direct realist theories of perception because their central claim - that we directly perceive a world and its properties which is independent of our minds - comes apart when what we directly perceive is an illusion. In such cases, what we see is not what there is. A bent stick in water, for example. Or sunlight hitting the road in such a way that it creates the illusion of water. So the direct realists are left having to explain how our perception and reality have come apart.
All that is basic philosophy A-level stuff. But magicians like Penn and Teller remind us that illusion is not just confined to those peculiar cases of sticks being in water or the sun hitting the road in just the right way. Illusions can be so dependable that a duo like Penn and Teller can guarantee a paying audience in Las Vegas every night that they will experience certain illusions, wherever they are sitting in a theatre, and then pack up those same illusions, travel across an ocean, and set them up in a completely different theatre for another paying audience to see on demand. The ability to manipulate and distort our perceptions is actually something you can study, learn, and do at will.
We see it in the theatre outside of magic shows too, where certain techniques are used to play with perspective, sound or light to convince an audience something is happening when it isn’t. Wrestling, too, one of my favourite past-times, is full of dependable illusions. A person can literally slap their leg in full sight when they pretend to kick someone in the face and you will still wince at the illusion of impact. And how many corners of steel folding chairs have I seen smashed safely onto the ring next to a person’s head instead of directly onto their head, yet still I believe they have been brutally assaulted with a chair?
I am from a generation brought up on cartoons. That paradigmatic illusion: a moving image that is, in fact, not moving at all. Just hundreds of slightly altered static images run in such a swift succession that your mind can’t help but accept that they are moving. Film and television was once like this too in its analogue heyday. I’m sure the new, digital versions do something similar when we see them capture movement on screen. What is captured movement but the same idea translated into digital programming - the succession of images so fast, and so many images, that the movement comes at us in high definition.
Meanwhile, the other week I covered an art lesson in my school and marvelled as Year 10 students made flat surfaces seem 3D and alive by simply applying bits of white paint in the right places to create an illusion of surface reflection. Schools right now continue to be worried about the increased use of AI by students - passing off the illusion that they know something by claiming the work of Chat GPT to be their own. Yet how often before the advent of easily accessible artificial intelligence did students pass off the work of their parents or their peers as their own? I have long spoken about what I call the “Chinese Room Theory of Learning”, after philosopher, John Searle’s famous thought experiment against the illusion of artificial intelligence. Searle suggested that a machine which could pass Alan Turing’s infamous test and make a human not be able to tell the difference between its answers to the questions and the answers of a real human did not really show consciousness, as the processing of symbols to give correct answers showed only an understanding of syntax but not semantics: the machine knew that B followed A but not what B or A actually meant. My point about learning in the classroom was that these days teachers have been made to actively demonstrate that learning is happening in their lessons due to a range of poorly considered accountability measures. The problem with this is that learning has been reduced to the simple act of students giving an expected answer to a question. So, for instance, I teach them about John Searle and his Chinese Room and then, later, I ask the students who created the Chinese Room thought experiment. The ones who say “John Searle” have demonstrated “learning”. The most obvious, yet extreme, example of this is the terminal examination. I teach you two years of a Philosophy A-level and then you put down correct answers in a three hour exam at the end of those two years and thus prove you have “learnt” something about philosophy.
The problem I suggested with this approach is that much of the time students simply learn what the answers are that a teacher, or exam board, want to hear when given certain stimuli, but do not actually understand the content or get themselves to a point when they can actively apply the ideas or information in new and novel situations. A student can pass an exam one month and have no idea about their examined subject the next. A classroom of students can all give the right answers in an end of lesson plenary only to be utterly clueless about the same content the following week. The supposed learning that was witnessed was merely an illusion. One so dependable that both teachers and students alike repeat it lesson after lesson in the expansive mutual box-ticking exercise that sadly describes contemporary schooling. The school itself providing merely the illusion of an education - lots of grades and numbers that fill reports and look impressive but little of actual intellectual substance.
As magicians like Penn and Teller show: illusions can be so dependable that they simply become part of our reality. When someone like me goes to the magic show, I don’t see illusions and effects, I suspend my disbelief and see something actually disappear. If I wasn’t seeing it actually disappear, if I were only seeing an illusion, why would I pay to see it? Why pay to be fooled? Yet at the same time that is exactly what I am doing - paying to be intentionally fooled. Just as I pay to be fooled when I go to the theatre or cinema or wrestling show. Let’s all pretend, for just a few hours, that the world is some way other than it is.
I pay to be fooled when I choose my news provider: an ideological lens to shape the events of the day in a way that most makes sense in line with my own particular prejudices and preferences. Right wing or left wing. Conservative or liberal. The illusion that I am merely learning about what is happening in the world one which has been sustained since the printing presses first began and the first reporter thought about what angle to take on a story. Did the Prime Minister make a bold and brave decision, or did they make a fatal mistake? Was the war an attack, or a defence? Is the economy working for all the right people, or for all the wrong ones? To call it the news is to pretend all we are getting are value-neutral facts. A news is probably better - but to call it such would be to break the illusion.
Buddhist philosophers have long told us that even our most cherished idea - the self - is merely an illusion. A constantly fluctuating and impermanent array of ever-changing energies which we pretend to be a singular and permanent whole. Meanwhile scientists have long told us that the world we believe we are perceiving out there is really a projection of whatever world there may be out there inside our own skulls. The sense organs take in the sound-waves, the light-waves, etc. and it’s all processed by the brain. A representation of reality rather than reality itself. An illusion, albeit potentially an illusion identical to the reality it is representing. Meanwhile, we all know that one day we die. That it happens to us all. Yet to not go insane with worry we maintain the illusion every day that somehow, that doesn’t mean us. At least not today. Maybe we’ll live forever - maybe we’ll die some day in the future. But never today. To accept the possibility that any of us could go at any minute would be to shatter the illusion of safety and security that is at the heart of our illusion of civilisation. Such thoughts are the stuff of a state of nature, not of civil society, and as we step over another person without a home sleeping rough on the streets of our cities and skim over news about another family crushed by avoidable poverty or another exposure of baked in institutional prejudice which has caused generations of suffering, we maintain the illusion that our society really is civil.
I guess what I am getting at here is that with illusion so rife in our day-to-day perceptual and intellectual experiences, can we ever really speak of a non-illusionary reality at all? Is the real illusion the occasional glimpse we think we have of some objective and true world beyond all the illusions? Are the magicians the only people honest enough to confront the fragile nature of our “reality” and, by learning how to bend it to their will and give us ninety minutes of repeated and dependable illusions in the safe space of the theatre each night, remind us that everything we think we know about the world we experience is subject to distortion and manipulation?
I used to think it was the clowns who were the real heroes - speaking truth to power about the absurdity of power and mocking those in authority with satire and parody. But nowadays I think it might be the magicians.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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