Locating The Screen
Locating The Screen
Locating The Screen
Abstract: The question of where the screen is located in relation to the viewer is
used to exemplify the larger problem of how the world relates to the perceiving
mind. Citing a key moment in Powell & Pressburger’s film A Matter of Life and
Death, the analogy between mind, screen and camera obscura is explored. The
argument is made that in addition to the two most prominent models of human
perception — broadly described as internalism and externalism — there is a third
that combines both without negating either. This third model, however,
necessitates the use of a non-classical logical framework known as dialetheism,
which recognises the inherent indeterminacy of the subjects under discussion.
Several possible applications of dialetheism to the study of cinema are
suggested.
There is a scene in the extraordinary occult romance A Matter of Life and Death
(Powell & Pressburger, 1946) where a young American woman, June, visits an
eminent neurologist, Dr Reeves, in his private camera obscura. She persuades
him to take on the case of her lover, Peter Carter, a bomber crewman and
aspiring poet whom she believes to be suffering a neurological disorder. Carter
was notionally killed when his plane was shot down, but finds himself inexplicably
alive, or at least suspended between life and death. A divine envoy tells him this
is due to a clerical error in heaven, although to the mortal world it appears he is
deluded. The film itself hovers between the physical and the spirit realms,
presenting us with both materialist and numinous accounts of Carter’s condition.
During the scene in question Reeves takes us on a guided tour, through the
medium of his camera obscura, around the village where he works as a doctor,
with its various local inhabitants and visitors. As he later says to June, it is from
this elevated vantage point that he forms medical diagnoses and where the world
can be seen “clearly and at once, as in a poet’s eye.” It is tempting of course to
read the scene as simple metaphor, with the view from the camera obscura
poetically mirroring the doctor’s privileged insight into human minds and bodies
through specialised apparatus. But the scene is also rich with analogy,
particularly for those intrigued by the relationship between mind, body and world.
The analogy of ‘mind as screen’ recurs in the literature on consciousness,
often as a flawed explanatory principle. It has long been understood that we do
not perceive the world directly, in itself, but as a representation derived from
sensory data. One of the leading figures in early experimental psychophysiology,
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-94), was instrumental in establishing the scientific
basis of the distinction between external reality and internal representation, which
had previously been maintained on philosophical grounds by figures such as
John Locke and Immanuel Kant. Helmholtz (in Cahan 1995) argued that we are
mistaken when we assume a veridical connection between quantitative physical
stimuli, e.g. certain electromagnetic frequencies, and their qualitative
apprehension in the mind, e.g. certain colours:
…the objects at hand in space seem to us clothed with the qualities of our
sensations. They appear to us as red or green, cold or warm, to have
smell or taste, etc., although these qualities of sensation belong to our
nervous system alone and do not at all reach beyond into external space.
Yet even when we know this, the appearance does not end, because this
appearance is, in fact, the original truth… (p. 352)
For the so-called ‘enactive theorist’ the screen and the viewer’s perception of it
are (at least in part) ‘out there’, an external presence sustaining our memory and
cognition. The world is yoked, as it were, to the sensory apparatus of the viewer
in a way that extends the perceptual domain far beyond the immediate locality of
the brain and its store of memories and experiences.
There are in fact several contemporary philosophers, biologists,
anthropologists, and other theorists arguing that the mind is not confined to the
inside of the head but extends beyond into the body, world, and even into the
cosmos.2 The purpose here is not to explore these arguments per se, but to note
the opposition between internalism and externalism, each of which is supported
by plausible evidence and theories.
Rather than choosing between internalism and externalism, I wish to propose
a third possibility: that both views are not only credible but also correct. In other
words, despite the inherent contradiction, the screen can be regarded as being
both ‘in here’ and ‘out there’ at the same time, without one cancelling the other
out. The immediate drawback of this position is obvious: according to the
founding principles of rationalist logic, as expounded by Aristotle, there cannot be
two contradictory statements that are both true. The ‘Principle of Non-
Contradiction’ demands the statement ‘The screen is located inside the head’
and the statement ‘The screen is located outside the head’ are logically
inconsistent.
But there have been a number of recent thinkers willing to countenance
contradictory states and construct plausible logical and philosophical systems to
accommodate them. Prominent among these are Stéphane Lupasco (1987),
George Melhuish (1973), and more recently, Graham Priest, whose book Beyond
the Limits of Thought (2002) rigorously sets out arguments in favour of what he
calls ‘dialethic’ logic (literally —‘two truths’) in which ‘true contradictions’ become
unavoidable when we contemplate the ultimate limits of thought and reality.
For example, when we try to conceive the limits of thought and what might lie
beyond, we encounter the following: The unknowable is precisely that which we
can know nothing about, and in knowing we can know nothing about it we know
something about it; which is contradictory, not to say paradoxical.
For Priest, such contradictions are not logical aberrations, nor the result of
fundamental errors of conception; they are a part of the fabric of human
experience. Even the doctrine of dialetheism itself is not immune to the same
conclusion. He says: “… it may … be rational to accept that dialetheism is both
true and false. In a sense, this is what I do accept.” (p. 275 n). Cases of dialethia
turn out to be surprisingly common; one occurs in the shape of the Necker cube
cited above, for which it is just as true to say it appears oriented upwards as
downwards. Since, as Priest shows, certain aspects of our conception of reality
and existence are inherently contradictory, there are valid logical precedents for
making the claim that the screen is located both inside and outside the head.
According to the argument made here, the screen exists at some
indeterminate location, both inside and outside the head, just as the famous cat
in Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment is both dead and alive3 — as for that
matter is Peter Carter when we meet him in A Matter of Life and Death.
Indeterminate states tend to be looked on as inherently unstable conditions
requiring some kind of resolution, and Carter is finally returned to life to fulfil his
destiny as a poet and partner to June. But in a dialethic model certain states are
inherently irresolvable according to standard rational accounts, and the question
of the location of the screen, I argue, is one such case that cannot be resolved
according to classical logical principles.
The intrinsic indeterminacy we encounter when tracing the relationship
between internal and external locations of experience finds a historical echo in
early descriptions of the camera obscura. Couched in the discourse of alchemical
and occultist knowledge, Giambattista’s Magia Naturalis (1584) contains a
passage that alludes to the very same uncertainty about the location of reality in
relation to experience. Speaking of "How we may see in a Chamber things that
are not”, he writes:
...For what is without will seem to be within, and what is behind the
spectator’s back, he will think to be in the middle of the house, as far from
the glass inward, as they stand from it outwardly, and so clearly and
certainly, that he will think he sees nothing but truth. ...
For Giambattista, reality appears to be positioned both inside and outside the
chamber, just as it is when an analogy is drawn between the chamber and the
human head. For Dr Reeves, reality is revealed more clearly through the eye of
the camera obscura, which grants the privilege of a poet’s vision, seeing both the
external (outside the chamber) and the internal (inside the mind and body of the
patients) at the same time, or “all at once”, as he puts it.
By allowing us to consider indeterminate and contradictory states without
negation, the dialethic approach offered here might, I believe, have useful
applications in certain areas of study relating to cinema. I will briefly mention
three. First, the peculiarly compelling nature of the illusion of moving images and
the oft-drawn analogies between film and mind, have tempted us to think of
either ‘the screen in the mind’ or the ‘mind on the screen’; that is to say, either
phenomenal experience is played out through some internal projection — a
Cartesian theatre of the kind critiqued by Dennett (1991) — or the screen stands
as a prosthetic mind-extension which displaces our mental experience into the
technological world. Given the present considerations, neither of these may be
complete as a self-standing model, although a combination could prove viable,
even if they are logically opposed.
Second, the dialethic logic applied here may help to account for the efficacy of
the illusion in which we simultaneously believe in and do not believe in what the
screen affords. For the characters, objects and events that appear neither in the
mind nor on the screen alone are, being representations, simultaneously present
and absent. Just as Peter Carter (played by the late David Niven) is both dead
and alive in diegetic terms, while dead in reality and alive on the screen. As
viewers we are trapped in a perceptual vice of opposing forces, transfixed (in the
sense of both pierced and fastened) by multiple, contradictory beliefs, yet also
able to make sense of these logically inconsistent states.
Finally, the possibility of a ‘conscious cinema’ — an enhanced cinema that
deploys prospective artificially conscious technology — cannot be discounted.
Given the increasingly proximity of artificial intelligence and interactive
entertainment, we can expect a great deal of theorisation to emerge on the
subject of mind-technology integration in the field of sentient entertainment
systems, with an extension of current debates in AI about the degree to which
cognition can be understood as an internalised or an externalised process4. It is
precisely here that a dialethic model offers a way of managing these divergent
tendencies, although clearly not to the satisfaction of those wedded to a purely
classical logic.
Dialethic logic is of course not without its critics, and there are some who
doubt it has any application at all5. I would suggest that it has many uses beyond
the field of logic in which it was conceived, one being that it permits us to
consider issues of great complexity, like the relationship between mind and
world, without having to discard plausible but conflicting approaches. Dialethic
logic opens up a new world of descriptive possibilities to account for states of
indeterminacy, which reflect the contradictory nature of the world itself, at least
as it appears to us — something to which poets have testified. When June
approaches his house, appearing through the camera obscura lens, Dr Reeves
sighs, “She walks in beauty, like the night; only she’s cycling and the sun is out.”
Byron went on, “And all that's best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her
eyes.”
(This essay is based on a panel paper given to the First International Conference
on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, and on a chapter in the
collection Transdisciplinary Connections: Cinema, Technoscience and
Consciousness, edited by Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt and published by
Rodopi Press as part of the Consciousness, Literature and the Arts series.)
Notes
1
See O’Regan et al. (1999) and numerous examples on line, e.g.
http://eyelab.msu.edu/VisualCognition/flicker.html.
2
For examples see Chalmers & Clark (1998), Sheldrake (2003), or Gell (1998).
3
Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat is both dead and alive until the observer
collapses the indeterminate state by opening the box in which the cat is held. For
an exposition and contextualisation see Gribbin (1992).
4
For a discussion on internal vs. external theories of mind in contemporary AI,
see Clark (2004).
5
For a fuller discussion of dialethic logic and its detractors see Priest (2002).
Bibliography
Cahan, D. (ed.) (1995). Herman Von Helmholtz: Science and culture. Chicago:
Chicago University Press.
Chalmers, D. & Clark, A., 1998. The Extended Mind. Analysis, Vol. 58, pp. 10-23.
Clark, A. (2004). Embodiment and the Philosophy of Mind. In Mind and Causality.
Peruzzi, A. (ed.). Philadelpia: John Benjamins.
O’Regan, J. K. & Noë, A., (2001). A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual
Consciousness. Behavioural and Brain Sciences. 24. pp. 939-1031.
Priest, G. (2002). Beyond the Limits of Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sheldrake, R. (2003). The Sense of Being Stared At, and Other Aspects of the
Extended Mind. London: Crown.
11
See O’Regan et al. (1999) and numerous examples on line, e.g.
http://eyelab.msu.edu/VisualCognition/flicker.html.
2
See, for examples, Chalmers & Clark (1998), Sheldrake (2003), or Gell (1998).
3
Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive until the observer collapses the indeterminate
state by opening the box in which the cat is held. For an exposition and
contextualisation see Gribbin (1992).
4
For a discussion on internal vs. external theories of mind in contemporary AI, see
Clark (2004).
5
For a fuller discussion of dialethic logic and its detractors see Priest (2002)