One of the artists most dedicated to the surrealist life was Max Ernst. ibid.
Magritte: ‘Surrealism is neither a literary school nor a school of art. Surrealists use literary and artistic means with a view to expressing what the mind can say and which is not already known.’ ibid.
You’re having your reality contorted right in front of your eyes. Patrick Henningsen, Alternative View 5 conference lecture, ‘Bending Reality: Countering Media Manipulation in the 21st Century’
What is the Fourth Estate? The difference between Press vs Media. Politicisation of Media. If we lose the Free Press then there is no shame for criminal elites and bullies. Any level of tyranny is possible. We’ve never had a Free Press until the internet came along. ibid. bullet points
In 2014 trivial stories routinely grab headlines; product placements grab headlines; cock-ups not cover-ups; information becomes disinformation; ‘informative’ replaced by ‘coercion’; the Fourth Estate has become a Fifth Column. ibid.
Most people now view the world in a narrow band of reality. ibid.
This is in theory still a free country but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperilled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths. Simon Heffer, Daily Mail 7th June 2000
Some of the tricks of the trade to ensnare potential customers … alter their perception of the product … in the highly lucrative business of politics, governments and selling ideologies. Neil Sanders, lecture Alternative View 5 conference, ‘The Art of Creating Reality’
Weasel words … ‘helps prevent dandruff’. ibid.
Products are sold on emotional content not a logical rational way. ibid.
What Edward Bernays called a third-party advocacy. ibid.
You must give the impression of wanting to effect some change. ibid.
Vague claims use colourful emotive phrases which are ultimately meaningless. ibid.
Brand identity … To fill the empty spaces … Brands become more than just a mark of quality, they become an invitation to a longed-for lifestyle. ibid.
North Philadelphia: ‘I like to get away from the real world as much as I can.’ Storyville: Quest: Surviving in America, Rainey, BBC 2018
‘I love north Philly. This is the neighbourhood we’re living in all our lives … North Philly is definitely a tough neighbourhood … You see people getting shot right in front of you.’ ibid.
Is reality real? Or could we be living in a sophisticated simulation? Could the universe be more like a dream than we’ve ever imagined? The Simulation Hypothesis, 2015
‘How would you know the difference between the dream and the real world?’ ibid. The Matrix 1999, Morpheus to Neil
What would you do to change the world? ibid.
Science is beginning to see a correlation between our world and the world of a virtual reality. ibid.
Our universe simply makes more sense when viewed as a virtual construct emerging from consciousness. ibid.
Everything is made from finite bits. ibid.
Quantum Entanglement: Particles separated by unlimited distances in space, and this only makes sense if the world is a virtual construct. ibid.
How the light chooses to display itself as particles or waves is dependent on how much we know about it. ibid.
For much of my lifetime the American media has been tightly controlled by a handful of corporations whose main task since 1945 was to terrify Americans into believing the Russians were coming and so we needed more missiles and nuclear warheads and submarines. They have had decades to create a false reality. Gore Vidal, speech World Political Forum, Venice, cited: Gore Vidal: United States of Amnesia
Our perception of the universe is an illusion: they are connecting two of Europe’s largest telescopes … Perhaps the strangest idea in science: quantum entanglement … Can particles be connected as if they joined together even if they are millions of miles apart? Einstein rejected the idea … Is Entanglement real? Einstein’s Quantum Riddle ***** BBC 2020
The electron is just a wave of fuzzy probability. ibid.
Quantum Physics: Its mathematics were elegant and beautiful. ibid.
The Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox: a seemingly magical effect … How could two particles act in unison? ibid.
The particles were fuzzy and undefined until the moment they were observed. ibid.
In theory this technique could be used to create a totally secure global communications network. These are the first steps of a completely unhackable quantum internet of the future. Made possible by quantum entanglement. ibid.
Many of us think that we are in total control of our thoughts, but we fail to understand that our thoughts are highly influenced by the people around us and everything we read, see, and do. Many of those same choices are because we want to belong. That influence on us, much of which we don’t realize, traps us in our own bubble of reality that may look very different than others’. Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future
The history of Public Relations is ... a history of a battle for what is reality and how people will see and understand reality. Stuart Ewen
If you’ve ever undergone general anaesthetic then you have experienced oblivion, an interruption of consciousness more complete than even the deepest sleep. Whole hours or days can pass in a millisecond; it’s proof – if you need it – that you can cease to be, that the world will go on without you. Some people find this terrifying. The neuroscientist Anil Seth finds it reassuring.
In 2017 Seth gave a Ted talk that has since been viewed more than 12 million times, a mind-blowing, 15-minute distillation of his three decades of research, which ended with Seth paraphrasing Julian Barnes: ‘When the end of consciousness comes, there’s nothing to be afraid of – nothing at all.’ It’s a sentiment he returned to in his bestselling 2021 book, Being You, and when we met recently in Falmer, East Sussex, he told me why: ‘When you see how fragile and precarious our unified consciousness is, of ourselves and of the world, when you see how many ways it can go wrong or just be abolished completely, you can either take that as a scary thing or a reminder to be very glad to be where you are.’ He chooses the latter.
Seth, 49, was casually dressed in jeans, beige trainers and a blue jumper. His close-shaven head and quiet intensity lent him a monkish air, which he periodically punctured with a joke. We spoke in his office at the University of Sussex, where he is co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. (As the university will no longer be receiving new funding from the Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation, the centre is due to be renamed.) On the bookshelves were works on psychology, philosophy, informatics, physics, a Zadie Smith novel, poetry anthologies. Tacked to the wall was a print-out headlined ‘12 fucking rules of success”’. (1. Do the fucking work. Don’t be lazy.)
Seth began studying consciousness in the mid-Nineties, a time when advances in computing and brain imaging were giving scientists new tools for understanding the mind. In 1994, the Australian philosopher David Chalmers outlined the challenge ahead: in a talk at the inaugural Science of Consciousness Conference in Tuscon, Arizona, Chalmers set out what he described as ‘the hard problem of consciousness’. How can objective, physical matter give rise to the unique, subjective experience of consciousness? How could anyone adequately describe the inimitable feeling of being you, with reference only to your brain and biology?
Philosophers and scientists have tried to tackle this hard problem in different ways. Panpsychists argue that consciousness is a fundamental quality of all matter – that a deckchair exhibits a different kind of consciousness from you or I, but is conscious nonetheless. At the other extreme, illusionists argue that consciousness is only imaginary. Seth, whose academic background spans physics, psychology, computing and neuroscience, says he has come to another, more satisfying conclusion.
His research has led him to radical positions: the way you see yourself and the world is a controlled hallucination, Seth argues. Rather than passively perceiving our surroundings, our brains are constantly making and refining predictions about what we expect to see; in this way, we create our world. He points to the example of #TheDress, the viral photo of a cocktail dress that to some people appears gold-and-white, and to others as blue-and-black. In his Ted talk, Seth twice plays an audio clip of a high-pitched, distorted voice that is so incomprehensible it could be speaking any language or none at all. Then he primes his audience with the sentence: ‘I think Brexit is a terrible idea.’
When he plays the clip again, the words are so immediately discernible it’s hard to imagine how they couldn’t have been.
Sometimes the term hallucination confuses people (Seth wishes there were a better word): it might suggest that perception is arbitrary, or that things don’t exist. In fact, if our brains are working properly, we’re constantly updating our predictions based on feedback from our senses – which is why ordinary perception is a ‘controlled hallucination’, not a fever-dream. That said, Seth told me as we strolled across campus in search of a sandwich, he’s open to the idea that the physical world doesn’t exist in the manner we think it does. That’s a ‘question for a physicist, someone like Carlo Rovelli. Who knows what’s actually out there? But let’s assume things are out there and things exist,’ he said. Reality, Seth believes, is the hallucination we can all agree on.