Making Stuff Up

Medical doctors and outdoorsmen alike refer to the rule of threes. You can live for three minutes without breathing, three days without drinking, and three weeks without food. Outside of these limits your continued physical survival becomes dubious, although the precise limits vary significantly with environmental factors. Obviously, there are certain secondary affects such as waste removal and bodily motion implied in the above. Nevertheless breathing, drinking, and eating are the three things that every human being must do to prevent rapid biological death. All else is fantasy.

I

This is the definition of fantasy used by the psychologist Carl Jung, who not coincidently was a medical doctor. Jung despised the tendency in Freud and Adler to concretize or reify the personality. He was fond of saying, “The object of psychology is to get the individual to play with their own personality.” Play being the operative word. Unlike most other psychologists, he didn’t regard role playing or fantasizing as an activity limited to childhood; he considered it the acme of human experience.

Buried in a post a few months ago Gevlon made a remarkable comment. “Reality,” he said, “is just what we chose to focus on.” This has certain implications that Gevlon didn’t explore; I going to because it’s essential to contextualizing the World of Warcraft.

There are two different ways to interpret Gevlon’s comment. One way is to conceive of reality as preexisting; the human mind uncovers it in the act of choosing focus. The other option is that reality is created in the process of choosing; the choice to focus is the choice to create. Those of a theological bent will understand this as the rephrasing of the age old question as to whether believing is seeing or seeing is believing; those of an academic bent will understand this as the distinction between modernism and post-modernism; those in physics will understand this as the difference between a closed and an unfinished universe.

I go in a different direction. If everything beyond crude biological functioning is fantasy then reality and fantasy are indistinguishable in most cases. This is so because things are one at the level of the mind. The distinctions between what we label “fantasy” and what we label “reality” are distinctions made in the mind first and reside in most cases in the mind only. What we call the self, what we mean when we say “I,” is a label stuck on a process of fantasy.

Eye

The eye is a beautiful example of this. We don’t see with the eye; we see with the brain. The eye is a physical organ which, through a complex chemical process, light is turned in electrical neural impulses. It is these neural impulses that the brain then translates into the images we see in three dimensions. As Shakespeare said in a Midsummer Nights Dream 400 years ago “Love sees not with the eyes but with the mind/and therefore wing’d Cupid painted blind.”

The eye translates light into electricity through a biochemical protein based process. Because this process is not instantaneous, when you shift focus from object to object you get fading or accommodation affects. The brain’s response to biological lag is to predict what you see up to a full second in advance based upon prior experience. In the first milliseconds after looking at a new object, you actually see what the brain thinks you should see and not what’s actually there. As a consequences of the speed discrepancy between protein synthesis and neuron transmission the reality we choose to focus on just is fantasy; every single time your eye focuses your brain fantasizes. If this wasn’t the case any type of improvement in manual dexterity, any type of skilled crafting or athletic accomplishment, would be biomechanically impossible.

In this sense, both the eye and the I share a common ground as instruments that mediate realities. The core of the psychological insight is that the mind is a medium; it is that part of reality that mediates between other parts of reality. The mind’s eye is the I. In the same way that the brain weaves together neural impulses from the eye to create three dimensional visions which we call “sight” the psyche stitches together spiritual, emotional, logical, intuitive, and sensory experiences to form the self that we identify as “I”. The precise connection between the physical brain and mental consciousness—between eye and I—remains an enigma despite advances in psychology, medicine, and philosophy. But that there is a connection is indisputable, as has been recognized for thousands of years.

Aye eye I

In 2005 Ralph Koster published what has become the well-known article entitled “The Evil We Pretend To” about colonialism and genocide in video games. There have been a variety of responses and replies to that post yet all of them overlook what seems like to me the salient point. What’s so pretend about it.

Because if the reality/fantasy distinction breaks down upon close examination at the level of the mind then we are left with two choices. One choice is to see everything that happens as a product of fantasy. Our cultures, our legal systems, our religions, our family and friends are as ephemeral and wispy as a dream. They are no more real than the pixel Horde. As Napoleon once said: that’s what emperors do, they play with people. It’s why chess—with all it’s symbolic humans—is called the sport of kings. It’s what Ecclesiastes meant 3000 years ago when he proclaimed “all is vanity.” (The Latin root for vanity is “empty".)

On the other hand, if that perspective bothers you; if you wish to insist that what happened during the genocides in the Balkans or Rwanda was not a cartoon graveyard but something real, that the living and the dying were real dramas happening to real people about something truly important; then the war against the Horde is also the same. Our participation in the genocide of the Horde is not the evil we pretend to; it’s not make believe; it’s the evil we actually do.