Notes

Perspective vertigo

The dizzy moment when you stop looking from a viewpoint and start looking at it.

Most of the time the viewpoint is invisible. There seems to be a little person behind the eyes, watching the inner movie and choosing each action. Dennett called this the Cartesian Theater. When you notice the theater is closed, you get a kind of vertigo: the floor you were standing on turns out to be part of the picture.

Three places it shows up

Who did that? You knock over your coffee reaching for your phone and say it was an accident. But your motor system has handled cups thousands of times, and your world model knows laptops and coffee don't mix. Much of what we do comes from a Society of Mind (Minsky): a coalition of semi-autonomous systems with their own goals. So the question shifts from "did I intend it?" to "which part of me was modeling the consequences?" Our accidents are sometimes intentional. We just weren't invited to the planning meeting.

When did that happen? Experience feels continuous, but a flashed image below the threshold of awareness leaves a gap we never notice. Dreams, flow and drugs stretch or detach experienced time from physical time. The continuity is something the simulation reports, not something it guarantees.

What color is it? I see the dress as white and gold, even though I know its reflectance says black and blue. Knowing doesn't change the view. The vertigo is holding both at once: the perception is wrong about the dress and still a true fact about me.

Why the vertigo is useful

Each of these swaps a single viewpoint for a larger one. Michael Levin calls the boundary of what a system can measure, model and affect its cognitive light cone. Practicing attention widens it: the tension before snapping at someone, or the fatigue that makes you clumsy, comes inside the boundary, and where you once had automatic reactions you now have choice points. The dizziness is what it feels like when the boundary moves.

The dualist Cartesian Theater is closed, but the show goes on.