"The Drunkard's Walk" is a treatise on randomness and how human perception is sort of trained to ignore or deny its effect, since, as Mlodinow claims, we're predisposed to believe that things are within our control. In fact, our perception seems to have a mind of its own, often operating outside the realm of what is real and actual. But this is because we have no choice; we literally cannot see everything. In the book, Mlodinow describes the human eyesight:
"...the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina's center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm's length. Outside the region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixelated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining the input from both eyes, filling the gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result...is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear."
Mlodinow's exposition on how eyesight works made me think of one thing: LOVE.
* * *
This is not because it's Valentine's month. The real reason should be a lot more obvious. Think about it, what could possibly be more a result of a sensory overload than when one claims to be "in love"?
We come up with our own reasons. It's her eyes. It's the way she talks. It's her taste in music. It's her enthusiasm. Her mysteriousness. It's her intelligence. Everyone claims to have experienced "love at first sight." People will swear that this is true. But perception isn't about what we see, as Mlodinow explains, it's about what our brain tells us we see.
And since love is the most intense feeling we get, then it's also our brain's greatest creation.
We can then conclude that love is by far the most intense fake thing we can ever experience.
* * *
"Eating the Dinosaur", like all of Klosterman's books, deals with how the modern world is increasingly separating itself from reality by continually building fake constructs via mass media. Known for his rather oblique argumentative writing, Klosterman closes the book with one of his clearest, most definitive declarations yet:
"Technology is bad for civilization. We are living in a manner that is unnatural. We are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity, and we have unknowingly constructed a simulated world. The benefits of technology are easy to point out (medicine, transportation, the ability to send and receive text messages during Michael Jackson's televised funeral), but they do not compensate for the overall loss of humanity that is its inevitable consequence. As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now.
And that (evidently) is what I want."
Almost everything about the modern world is fake. But this doesn't bother us. Our reactions to all the fakeness are nonetheless real. And fakeness, whether we're aware of it or not, is what we want.
This is how I see love these days.
I have no recognition of love outside of what I've watched in TV shows and in movies and what I've heard in pop songs. Every time I pinpoint a specific emotion as "love", I am ultimately drawing the conclusion from the reference point provided by three solid decades of technological exposure. My mind is not working on pure inference; it's slanted heavily towards fiction.
I'm aware that all these things - the visceral longing, the promise of happiness, the way I feel as if the universe is in order - are just illusions that are cooked up in my mind. Yet I am okay with this. I love the way the illusion of love feels. I'm addicted to it. And I'm going to have my fix over and over and over again, totally aware of the harmful side-effects.
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