The Tragedy of Coloring Books
For the past couple of years, I keep coming back to edges: how few of them there are in the world, how digital technology is founded on bits that are nothing but edges, how the online world overcomes the edginess of the technology that enables it, and how messiness is an ontological property: Reality is a mess.
And then you come to coloring books that train kids to see the world as edges to be filled in. Put down your crayons, kids. I have bad news: There are no outlines in the world, only swaths of color that are themselves fractally multi-hued.
Every edge has another edge but only if we look for it. When we die, we take our edges with us.
I think we can safely acknowledge that Rembrandt was a pretty fair sketcher. I assume that he began a painting by sketching its outline on the canvas. Nevertheless, his paintings aren’t outlines filled in. The colors are contiguous and, because he’s freaking Rembrandt, continuous. The outline underneath resulted from an edge-finding heuristic which then became a heuristic for its own erasure.
This is what we do: find an edge and then smudge it because we know continuity is more real than distinction.
In other words: Which came first, the fill-in or the edge?
According to neuroscience, the edge comes first; it would instead take a pretty remarkably astute and observant artist to realize that the reality we see and the reality that is seen are not onto but only relational. Could be you only see the swashes because of centuries of small baby steps taken by endless Rembrants each trying to turn you on to these finer points of seeing.
It does not matter that these edges are artifacts of evolution: All our senses are riddled with such artifacts. one of my favourites was the recent research on luminance vs contrast in deciphering the Mona Lisa: Kudos to the craft that sussed that reality out of how we see the world!
Hindsight is always 20/20, so you only think it’s obvious; the long history of primative art suggests it was a hard-won struggle, and now the new trick to pull is this: What are the primal cognitive edges we twentyfirst century postmodern enlightened peoples still see and therefore mistakenly project on the Reality?
Thanks, David, for a thought-provoking piece.
Weinberger: The Tragedy of Coloring Books
David Weinberger: And then you come to coloring books that train kids to see the world as edges to be filled in. Put down your crayons, kids. I have bad news: There are no outlines in the world, only swaths
One of the most fascinating parts about Gleick’s Chaos was the discussion on attractors and the way boundaries interpenetrate each other. The idea that, on this side of an apparent boundary, there are still examples of things found on the other side which is a mirror image, containing smatterings of things that are assumed to be on this side.
When you look closely at that edge, that hard line drawn between any two colours, what you see is that it is granular, it hops and skips and misses bits and includes others, that seen closely enough it is barely anything at all.
Another example is the fractal measurement of any boundary, where the smaller the scale the greater the distance until all boundaries approach the infinite.
An edge is just a vast field to play in, seen from a great distance, like a galaxy that becomes a tiny smudge on a photo plate.
As mrG intimates, edges are just convenient constructs, a scaffold that we need to get from here to there, something over which we build an arch from which we withdraw the scaffold when we cease needing it.
Cheer up
David, Perhaps you should start a new philosophical movement and call it “edgestentialism”. :)
Maybe it’s just that the visual edge maps to a nice simple conceptual model of things, and the neural pathways evolved to take advantage of that. It’s our mistake to extrapolate from the visual.
Despite the binary at the bottom, edges may be less hard-wired into computers than humans. The clear-cut truth values of formal logic are maybe just a special case – see:
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/analog.htm
Dave, binary digits are part of the problem when taking world-views forward into the unbiquity of the digital web.
Apart from better information models (ontologies that recognise blurred clasifications of various sorts – see Lakoff et al) I hold out some hope for QuBits (quantum digits) in better information processing models, that recognise doubtful bundaries. (I’m not thinking qubits as in quantum computing devices here.)
Hey Danny, I see you’ve picked up on John Sowa. I have too quite recently. I see he’s active in the SUO (Standard Upper Ontology) initiative.
I noticed he’s discussing “analogies”. I’ve been ploughing the “metaphors” furrow for some time, and recently have been reading Lakoff who, with Johnson, has a very thorough analysis on the many kinds of metaphor, analogy, metonymy etc that exist both conceptually and linguistically in the world we see.
Edges considered harmful
David Weinberger: The Tragedy of Coloring Books .