The movie of our own life

Did you know that the big, hard and profound problems in philosophy are related to big, existing businesses? In the last four posts we have seen how the hard problem of free will is related to the big business of PR, marketing and advertising.

The hard problem of consciousness is related to nothing else but the show business and film industry in Hollywood and elsewhere. Why can a cinema or a movie theater be seen as a machine to understand the profound and fundamental question what it is like to be someone else? Let us try to recapitulate.

To use the words of Roger Ebert everybody is born unwillingly inside the movie of his own life. Each of us is stuck inside his or her own movie. Roger writes “I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don’t remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me” [1]. In short we are the main actors and spectators in the movie of our own life.

Apparently cinemas allow us to view the movie of other lives. We are fascinated by movie theaters and cinemas because everybody is stuck in his own movie, and they allow us to see how the other movies look like – or in other words what it is like to be someone else. While the movie of someone’s life is not the real life, it brings us as close as we can get to it, especially if it is well made. Roger Ebert said “Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.”

Vivian Sobchack argues that a films in a movie theater does not just display reality – it presents a world that invites our embodied participation. She says for a brief moment “we forget ourselves in our interest in another’s vision of the world” [2]. By perceiving the vision of the world from someone else they bridge the gap between our own subjective “movie” and the “movies” of others. She argues the film experience provides empirical insight into the nature of that embodied vision we each live daily as both “mine” and “another’s.

Vivian Sobchack writes [2]

“The cinema thus transposes what would otherwise be the invisible, individual, and
intrasubjective privacy of direct experience as it is embodied into the visible,
public, and intersubjective sociality of a language of direct embodied experience.”

And this is what the hard problem of consciousness is all about: understanding how a stranger really feels [3]. There might be no single “Cartesian theater” where consciousness happens as Daniel Dennett has argued [4], BUT theaters are the place where the hard problem of consciousness is solved. Movie theaters are machines built to solve it. Approximately.

Because a cinema

• enables immersive storytelling:
  The physical setup of a cinema – the darkened room, the large screen filling the field of vision, the powerful sound which surrounds the viewer – is designed to minimize external distractions and maximize immersion in a different world, the world of the main actor in the story that is being told. By understanding the story step by step we understand what it is like to be someone else. A cinema and the movie it shows allow us to step into someone else’s shoes, and follow his steps.
• changes our perspective:
  We see the world from the point-of-view of somebody else, through the eyes of the actors, and this allows us to share their emotions. We feel their fear, joy, sorrow, and confusion. Cinemas brings us as close as possible to the subjective reality of other persons. They allow us to bridge the gap of subjectivity by giving us the opportunity to perceive the experiences of a 3rd person from the 1st person point of view. Thereby we can experience a subjective perspective that the real world normally does not offer.
• provides us a window into different worlds:
  Cinema allows us to step into the shoes of people from different cultures, socio-economic backgrounds, historical periods, or even future times. It provides a window into “what it’s like” to be a refugee, a hero, a soldier, a researcher or a scientist, someone struggling with an illness, a person of a different race or gender, or someone facing an impossible moral dilemma. These are experiences we might never have in our own live

What does the movie of your life look like? Hopefully exciting, original and creative 😉

If we think about it, then it is not surprising that the deep, fundamental questions that everybody cares about have led to big businesses, large organizations and huge corporations. People care about these questions because they are interested in them, and because so many people care about them, they are obviously a big opportunity to make lots of money.

References

[1] “Life Itself : A Memoir by Roger Ebert (2011)
[2] The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Vivian Sobchack, 1992
[3] “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory” by David J. Chalmers (1996)
[4] “Consciousness Explained” by Daniel C. Dennett (1991)

Unsplash photo of a movie roll by Denise Jans, photo of a cinema by Toni Pomar