Transcripts of the personal tapes
recorded by Melanie Anne Phillips while continuing to develop the Mental Relativity theory
of mind.
7/24/94
"Forrest Gump:
Being There, Doing That"
by Melanie
Anne Phillips
Sunday, July 24th, 1994
Another notion considering Forrest Gump: as a
species, we have striven in terms of our record keeping to try and get accurate
representations of the meaning of things by documenting the knowledge of what actually
occurred, basing everything on the knowledge of what occurred, and saying knowledge is
where you can find objective truth -- only in knowledge. When something really was a
certain way, that means that that's it. There are all kinds of interpretations available,
but they are interpretations of what is actual fact. We have increased our technology to
be more and more accurate in defining facts and recording facts. We started by a verbal
tradition, and then came to written forms, moved on through technology, we have now where
we could put it on audio, and then on motion pictures and video tape, still photographs.
All these means of storing images. Now digitally and electronically directly into the
computer. When we do that, we feel that we are becoming more and more precise.
But, as we see in recent CGI productions like
Forrest Gump, where things that actually did not exist can be made to appear as accurately
existed, as if they had. And in the context at the time, we run into a situation where the
very technology we created to latch onto absolute truth is now making that a more nebulous
concept. When we see Forrest Gump with JFK, LBJ and Nixon, the grain of the picture of him
, matches the grain of the picture of the president. Everything blends together
seamlessly, flawlessly. Anyone who has seen Forrest Gump would see those pictures and say,
no that never happened. But, suppose somebody was unaware of Forrest Gump - in a foreign
country or didn't know. Tom Hanks doesn't look exactly like Tom Hanks in that motion
picture. If they came across a piece of that footage, mixed in with historical footage,
they might very well include it in with the actual footage of that time period or
administrations.
100 years from now, no one will be as popularly
aware of Forrest Gump as we are today, since it's brand new. And they will find that
footage and believe that was a clip that was used of historic value in the motion picture.
In fact, they may actually conclude that the entire motion picture is about somebody.
In any event, what we've done is that we've created
something that archeologists in years hence will look at as absolute truth because there
is a record of it and there is no way to distinguish the fantasy from the reality. Why is
this? Because there is no such thing as objective reality. When we try to document
objective reality, we are always going to fall short. We are going to fall short because
no matter how many different ways we measure it, there will always be ways that we aren't
measuring it. For example, we aren't measuring everything that happens in a person's life
without a break, without a cut, without an edit.
We don't have a simulation that starts someone out
at the moment of birth and follows them with video and audio, anything within the realm
that they could be seen in, anything within the realm of what they could see, and create
from that a record of their lives. Instead, we have little flash segments that are
recorded, and those flash segments allow for gaps, just like Richard Nixon's missing 18
minutes. There are gaps that occur and the gaps are bigger than the parts that are
covered. There's no way in current technology to cover someone's entire life from one end
to another. So anything that we fabricate and put in as an actual existent moment of their
lives could very well have been altered by a non-included gap.
That's only one illustration of how we don't cover
everything with complete accuracy, because it's not just covering the moment, it's also
covering all the other moments to show in your documentation, just as in an argument in a
story, that things are not only proven by what you see of them, but also showing that in
other areas, it did not occur in all other areas, where it might have. You have to prove
both that it did exist and also that something did not exist elsewhere. So, in order to
show that Forrest Gump was not really there with these presidents we would have had to
have a documentation of all of the time the presidents did anything during their
administrations that was seamless, to not allow for a single moment in which that could
have occurred. Now this seems like kind of a moot point, but it's really very important,
because the implications are that as we begin to create a technology that seems more and
more real in documenting what actually apparently happened, we are also bringing ourselves
right back to the verbal tradition of having people describe what they actually saw.
In fact the most objective of all truths goes back
to the concept of folklore, and will actually become our modern folklore, so that as we
see things that happen in front of us, that we perceive with our own senses, in real time,
sure we can be mistaken, just as any lawyer knows dealing with eyewitnesses, is that
eyewitnesses can often be mistaken. But if you get enough eyewitnesses to enough different
kinds of events, you establish something different than an objective external truth. You
establish an objective internal truth. An objective internal truth is the collective
appreciation or folklore that surrounds an individual. Which means you can't trust any of
the events that are talked about as actually having happened, no matter how many times
they recur in the folklore. And you can't trust any of the statistics that are brought
forth, or the historic representations that are transcribed. But what you can trust is
that the mood surrounding that individual or that event or that period of history is
accurately the way that people feel about it now.
