I see mirrors everywhere.
Maybe it’s because I’m imposing my own mental schema on the rest of the world. After all, Kant was right when he said, “Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature but imposes its laws on nature.” Or maybe it’s because mirrors are easier to see than other things. After all, they’re shiny, widely useful, and placed in conspicuous locations throughout homes, hallways, and historiographies. Or maybe it’s because the metaphor of the mirror–the reflection, the sign, the dialectic, the simulation, the narcissistic dream–is so powerful and so central to the human imagination that mirrors really are everywhere we look.
The gift of consciousness is the (a priori?) knowledge that there is something out there–some “truth”–beyond what we can immediately perceive. Any living being can experience the growth of a tree inasmuch as it grows vertically, branches out in various directions, and doesn’t move very quickly. But it’s perhaps uniquely human to wonder about the laws or meaning behind the growth of a tree–only we ask, “Why?”
Our individual and collective capacity for symbolic thought predisposes us to believe in the epistemic validity of dialectics and dichotomies. Language depends upon the assumption that objects and processes in the real world can be expressed in terms of symbols. Science–and in fact, any system intended to create knowledge–depends on mirrored relationships to link what we see and hear and taste to what we can’t possibly perceive.
Philosophers, especially philosophers of mind, have always had trouble with what they call qualia. How do we know that what you see and what I see correspond to the same thing in the real world? Do concepts independent of subjective experience, or qualia, exist? This is part of the problem of underdetermination, the idea that theories are or can be independent of evidence: the same evidence (the sun always sets in the west) can be used to form different and equally valid theories of nature (the Earth orbits the sun, or the sun orbits the Earth). The shadow of reality takes a different shape depending on the texture of the surface on which it is projected.
The fantasy of correspondence is the idea that theory and knowledge can be grounded in materiality. It is an ancient dream, visible in the Enlightenment ethos that rational (mathematical, logical, symbolic) thought can reflect and reveal the hidden natural order and all of its Utopian potential. But it is also a modern dream, incarnated as our newfound faith that digitization and interdependence can simulate a more perfect universe.
Our tools have historically been both proxies and catalysts for our changing understandings of the reflecting plane between objectivity and subjectivity. The development of printing in the 16th century splintered the Holy Roman Empire, and at the same time established new structures of knowledge and power throughout the world. The camera’s mechanical fidelity and emotionless distance from its subject altered and was altered by changing concepts of reproducibility and truth-to-nature. And now, simulation technologies from supercomputers to MRIs are at the center of changing concepts of observability, experimentation, and reality.
Karl Popper, responding to the sterile linguistic mathematics of the logical positivists, imagined an “induction machine” that might model the universe by using mirrored correspondences between simulation and reality:
In constructing an induction machine we, the architects of the machine, must decide a priori what constitutes its “world”; what things are taken to be similar or equal; and what kind of laws we wish the machine to be able to “discover” in its “world.” In other words we must build into the machine a framework determining what is relevant or interesting in its world: the machine will have its “inborn” selection principles. The problems of similarity will have been solved for it by its makers who thus have interpreted the “world” for the machine.
Simulation is probably not a solution to the correspondence problem, the problem of mirrors. Technologies of simulation are and will always remain tools developed and trained by human beings, and therefore will never be able to do or see something we cannot (but they can make things apparent that we have overlooked). But by bringing the mirror to our attention–by making material the until now invisible logical relationship between that which we experience and that which we know to be real–they provide us with a site for ultimate self-exploration.
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