The Chinese and the Mayans didn't care. Europeans did. We now have trump!

One of the factoids that I share with students is how India and China were the richest countries on the planet for the longest time.  Not only rich, but advanced in scientific and literary fields also.  Math, astronomy, metallurgy, whatever it was, well, they had it all.

Yet, they didn't seem to have had a great deal of interest in exploring the rest of the world in order to colonize them.

Trevor Noah joked about this in one of his bits, where he asks the audience to imagine Jamaicans, living in the paradise that the Caribbean is, going to cold Europe to colonize the people and the land.

The world changed in 1492.  Jill Lepore writes that "it is a little surprising that it was western Europeans in 1492, and not some other group of people, some other year, who crossed an ocean to discover a lost world."

Lepore gives us an idea of some of the other groups of people:

The Maya, whose territory stretched from what is now Mexico to Costa Rica, knew enough astronomy to navigate across the ocean as early as AD 300.

(A quick comment/question: Why is Lepore using the "AD" instead of "CE"?)

Lepore adds:

The Chinese had invented the compass in the eleventh century, and had excellent boats. Before his death in 1433, Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim, had explored the coast of much of Asia and eastern Africa, leading two hundred ships and twenty-seven thousand sailors. But China was the richest country in the world, and by the late fifteenth century no longer allowed travel beyond the Indian Ocean, on the theory that the rest of the world was unworthy and uninteresting.

Similarly, the Middle East and North African Muslims couldn't care about the rest of the world because they already dominated trade--Mediterranean and continental.

Trevor Noah's Jamaicans serve as wonderful metaphors.  The world outside of Europe was happy and content.

Europeans, on the other hand, were not.

It was somewhat out of desperation, then, that the poorest and weakest Christian monarchs on the very western edge of Europe, fighting with Muslims, jealous of the Islamic world's monopoly on trade, and keen to spread their religion, began looking for routes to Africa and Asia that wouldn't require sailing across the Mediterranean.

Columbus discovered America!

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

The genocide, the rape of cultures, and more that they don't always teach in school!

I suppose white supremacy was also born!

By the end of the 19th century, China and India had been reduced to lands of beggars by white colonialists and imperialists, and the material and cultural riches of Central and South America had been wiped out by Europeans.  Two decades into the 20th century, the Middle East was carved into prizes for Europeans.  And Africa was raped and plundered--even by the tiny Belgians.

These truths are setting up the book well.  Looks like it might be a depressing read.  After all, all these truths have given us trump and his 63 million.  I hope Jill Lepore will give me plenty to be cheerful about too.

A "modeled imitation of the observed reality"

In The Matrix, Morpheus reminds Neo that it is our brains that tell us what we think a smell is, what a taste is, what the world is.  Based on all that, we then think of the universe in a certain way.  What if it is all a figment of our imagination?

Ancient Hindu philosophers provided even the illiterate like me to conveniently refer to all that figment of our imagination as Maya.  It is all a grand illusion.  We think the red hot chili pepper is insanely spicy and pungent.  But, does that mean it really is?  What exactly is real and what is not real?  Am I real?   What if the "insane" descriptions of the world that those in the cuckoo's nests offer are the real descriptions of the world?  What if we are the ones trapped in an asylum and we don't even know it?

Some day, when we figure out where consciousness comes from, maybe we will sort those questions out once and for all.  Until then, we struggle through.  And we have to make a conscious effort to deal with these tough questions especially now when it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify the real from the virtual.  You think you are listening to a cello being played, when it turns out that a kid is producing those sounds through a computer.  Friends are virtual. Even that most primal of all--sex--doesn't have to be real anymore!

I had designed for myself deep reads for this summer so that I can engage with those questions for a while and continue to chip away at my existential struggle of "who am I?" and "what the heck is all this about?"  The final one in the list is John Steinbeck's The Log from the Sea of Cortez.  Yes, a non-fiction work by the great storyteller.  As is noted in the introduction in the Penguin edition that I am reading:

If we read and consider Sea of Cortez in all its complexity, we see John Steinbeck fusing science and philosophy, art and ethics by combining the compelling if complex metaphysics of Ed Ricketts with his own commitment to social action by a species for whom he never gave up hope, and whom he believed could and would triumph over the tragic miracle of its own consciousness.

The travel adventure is, to use Alfred Hitchcock's favorite, a MacGuffin.  Yes, Steinbeck the marine biologist will give me details about invertebrates and I would not really care about that.

"We were curious" writes Steinbeck in the introduction:

Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny.  We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality.

And he gives an example of the reality versus what we construct it to be:

The man with his pickled fish has set down one truth and has recorded in his experience many lies.  The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, not does he smell that way.  

The travel adventure is a MacGuffin.  I don't want my entire life to be a MacGuffin.

It is not merely the color of the dress. Everything is an illusion. Maya!

"Maya" is a profound thought in Hindu philosophy.  The philosophy offers plenty of metaphors to get us regular folks understand it.  In semi-darkness, we might mistake a rope for a snake and freak ourselves out.  Out in the desert, the mirage of an oasis has us rushing there for water.  Maya is that philosophical idea that such incorrect perceptions of reality lead us to nothing but immense unhappiness and misery.  It is all an illusion.

Even with my half-baked understanding of maya, it makes sense.  It has always made sense.  The discussions of a "creator" that follows all those are where I walked away from the faith.

The latest trending story to break the internet--what is the color of that dress?--is another metaphor along those lines.  In case you missed it because unlike me you have real work to do, let me first brief you on it.  Consider the image below:

source

What's the big deal, you ask?

Not since Monica Lewinsky was a White House intern has one blue dress been the source of so much consternation.
(And yes, it’s blue.)
The fact that a single image could polarize the entire Internet into two aggressive camps is, let’s face it, just another Thursday. But for the past half-day, people across social media have been arguing about whether a picture depicts a perfectly nice bodycon dress as blue with black lace fringe or white with gold lace fringe. And neither side will budge.

In that image, the original is in the middle.

So, what gives?

Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. The light hits the retina in the back of the eye where pigments fire up neural connections to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes those signals into an image. Critically, though, that first burst of light is made of whatever wavelengths are illuminating the world, reflecting off whatever you’re looking at. Without you having to worry about it, your brain figures out what color light is bouncing off the thing your eyes are looking at, and essentially subtracts that color from the “real” color of the object.

What we see is not what we see until our brains tell us what it is that we are seeing.  So, how do we know for sure what we see is what is really out there?  You "see" how this dress color controversy is serving as a metaphor for maya?

The colors that we see are illusions themselves.  Is that red apple really red?

"The agreed-upon technical definition of color," says Fairchild, "is that it's a visual perception."

He should know; "Mark Fairchild, who studies color and vision science at the Rochester Institute of Technology."

A visual perception, which we think is the reality.  That is nothing but maya!

"I could change the color of illumination on that apple and make it look green or blue or something completely different," he says. "The redness isn't a property of the apple. It's a property of the apple in combination with a particular lighting that's on it and a particular observer looking at it."All three of those elements are critical to the idea of "red" or any other color, he says. "You have to have somebody looking at that in order to combine all that information and produce a perception."

It is all an illusion!

If two people are looking at, for example, a construction worker hat, and both saying, "This is yellow," are they really having the same subjective experience?
"I think we have no way of knowing. I think it's not known," says Brainard. "Each of us is essentially stuck inside our own brains with respect to the nature of that experience. So your yellow could be like my blue, your yellow could be like my experience of sound, and my experience of sound could be like your experience of color."

So, get going. Search for that whatever that is beyond what you think you see.