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In Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, a horrific crime in the forests outside Kyoto is recounted by four different eyewitnesses, three of whom are still alive. Each tells a different version of the same series of events. The film itself is deeply affecting, but even Kurosawa could not have imagined its lasting stylistic influence. The use of contradictory flashbacks and unreliable narrators was dubbed the Rashomon effect, a term which has made its way into common lexicon and legal jargon, while points of view have become an important tool, or shortcoming, for understanding the world around us. Rashomon is, easily, the second best movie ever made about perspective:
In this post, I’ll share examples of the power and limits of perspective from the realms of philosophy, physics, and fiction, and try to make sense of how they can offer our own lives a bit of…
I. Wigner’s Friend
“Anyone who claims to understand quantum theory is either lying or crazy.” - Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist of quantum theory.
Like it or not, it’s quantum water we’re swimming in. Quantum theory is, without question, the most successful scientific theory of all time. Its maddening equations have never failed, and much of the work in modern physics involves fitting other theories of the world – gravity, strings, etc. – into the quantum model.
Still, Feynman wasn’t just joshing. Physicists themselves have never fully grasped the quantum world on a basic, conceptual level, and at the core of this misunderstanding is what’s known as the quantum measurement problem.
First, some background. As you might have heard, particles are waves, and waves are particles. The proof involves beaming light (made up of particles called photons) through a board with two small slits and observing what comes out the other side. This classic double-slit experiment found that light particles experienced diffraction (bending) and interference (combination), effects normally attributed to waves. It turns out that this is true not just for photons but also for particles with mass, like electrons, specks of dust, or human beings. Wave-particle duality: all of quantum theory comes from this strange reality.
Years after the double-slit experiment, Erwin Schrodinger devised a miraculous equation, better known as the wave function, that represented the probabilistic path of a particle in space, allowing for the calculation of a particle’s position or momentum at a given time.1 What does it mean for an equation to be probabilistic when it’s meant to be precise and predictive? Like much of quantum theory, it’s entirely counterintuitive, and also true. Schrodinger’s wave function treats the position of a particle as a superposition of numerous possible states. Yet whenever that position is actually measured, the function appears to collapse into a single state, which the equation spits out, without fail.
Among the many confusing things here, one stands out: it’s as if the very act of measuring the wave function causes its collapse. Which is a huge issue for scientists, since the integrity of a measurement depends on its independence from the phenomenon it measures!2 This is better known as the quantum measurement problem, and it still hasn’t been solved.
In 1961, the physicist Eugene Wigner imagined that his friend was in a laboratory conducting a quantum experiment on a system, like Schrodinger’s cat, with two distinct states (call them “0” and “1”). Wigner’s friend (as the thought experiment is beautifully named) models his system using Schrodinger’s equation, meaning it is in a superposition of its possible states until he makes a measurement, collapsing the system into one state or the other. But now, imagine Wigner himself is standing outside the laboratory, waiting for the friend to relay his results, making his own model of the situation. In Wigner’s model, there are still two possible states, but they include the original system and the friend’s measurement of it, i.e., “0/friend measures 0” and “1/friend measures 1.”
Wigner’s friend makes his measurement, the system collapses, then he runs outside to tell Wigner, collapsing Wigner’s combined system into whatever state the friend measured. But consider that both elements of Wigner’s model were already decided before his friend ran outside, yet Wigner’s system appeared to collapse only when that information entered his consciousness. The result is a quagmire of observation, measurement, and perspective. Objectively, when did the system collapse? It depends on who you ask! Wigner’s friend allows for two observers to experience two different realities from the same event.3
II. The Problem of Other Minds
Philosophy has long been obsessed with defining consciousness. Materialists think the mind is nothing more than a product of physical and biological processes; basically the brain. For them, there is no separate plane of consciousness. Idealists hold the opposite: only the mind exists, and the external, physical world is an illusion created by the mind. Dualists take the Cartesian line, that the mind and body are distinct entities, working together but existing in separate realms. In 1974, a young philosopher at Harvard named Thomas Nagel waded into the debate with his paper “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?”, which remains today one of the most widely cited references in consciousness and philosophy of mind.
Nagel’s premise is remarkably simple. Consciousness, he says, is “the subjective character of experience.” By this definition, humans are far from the only organisms with the gift of consciousness; instead, any living thing is conscious so long as “there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism.” Nagel’s titular question really asks whether anyone else’s consciousness is accessible to our own, also known as the problem of other minds. Spoiler alert: no! According to Nagel, the best we can do is imagine what it’s like for us to be a bat, which is a very different thing from knowing what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.
Nagel framed his argument as the nail in the coffin of materialism, since, unlike the physical world, consciousness is an entirely subjective phenomenon. Later philosophers have been quite skeptical of Nagel’s simplistic line of reasoning, and recent leaps in neuroscience and psychology have re-established materialism as the dominant theory.
Nagel’s question remains relevant for the insight that the mind is a black box; each individual’s consciousness is akin to their own point of view, impenetrable to the outside world, though not for lack of trying.
III. Who’s Telling This Story, Anyway?
In the 19th Century, the heyday of the novel, third person narration reigned. Austen, Dickens, Kafka, Dostoevsky (with some exceptions). The narrator was understood as an objective, omniscient figure, telling the story somewhat outside of its events, or else from a designated place within them, like Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes. Often this third person perspective trafficked in free indirect discourse, meaning the narrator has access to several characters’ thoughts, expressed freely without being tagged with “he/she thought,” creating a cacophony of voices within the omniscient narration. The modernists of the early 20th Century blew up the old style of narration, introducing stream-of-consciousness (Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury), third-person limited (Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist), and multiple perspectives (Woolf’s The Waves).
Of course, there are countless exceptions to these period categorizations, as there are to my next blanket statement: since the mid-century, the first person narrator has dominated literary fiction. Ironically, it may have been the so-called Great Male Narcissists of mid-century (Roth, Mailer, Salinger) that brought first person to the forefront, though it is now prevalent in books about identity, often rebelling against precisely that tradition. The current fad of autofiction takes the first person one step further by dissolving the distance between author and narrator.4
It goes without saying that the perspective from which a story is told has significant bearing on how the story is read. In writing classes, an annoyingly common piece of feedback is to consider swapping narrative POV, just to see how it changes a story. A creative exploration of this idea comes in Anna Moschovakis’s novel Eleanor, or The Rejection of the Progress of Love, in which the narration alternates chapter-to-chapter from first to third person. The difference in tone is productively jarring, not unlike the painting by Jan Dibbets pictured above. There is something about calling attention to the artifice of narrative perspective that is disquieting, but it’s always there, whether we see it or not.
Perspective
It can be difficult, these days, to develop a unique, sound perspective on nearly anything. The authorities of our upbringing, education, and cultural/historical circumstances color the lens through which we see the world. More than ever, we have access to a staggering range of perspectives, with little direction on which to privilege and which to cast aside. The obvious example is political media, where even as an informed citizen it is often genuinely difficult to figure out what’s going on.
I find myself struggling with more basic choices. Has anyone picked a restaurant lately without scouring the reviews? Watched a movie without checking the Rotten Tomatoes? With so much warped information at our disposal, it is easy to become the opposite of Nagel’s bat; every point of view is clear except for our own. And yet, in social interactions judgement can feel like a stand-in for personality.5 As Greg Jackson puts it in his Harper’s essay “Vicious Cycles”:
Rarely are you left to wonder what you yourself think, or what else you would like to know before forming an opinion, without someone swooping in to think for you.
In the climax of Rashomon, after hearing each witness tell their account of the crime with a self-interested slant, a priest declares that he has lost his faith in humanity. But the arrival of an unexpected character changes his perspective; what he saw as self-interest was really self-preservation. Perspective may be ultimately subjective, but it can be shared and shaped by others for better or worse. With friends or loved ones or trusted advisors, the black box of the mind cracks open. Open yourself up to conflicting points of view, Kurosawa seems to say, and you may at first get lost, but eventually, you might be surprised what you discover.
Recommendations
Against/For Substack, plus somewhat balanced background. (There has been a lot of debate on Twitter over the ethics of Substack’s business model. Some of it is valid and some of it is political and for now, like many writers I admire from all over the spectrum, I’m still here.)
James Wood reviews Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Wood’s criticism is always a joy to read. His enthusiasm is infectious, and a respite from the presiding critical tone, which is often snarky, and occasionally cloying. If you haven’t read Ishiguro, start with Never Let Me Go.
Do You Think You Can Tell How A Neighborhood Voted Just By Looking Around? This interactive graphic from the NYT might be too random to say much about the electorate, but it’s a fun way to kill time and get a glimpse of America.
Tweet of the month:
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Chag Sameach and Happy Easter to those who celebrate. Wishing health and happiness to everyone.
Until next month,
Micah
Schrodinger’s friend Hermann Weyl attributed Schrodinger’s breakthrough, which was the first predictive application of matrix mechanics, to a “late erotic outburst” in the Swiss Alps at the age of 37.
If this isn’t clear, imagine a ruler that temporarily elongates the objects it measures.
Thanks to Professor Thomas Ryckman, who taught me everything I know about Wigner’s friend.
There is something to be said here about the rise of individualism and the all-importance of the self in modern society, but that’s for another piece.
This likely applies better to young people than our elders. Maybe they spent more time thinking, less time consuming content that others thought? Or maybe, as we get older, we just gain perspective.