Nook said:
After reading your comment, I felt a strong urge to defend the movie, I wanted to question your expertise on movies and say that you probably felt that way before you sat down to watch it. But after a few minutes, I'm wondering if that urge to defend it comes from the alleged visual and verbal 'drugs'.
I think it's great when we can self-observe our own urges and interrupt our tendencies towards knee-jerk reactions.
Nook said:
I didn't feel like there were any, after I came out from watching the movie (in the theatrer and in 3D) but now that I'm reading about other people's experiences, there might have been something.
I suppose I should watch it again at home, in 2D and see how I feel about now without all the other technological tricks.
Despite my inclinations towards sci-fi type stories, I decided not to watch the movie. I could then read others experiences without too much bias, I supposed. The various reactions have been interesting to read about.
Galaxia's comments were especially refreshing.
From the viewpoint of self-observation, what I find most interesting is what I experience during that time period that starts when I first become aware that there is a "movie named Avatar or something similar", the point at which my mind grants credibility to the idea of investing time with it and the point at which I would be seated comfortably and starting the show, having justified the preparatory stages that got me to this point.
Do you remember any of this from your self-observation practices?
The way I'm tending to see things at present, the differences between many folks, with regard to this movie, split three ways. The first two describe the folks who 'get into it' and afterward, discuss the pros and cons (this point vs that point) of the esoteric or other meanings that the movie supposedly represents. The third suggests an approach that there is basically nothing there but a sequence of still computer drawings and audio. One's own imagination gets drawn in and the mind and perceptions do all the animating and assignment of meaning. Our own fantasies, aspirations, likes and dislikes get projected onto the screen. We get out of it what we put into it, as we seemingly entertain ourselves with fantasy.
Sometimes, I tend to think that to the extent one has come away having thoroughly enjoyed something like this, one's anchor to reality has become obscured and one can possibly have accepted a new cognitive bias that was inserted while one was disassociated because almost
any information can work its way into a cognitive judgment.
Has anyone ever noticed him/herself drawing a conclusion or utilizing a "rule-of thumb" based on something that can be traced back to a fictional story? I have noticed this in myself and decided that to prevent it from happening would require keeping the critical faculty of the conscious mind asking questions and analyzing everything instead of just letting go and accepting whatever feels good. But that seems to put a damper on the enjoyment to some extent.
Explaining the cognitive bias/logical fallacy of
generalization from fictional evidence, Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Palo Alto, CA has an interesting way of putting it:
[Arriving at] Truth is hard work, and not the kind of hard work done by storytellers. We should avoid, not only being duped by fiction - failing to expend the mental effort necessary to 'unbelieve' it - but also being contaminated by fiction, letting it anchor our judgments. And we should be aware that we are not always aware of this contamination.
Source: _http://singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf
So, could we say that as long as there is nothing to 'unbelieve' after this movie, then the main concern would be to consciously understand how this activity fits into our Aim, even if it just functions as a positive disassociation experience?
I hope I don't give the impression that I have no imagination. I do, and sometimes it's overactive. I just want to 'see' what's going on in this machine. And this is what I think I see happening.
