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Majestic Falls Again

This is Majestic Falls, the main waterfall at McDowell Creek Falls county park.

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Seeing Human Traits in AIs

Bashful and Bold

This picture is titled “Bashful and Bold”. To me, it evokes two people standing next to each other. The one on the left looks like it is shyly hiding its face behind the shoulder of the other, while the one on the right looks like it is facing the viewer with arms outstretched, blasting forward.

Of course, these are only unusual flowers with none of the emotions described above. It’s common for people to attribute emotions or other human characteristics to inanimate objects. While this is fairly harmless for something like this picture, things get a little more complicated when we think about the latest developments in AI and how people may react to them.

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Antique Powerland Steam Sawmill

Steam Sawmill
This is a steam-powered sawmill at the Antique Powerland museum complex in Brooks, Oregon, my “Work” entry for the World Wide Panorama project.

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Recent Articles

6
Mar

More About Waterfall Experiences

This is a picture from a recently posted 360 photo of Majestic Falls. The original picture was for one of my World Wide Panorama projects, and talked about the waterfall in general. I used a different picture of this same waterfall to discuss the idea of qualia; that one was just a normal photograph.

The normal photograph and discussion illustrated ideas of conscious experience and helped me think about the different aspects of experiences that are just based on perceptions, versus those that also involve internal context and related thoughts.

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26
Feb

Majestic Falls Again

This is Majestic Falls, the main waterfall at McDowell Creek Falls county park.

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17
Feb

Frameless Pictures

When photographs are printed and hung on a wall, they often have a frame and a matte. Sometimes though, photographers, like other visual artists, choose to display their pictures without a frame – so-called “frameless” mounting. The picture here is an example of that.

This example does have a solid side, but sometimes frameless mounts don’t even have that – they may be mounted flat on the wall, or have a small hidden mount behind the picture so that it appears to be floating in front of the wall. In any case, the point is that there is nothing in the same plane as the picture itself.

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30
Jan

Eagle Marsh

Eagle Marsh

This is the Eagle Marsh lookout at the Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge .

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25
Jan

The Experience of Waterfalls

This is Majestic Falls, in the McDowell Creek Falls area, taken on a morning that was supposed to be cloudy but turned out sunny. Fortunately we made it there before the sun became a problem. Taken with a long exposure, the falling water appears silky smooth, almost like a wisp.

This photographic approach is very popular. One reason may simply be the beautiful aesthetic of silky smoothness. But also, something about this style seems to capture what we feel when we see a waterfall — the sense of pure unbroken flow.

In other words, the smooth lines of flowing water give a sense of what we experience, but may not be an accurate representation of what we physically see.

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4
Jan

An Example of Local Wonder

This is a picture of a dandelion, taken along a small lake at a local state park. I’m not sure why it caught my eye. After all, it’s just a weed, something that is generally not thought about much except as a problem, or perhaps occasionally for making tea. For whatever reason, I took this picture.

The picture ended up being surprising in how beautiful this simple little flower appeared. Some enhancements were done in post processing, but only to enhance the colors and shapes already there, and also to deemphasize the background.

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15
Dec

Thoughts on Change

When I first published this picture, I described it as “The process of change”. Very simply, it was because that captured the process of the leaves changing from green to red. At the time, I didn’t have any particular ideas of what it illustrated about change, but I think one can see various possibilities in the picture.

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12
Nov

Seeing Past Bias

We all have biases that affect how we see the world. As a photographer, one of the things I strive to learn is to see beauty in the world even when it’s not obvious. For example, my bias may be to see the obviously ugly, natural appearance of something, but I will choose to seek to see what else is there. This is perhaps a sort of deliberate bias, but it often reveals unexpected beauty.

Take, for example, this photograph. To me, it looks like a picture of deep space, with glowing gas clouds, fields of stars, and layers of detail that recede into infinity.

In reality, however, this is simply a rusting metal plate. I looked for and found a different aesthetic by refusing to limit myself to what I thought rust should look like and chose to see it a different way. Of course, it did take some processing to make it look like this, but the point is that I was deliberately trying to look beyond my bias of ugliness to find some beauty, and this resulted.

This tendency goes beyond photography, of course, and applies to pretty much all our perceptions, the ways in which we see the world around us. It even applies to scientists who are deliberately trying to extend knowledge beyond current understanding, especially in fields with high uncertainty. It’s common for individuals to start with a proposed answer and attempt to find supporting proof, rather than start with an array of options to narrow down. It’s even less common for people to deliberately try to disprove their preferred understanding.

An example of a scientific domain that reflects this challenge is research into the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is so poorly understood and is such a different phenomenon that it challenges existing views of physicalism (the idea that reality consists of only physical entities). As such, scientific research into it is subject to biased thinking because some approaches to explain it, even though not based on any religious ideas, sound religious to some people and so get immediately rejected.

I’ve written before about how consciousness is a challenging topic and how photography may help. Perhaps one specific possibility is that it can be used to address bias by helping us learn to see beyond our initial perspectives, as I did in the picture above. Sometimes, simply picturing something in a new way can yield helpful insights.

The trick is to apply this sort of thing to thinking critically about consciousness. In this case, it might look like creating metaphors that represent some aspect being studied. Metaphors may help us think about the topic in ways that don’t automatically trigger our biases. Thus, this could help us avoid biases against certain types of solutions, and truly seek whatever the science reveals.

15
Oct

After Fading

One of the things that fall is known for is the colorful displays that many trees put on; this is an example of a maple leaf beginning to turn. One of the things that strikes me about this picture is the way the color change is starting at the edge and moving its way towards the tree, as food production stops through the leaf. The edges look darker, too, as if the leaf’s life is slowly being drawn back into the tree.

When this process is complete, the leaf falls, decays, and eventually becomes part of other new growth.

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30
Sep

Perhaps Art Can Help Explore Consciousness

It often seems as if science has explained the basics of how the world works, and the remaining mysteries are interesting details that aren’t directly related to daily life. Questions about the very beginning of the universe or what’s going on in black holes may be interesting and fundamental to an ultimate theory of everything, but it’s hard to believe they have practical application.

However, history shows that solving such mysteries can change our understanding in such profound ways that it cascades through our lives in unexpected ways. So, we need to be careful with the still limited understanding we have of reality and be aware of places where we still have things to learn. Some mysteries, because they are at the edge of science, may benefit from other modes of thinking, even if only to make sure the right questions are being asked.

An example of this sort of limited knowledge is the challenge of understanding consciousness, and in particular, how it relates to material reality. In other words, is consciousness strictly a result of physical, material processes, or does it result from something outside of these?

At one time this might have been considered a somewhat abstract question, with application to only a few, narrow places in medicine. However, with the advent of AI, these questions may become fundamental influences in the future of our species.

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