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.
By expanding the picture to the full 360 photo and seeing everything else that’s there, the experience of the waterfall expands greatly.
With the full 360 photo, the picture becomes interactive. It’s no longer just about viewing something, but involves looking around, making decisions, and acting. This is yet a different type of experience. However, it’s not clear how these relate to the standard description of qualia.
I probably just need to do more research, but it does seem that discrete qualia (“quale” is the singular) may be too simple, and that our real world, or rather our experience in it, is a mixture of many different individual experiences (qualia), all related somehow. The tendency of science to create discrete compartments and structures may artificially impose a picture of discrete experiences, separate from one another.
Think about looking at the 360 photo of the waterfall, and gradually moving the waterfall itself off screen. There may be an experience of it while on screen and that experience disappears when it is off screen, but what happens when it is in intermediate positions? If there are partial versions of the original experience, does that mean that our experience of a picture containing the waterfall, that also contains other elements, includes that experience as something partial and mixed with experience of the other elements?
I’ll be looking into this, and perhaps explore these questions by creating other pictures that illustrate or evoke the questions that come up.