I'm working on a very chancy play in which a main character is a working philosopher.
At one stage I have him deliver a quick riff on something I've posted on this forum: He asserts that all notion - all "consciousness" - is IIMT: Picture an ocean-wave. How many notional drops in that notional wave? It's Indeterminate. How long is it? It's indefinite. It's multiplex - never a single "unit" - the "wave". And, I have the character say, it's transitory; all notion morphs like a writhing cloud. An hour from now you cannot reconjure in all its details that identical wave. At that moment, it occurred to me that maybe I was making a mistake that has marked philosophers through the ages: Because MY notions - in particular my imagined visual images - are unstable, constantly changing, I was assuming that EVERYONE's notions are that way. I can believe that whole philosophies have been created by philosophers who mistakenly believed the nature of notion is the same for everyone else as it is for them. The members of this forum are very predominantly visual artists. I'm not a notoriously modest guy, but I assume almost every one of you is far better than I at imagining visual images. So it then came to me you were the perfect talented people to put the question to. Note: I'm not talking about the visual image of something you're seeing right in front of you as you paint. I'm talking, in effect, about two other kinds of images: Memory images, and imagined images. My question is, how stable, how precisely-in-every-detail, reconjurable are those images? Is it, say, as though someone asked you to pull out a given photograph, and you can do it, utterly unchanged? Picture Abraham Lincoln - i.e. a photo of him you've seen. Does your conjured image reproduce every detail in the original image? Don't answer too fast. Are you picturing the exact tufts of hair on his head, beard and eyebrows? When I say "New York City", does the exact same image come to mind each time? And when it is the same, is it precisely the same? Now picture again that ocean wave. Would you say your current image is in every detail exactly as it was when you pictured it a few minutes ago? When/if you are painting a vasty scene a la Breughel, Bosch, Dadd et al, and you quit for the night and come back the next day, and there are still large unfinished patches, will you be able to fill in - in your mind's eye - the exact details you originally had for those patches? Or is it the case you never "see" in detail until, brush in hand, you're putting the specific strokes on canvas? In sum, is there any validity to my claim that all notion is transitory?
