The locution “nothing but” is frequently used when philosophers discuss appearances. The appearances are said to be “nothing but” particles or corpuscles, for example, or structured brain events. Even Thomas Hobbes, who recognized and honored the appearances, employed the “nothing but” locution frequently. That locution did not mean he denied the appearances or reduced them to matter and motion. Hobbes’s materialism is at best an explanatory one, not an ontological one. He was very firm: there are appearances (phantasms) and reality (matter and motion). Our contemporary materialists are not so clear about what they are affirming or denying. Often, they seem to me to confuse two claims: (a) all phenomena, all seemings or appearings, can be explained in terms of or by reference to, e.g., brain events, and (b) there are only brain events (and other physical events in the environment). The recent vogue for talking about supervenience may be an attempt to have it both ways, somehow to combine (a) and (b). Perhaps the appeals to supervenience are a genuine recognition that phenomena, qualia and mental events are also real, also exist.

To follow claim (a) rigidly may eliminate the need for any causal explanation of appearances, qualia or awareness. Whether supervenience is a causal relation, I am unclear. Most often, it seems to be treated as an explanatory relation: awareness or consciousness arises from, or emerges out of, a specific organization and structure of brain processes. But whatever the relation is, to talk of supervenience would seem to lead to the recognition that what supervenes, what arises from, differs in some ways from that from which it has emerged, or what it supervenes on: the supervenee and the supervened would seem to differ, at least numerically. With perceptual qualia or phenomenal properties, the difference cannot just be numerical. There is a kind difference between seen color or heard sound and the physical and neural events that precede our experience of color or sound. Similarly, being aware of tables, computers, or coffee differs in kind from the physical and neural processes that correlate with such awareness.

John W. Yolton, Realism and Appearances: An Essay in Ontology

It never occurred to me the shooting an entire picture in one room would be a problem. In fact I felt I could turn it into an advantage. One of the most important dramatic elements for me was the sense of entrapment those men must have felt in that room. Immediately a ‘lens-plot’ occurred to me. As the picture unfolded, I wanted the room to seem smaller and smaller. That meant that I would slowly shift to longer lenses as the picture continued. Starting with a normal range (28mm-40mm) we progressed to 50mm, 75mm and 100mm lenses.

In addition, I shot the first third of the movie above eye level. And then, by lowering the camera, shot the second third at eye level and the last third below eye level. In that way, by the end, the ceiling began to appear. Not only were the walls closing in, the ceiling was as well. The sense of increasing claustrophobia did a lot to raise the tension of the last part of the movie.

On the final shot, an exterior that showed the jurors leaving the courtroom, I used a wide angle lens. Wider than any that had been used in the entire picture. I also raised the camera to the highest above eye-level-position. The intention was to literally give us all air, to let us finally breathe, after two increasingly confined hours.

Boris Kaufman, photographer, in Making Movies by Sidney Lumet

All [eye] cones contain a pigment molecule consisting of a curved chain of amino acids. When this molecule absorbs a photon, a double bond snaps, causing the chain to straighten and the molecule to change shape. This seemingly trivial incident, lasting just 200 millionths of a billionth of a second, underpins all human vision.

James Fox, The World According to Color

In the fourth epoch, so gradually that almost no one noticed, machines began taking the side of nature, and nature began taking the side of machines. Humans were still in the loop but no longer in control. Faced with a growing sense of this loss of agency, people began to blame “the algorithm,” or those who controlled “the algorithm,” failing to realize there no longer was any identifiable algorithm at the helm. The day of the algorithm was over. The future belonged to something else.

George Dyson, Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control

In a digital computer, one thing happens at a time. In an analog computer, everything happens at once. Brains process three-dimensional maps continuously, instead of processing one-dimensional algorithms step by step. Information is pulse-frequency coded, embodied in the topology of what connects where, not digitally coded by precise sequences of logical events. “The nervous system of even a very simple animal contains computing paradigms that are orders of magnitude more effective than are those found in systems built by humans,” argued Carver Mead, a pioneer of the digital microprocessor, urging a reinvention of analog processing in 1989. Technology will follow nature’s lead in the evolution of true artificial intelligence and control.

Electronics underwent two critical transitions over the past one hundred years: from analog to digital and from high-voltage, high-temperature vacuum tubes to silicon’s low-voltage, low-temperature solid state. That these transitions occurred together does not imply a necessary link. Just as digital computation was first implemented using vacuum tube components, analog computation can be implemented, from the bottom up, by solid state devices produced the same way we make digital microprocessors today, or from the top down through the assembly of digital processors into analog networks that treat the flow of bits not logically but statistically: the way a vacuum tube treats the flow of electrons, or a neuron treats the flow of pulses in a brain.

George Dyson, Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control

We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the hidden transformations that others underwent in his mind; we mean to say that the dependence of what he does on what others have done is excessively complex and irregular. There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the direct intervention of the gods.

Paul Valéry, “Letter About Mallarmé”