Inception

[ida pingala]

If I had half a mind I'd analyze Saito's phone call to see if the DTMF tones were louder in one channel for the first three numbers, and then louder in the other for the second three.

[ida pingala]

Is anyone familiar with the "knees of intuition"? Why 'knees'?

[justdrew]

Is anyone familiar with the "knees of intuition"? Why 'knees'?

context? Where you getting that from?

[ida pingala]

Is anyone familiar with the "knees of intuition"? Why 'knees'?

context? Where you getting that from?

Thanks for responding. Ignorant of me. I was interrupted just as I was typing. Knees of necessity is what I meant to type. Sorry.

Greek mythology it seems.

[compared2what?]

Is anyone familiar with the "knees of intuitionnecessity"?

Sure.

Why 'knees'?

Now when the spirits which were in the meadow had tarried seven days, on the eighth they were obliged to proceed on their journey, and, on the fourth day after, he said that they came to a place where they could see from above a line of light, straight as a column, extending right through the whole heaven and through the earth, in color resembling the rainbow, only brighter and purer; another day's journey brought them to the place, and there, in the midst of the light, they saw the ends of the chains of heaven let down from above: for this light is the belt of heaven, and holds together the circle of the universe. From these ends is extended the spindle of Necessity, on which all the revolutions turn. . . .

Now the whole spindle has the same motion; but, as the whole revolves in one direction, the seven inner circles move slowly in the other, . . . The spindle turns on the knees of Necessity; and on the upper surface of each circle is a siren, who goes round with them, hymning a single tone or note. The eight together form one harmony; and round about, at equal intervals, there is another band, three in number, each sitting upon her throne: these are the Fates, daughters of Necessity, who are clothed in white robes and have chaplets upon their heads, Lachesis and Clotho and Atropos, who accompany with their voices the harmony of the sirens -- Lachesis singing of the Past, Clotho of the Present, Atropos of the Future; Clotho from time to time assisting with a touch of her right hand the revolution of the outer circle of the whorl or spindle, and Atropos with her left hand touching and guiding the inner ones, and Lachesis laying hold of either in turn, first with one hand and then with the other.

-- The Vision of Er, Plato

So. It's a reference to the spindle...



...of Necessity (aka Ananke)...

ANANKE (or Anance) was the Protogenos (primeval goddess) of inevitability, compulsion and necessity. She emerged self-formed at the very beginning of time--an incorporeal, serpentine being whose outstretched arms encompassed the breadth of the universe. From the time she first appeared Ananke was entwined in the serpentine coils of her mate, the time-god Khronos. Together they surrounded the primal egg of solid matter in their constricting coils and split it into its constituent parts (earth, heaven and sea) and so brought about the creation of the ordered universe.

Ananke and Khronos remained entwined as the cosmic-circling forces of fate and time--driving the rotation of the heavens and the neverending passage of time. They were far beyond the reach of the younger gods whose fates they were sometimes said to contro

...which she holds on her knee, as a woman might who sat and span.


Shorter version:

It's really not anything you haven't probably seen before AT LEAST a million times, I'm very sorry to say. Just a reference to the same old, usual theosophical twining/twinning and esoteric cosmologycosmogony stuff that's secretly encoded into all Hollywood movies (and all things). Music of the spheres; life's essence; to everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven; etc.

You know the routine.

_______________

ON EDIT: My apologies, I lost some links. The Ananke thing is from hereand the image of the cosmos is from Wiki, here.

[ida pingala]

c2w?,

Thank you very much for your time.

It does not answer my question, which perhaps can't be answered.

Why 'knees'?

"...which she holds on her knee, as a woman might who sat and span."

In mythology, such a characterization is often a cover story for something like revelation. Something maybe lost in time.

Thanks again. You are a wealth of information.

[compared2what?]

No problem.

In mythology, such a characterization is often a cover story for something more revelatory. Something maybe lost in time.

That's exactly what I was talking about, actually. But, you know how that hidden stuff is. (Inherently not-evident-at-first-glance, that's how!)

And with that, I'm off. But it was a great pleasure to spend a little time with you, ida p. Thanks.

[compared2what?]

^^JOKING. For the sheer fun of it, while enjoying your company.

What I meant was:

I'm sorry I couldn't/can't answer your question. But thanks for asking, I'm glad to have had a second to linger with you.

[ida pingala]

What inspired me to pose what I did, and in this thread, was the heist of Saito's expansion plans for his company, code-named Proclus. Surely an odd name for a Japanese corporation (much like Sony, another story). Researching Proclus' writing is compelling; and the deeper the reading, the more the parallels to Inception arise.

Why the question about 'knees' in reference to Proclus? Well, that's decidedly unrigorous intuition.

Wedding ring used in the movie as symbol of dreaming....
Scene of Saito divulging having bought the airplane actually a dream, etc....

No doubt Nolan makes the audience work too hard. Without the promise of DVD this movie would not have been created as it was.

Like James Joyce and Stanley Kubrick, Nolan is as interested in entertaining posterity as he is in making money.

Not that James Joyce ever made any money.

[ida pingala]

In a way, this deserves its own thread... In a way, it belongs in the Aurora thread. Note that the article is from 2010.

My opinions: The audience is dreamsharing. The inception being done is on the audience. What is the nature of the inception?

The Neuroscience of Inception

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/ ... inception/

The literary critic Frank Kermode famously argued that all successful works of art have the ability to inspire multiple interpretations. We read the classics, he said, because we believe they say more than the author meant. In other words, it is the ambiguity of art - this ability to inspire arguments and blog posts – that makes it so interesting.

Inception, of course, is all about the ambiguity. (Those who parse the wobbles of the spinning top in the final scene have missed the entire point of the scene.) This doesn’t mean the movie is a masterpiece – I personally thought it was a smart summer blockbuster but no Dark Knight. That said, I found this interpretation, by Devin Farci, to be mostly convincing:

Every single moment of Inception is a dream. I think that in a couple of years this will become the accepted reading of the film, and differing interpretations will have to be skillfully argued to be even remotely considered. The film makes this clear, and it never holds back the truth from audiences. Some find this idea to be narratively repugnant, since they think that a movie where everything is a dream is a movie without stakes, a movie where the audience is wasting their time.

Except that this is exactly what Nolan is arguing against. The film is a metaphor for the way that Nolan as a director works, and what he’s ultimately saying is that the catharsis found in a dream is as real as the catharsis found in a movie is as real as the catharsis found in life. Inception is about making movies, and cinema is the shared dream that truly interests the director.

I believe that Inception is a dream to the point where even the dream-sharing stuff is a dream. Dom Cobb isn’t an extractor. He can’t go into other people’s dreams. He isn’t on the run from the Cobol Corporation. At one point he tells himself this, through the voice of Mal, who is a projection of his own subconscious. She asks him how real he thinks his world is, where he’s being chased across the globe by faceless corporate goons.

What I like about this interpretation of Inception is that it also makes neurological sense. From the perspective of your brain, dreaming and movie-watching are strangely parallel experiences. In fact, one could argue that sitting in a darkened theater and staring at a thriller is the closest one can get to REM sleep with open eyes. Consider this study, led by Uri Hasson and Rafael Malach at Hebrew University. The experiment was simple: they showed subjects a vintage Clint Eastwood movie (“The Good, The Bad and the Ugly”) and watched what happened to the cortex in a scanner. The scientists found that when adults were watching the film their brains showed a peculiar pattern of activity, which was virtually universal. (The title of the study is “Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision”.) In particular, people showed a remarkable level of similarity when it came to the activation of areas including the visual cortex (no surprise there), fusiform gyrus (it was turned on when the camera zoomed in on a face), areas related to the processing of touch (they were activated during scenes involving physical contact) and so on. Here’s the nut graf from the paper:

This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains “tick together” in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to the same visual environment.

But it’s also worth pointing out which brain areas didn’t “tick together” in the movie theater. The most notable of these “non-synchronous” regions is the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with logic, deliberative analysis, and self-awareness. Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we’re engaged in intense “sensorimotor processing” – and nothing is more intense for the senses than a big moving image and Dolby surround sound – we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such “inactivation” allows us to lose ourself in the movie:

Our results show a clear segregation between regions engaged during self-related introspective processes and cortical regions involved in sensorimotor processing. Furthermore, self-related regions were inhibited during sensorimotor processing. Thus, the common idiom ”losing yourself in the act” receives here a clear neurophysiological underpinnings.

What these experiments reveal is the essential mental process of movie-watching. It’s a process in which your senses are hyperactive and yet your self-awareness is strangely diminished. Now here’s where things get interesting, at least for this interpretation of Inception. When we fall asleep, the brain undergoes a similar pattern of global activity, as the prefrontal cortex goes quiet and the visual cortex becomes even more active than usual. But this isn’t the usual excitement of reality: this activity is semirandom and unpredictable, unbound by the constraints of sensation. (This is usually blamed on those squirts of acetylcholine, an excitatory neurotransmitter, percolating upwards from the brain stem.) It’s as if our cortex is entertaining us with surreal cinema, filling our strange nighttime narratives with whatever spare details happen to be lying around. Furthermore, the dreaming state is accompanied by an increase in activation in a wide range of “limbic” areas, those chunks of the cortex associated with the production of emotion. This is why even the most absurd nightmares cause us to wake up in a cold sweat. We care about what happens in our dreams, even when what happens makes no sense.

I’d argue that Inception tries to collapse the already thin distinction between dreaming and movie-watching. It gives us a movie in which most of the major plot points are simultaneously nonsensical – Why are we suddenly watching a thriller set in the arctic? Why are all the subconscious mercenaries such bad shots? Why don’t Cobb’s kids ever age? – and strangely compelling, just like a dream. And so we bite our fingernails even though we “know” it’s just a silly movie. Thanks to the subdued activity of the frontal lobes and the excited visual cortex, we sit in our plush chairs munching on popcorn and confuse the fake with the real. We don’t question the non-sequiturs or complain about the imperfect special effects or the shallow characters. Instead, we just sit back and watch and lose track of the time together. It’s almost as if we’re being manipulated by Dom Cobb himself, as he effortlessly travels deep into our brain to plant an idea. But this Dom Cobb – we’ll call him Christopher Nolan – doesn’t need a specially formulated sedative. He just needs a big screen.

[brekin]

The Neuroscience of Inception
This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains “tick together” in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to the same visual environment.

I'm going to assume the story is not literally implying a shared dream but a similiar stimulus response and I don't know enough about neuroscience to make a compelling counter argument but I'm going to guess that what is more important then the common stimulus and the possibility of a similar stimulus processing area is how different people interpret that response or even identify with it.
Or to to use the quote by Wombatic Rex earlier in the thread that is more on the mark:

Luther Blissett wrote:
As for your other points, I have to wonder if we were watching the same film.

Wombaticus Rex wrote:
Few of us are ever watching the same film.

"individual brains “tick together” in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to the same visual environment" Can simply mean we tend to use the same rudimentary reflexive areas of the brain when interacting with our environment like balance, distance, direction, object identification which could be probably similar to other animals as they navigate a visual environment. Mice running a maze and customers walking through IKEA may have their individual brains ticking together to the environment but that is different from existing in a shared dream mind. The guy lost in IKEA who is trying to find the restroom probably is having the same spatiotemporal patterns activated but obviously has different desires, wants, goals, and interpretations of environment.

Even if the majority of customers or mice believe that navigating their respective mazes and picking up specific objects will bring freedom and fulfillment I would see more as an example of an arena to act out their individual pre-conceived dreams. But that still seems less like a "shared dream" and more like a common belief held before the customers/mice came together in the specific belief reinforcing environment. It seems more likely that the majority of people through previous conditioning have similar reactions to similar stimuli because of common cultural experiences and a pretty much from the factory stock nervous system. (Many people jump at the scary parts in films but the horror movie buff usually needs something much more shocking to have a similar experience.)

But it’s also worth pointing out which brain areas didn’t “tick together” in the movie theater. The most notable of these “non-synchronous” regions is the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with logic, deliberative analysis, and self-awareness. Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we’re engaged in intense “sensorimotor processing” – and nothing is more intense for the senses than a big moving image and Dolby surround sound – we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such “inactivation” allows us to lose ourself in the movie:

Our results show a clear segregation between regions engaged during self-related introspective processes and cortical regions involved in sensorimotor processing. Furthermore, self-related regions were inhibited during sensorimotor processing. Thus, the common idiom ”losing yourself in the act” receives here a clear neurophysiological underpinnings.

The parts that don't "tick together" would seem to be the only ones that really matter in this context. Showing a man and a gazelle a film of a tiger charging may activate similar parts in the brain but that hardly creates a shared dream. And really the significance for most people when they dream and after is what they think the dream meant or means. My basset hound, created for this analogy, may be having the same recurring dream of falling out of my boyhood tree fort that I do, but the difference is what it means to me or what I think it means during and beyond the experience, and not just my immediate reaction during the dream.

I didn't accept Inception completely because the plot line was so convoluted it frustrated logic, deliberative analysis and self-awareness so much I gave up on understanding it. But with those areas 'inactivated" and having lost myself in the movie it wasn't overall a pleasurable experience. There seems to be missing in the equation the problem of will and the giving consent to the narrative to "willing suspend belief" versus being forced to suspend belief. As my initial post about my experience with the film notes:

As an adult it was hard to maintain coherency and to try and reason things out. I feel like after awhile you just have to suspend reality and just accept what you are being shown and not expect "things to make sense". Overall I thought it was great, but it is such a house of cards with so much wind being blown that it ultimately felt to me that it didn't "work". There is so much that you have to accept unquestioningly but understand fully at the same time that it was like watching a great bank heist film in a foreign language.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=28916

I think we want to go into a deeper trance where we dim our higher faculties and individuality somewhat to experience that "oceanic feeling" in a good film, but as we get more sophisticated we need more sophisticated (not convoluted) and persuasive logical rationales to allow us to give up conscious control to do so. Since we all have different levels and requirements to allow this consent then I would make a wild ass guess that these are the parts of the brain where there is the greatest diversity in not ticking together and are the really the ones that matter and not the other more rudimentary areas. You don't get to massage my reptile brain until you've wooed my neo-mammalian brain.

[ida pingala]

But that still seems less like a "shared dream" and more like a common belief held before the customers/mice came together in the specific belief reinforcing environment.

Yes. Or belief deconstructing environment.

[ida pingala]

I've been wondering if it's as simple as A-B-C.

C=528 hz
B=491 hz

37 hz is the binaural beat.

Indeed, I was just watching the scene in which Fischer is being interrogated about the combination to the safe, and when they ask him for any numbers that pop into his head, Hans Zimmer's score plays the same two notes b4 and c5 over and over again. Proof positive.

Following this dream logic, the twelve floors of the elevator are the notes of the music scale, the twelfth note (the scene on the beach) makes the octave? And the B, nominally the basement (the apartment scene) is the musical note B.

"Do you know what it's like to be a lover, half of a whole."

That's it for me. Thank you all for everything. Now I know how many holes it takes to fill Albert Hall.

Feel free to email me at myriadsmallcreature@yahoo.com.

Peace and joy!

[barracuda]

Wot a surprize.

Yawn.

[Six Hits of Sunshine]