truth changes

It has been said in academic philosophy that truth is created by circumstance, that cultural beliefs change reality. This is to say that people living in 2023 see the world fundamentally different than, perhaps, in 1826. They don't just see taller buildings and more people with pets, they see the World differently. Orwell's writing suggests this - it suggests that if cultural language, in this case, via politics, tells people something is true repeatedly and the masses believe it, truth changes. The thing is actually "seen" as existing differently. Or perhaps they really believe it is.

Hegel suggested this same thing and so did Marx. They suggested that historical dialectics unfold where ideas compete, and new outcomes emerge. This emergence is, in a way, a new truth.

What is interesting to me is the depth of the difference between what inspires these differences. What do I mean?

In a capsule, say 2007-2023, our world is about cell phones and car accidents caused by them. It is about virus news blown out of proportion and becoming extravagantly political. This changes things about what we see as true. For example, we see face masks differently. We stare into people's cars and see if they are texting so that we can predict the next accident. This is our life. I would not say that these pretty preoccupations are very deep.

But what was life like in the early 1800s? Well … a man sat in his studio and looked at a trainboard, a diorama of "life," miniaturized on a board. He wondered not about whether the people on the board might one day drive with computers in their hand and kill each other, he thought about permanence and reality. Was this little trainboard a world unto itself? Did it exist as a reality? And this line of thinking led him to think about permanence. This diorama captures a moment in time perfectly. It took him years probably to build the board so, to him, it lacked efficiency.

You see, in the early 1800s, permanence was different than it is today. Time could not be stopped. The best you could do is sketch or decorate a train board - but even that was not very closely related to the real thing that had been sketched or copied or built. They were mere replicas. But in those days replicas were different than they are today.

In response to this thinking he started to look for faster and better ways of capturing the things that he saw in the world. He ended up with a box that had a hole in it that captured light coming from an object. The hole directed the light onto a silver plate that was surrounded by mercury vapor. This chemical reaction, over time (in some cases hours), etched images into the silver and produced a strange replica that shocked the world. It was a duplicate of the scene outside the box, say a tree, or a wagon, or, in one case, a man who looked like a vampire.

The man's name was Louis Daguerre. He was a scenic artist in France who had dreams of understanding the world differently. He shocked the world with his new ideas and became a bit of a celebrity in a growing industrial world. It was an industrial world that would take his new idea, called an obscura, and turn it into something we take for granted today.

You see in the early 1800s you could not duplicate reality the way you can today. The movie The Matrix was a long way off. Yes, Daguerre knew that there was more to simulation and simulacra. By doing this he changed the way people think and he used invention to move this process along.

Louis Daguerre had invented the camera.