The style of no style.
-Bruce Lee
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What is a camera?
A camera is a device that….
Wait, stop there; a camera is a device. At it’s most basic primordial description, a camera is a thing, and by definition, that thing exists. But what if there existed a universe in which the task accomplished by a camera did not require the existence of a camera? Well, first, imagine the opposite, a universe where objects must first be projected by a projection device in order to be seen. In that world, the outrageous idea would be: The Projections of No Projector. As it is where we come from, energy and matter somehow commingle to produce a material reality which, in a way, self-projects its presence into the physical world without the need for a projection device. Each and every thing around us that we can see or touch or taste projects itself out of energy and into a physical dimension. This is not to say that this reality I see before me is without a projection mechanism, but that mechanism is not something which simultaneously exists in the projected world acting to project everything else. If this were so, what would project the projector if not another projector? Could it be that everything is projecting everything else? Either that or everything simply projects itself, which is pretty much the same thing. Either way, there is no separate projecting device, there just is the projection.
The Camera of No Camera presents a similar phenomenon, but rather than a physical world acting as its own projection device, the physical world acts as its own encoding device, taking in, recording, and then becoming an expression of the information coming from the infinite perpectives available to iself. How does that old saying go? The seeing eye cannot see itself? Or something like that. It’s true, you’d need two cameras to see one camera, which means you’d need an infinite number of cameras if you wanted to encode and capture the infinite perspectives of the universe. Even then, you wouldn’t be able reach the end of the regress ad infinitum. The only logical conclusion to the exponential advance of increasing camera resolution and decreasing camera size is the inevitable ability of everything to encode everything about everything else, including itself. Ah, man, that’s crazy talk, as my friend Dr. Z would say, but that’s not to say he would disagree, it’s just to say that it’s strait up crazy talk.
Leibniz, the guy who invented calculus, was a collector of images of London (or so the story goes). This, of course, being the time before cameras were invented, but one can imagine paintings as the pics of the human camera that encodes not through the f-stop and shutter speed but through the minds eye. Each painting of London is a reflection of the unique perspective of the view finder painter person camera. Leibniz was interested in seeing London from as many unique perspectives as possible. He thought that by viewing an increasing number of simultaneous perspectives of the same object, one could come closer to seeing the world as God sees it, without any perspective at all. Interesting paradox, because to say someone needs to “get some perspective” is to assume they have no perspective, or, in other words, they have no vision, or that they can’t see something from where they are. But for Liebiniz, God has no perspective precisely because God lacks the ability to NOT see something from all perspectives simultaneously (which brings up another interesting paradox, later maybe, about being stuck always seeing everything from everywhere. What would a creature have to look like if it had eyes that could see such glory in an object?). Leibniz collected paintings of London because he wanted to increase his ability to see the same city from as many angels and interpretations as possible. From where he stands in one place with one unique perspective (in his private museum, perhaps) he can look out from the perspective behind his eyes and simultaneously encode information about a multitude of other perspectives of London as seen handing from the museum walls.
Now, imagine if you will, not the person, Leibniz, but the camera called Leibniz and he’s looking not at a gallery of paintings of London, but at an array of live images of London. Now, just imagine a Meta-Leibniz Camera with a wide angle that can see not only the array of live London images but can also see and encode an array of Leibniz cameras which themselves are all displaying their unique view of an array of arrays of live feeds from London. Now, let’s suppose Meta-Leibniz is actually standing somewhere near the Royal Mint so that he can be seen by the live cameras, and can also see the arrays of images encoded in Leibniz cameras, and they all include a perpective which includes his own physical presence Meta-Leibniz in addition to his own perspective from his Meta-Leibniz’s unique location near the Mint.
Okay, so just keep going with that until London fills up with german philosophers who claim to have invented calculus before Newton. That’s not the London that we know and love, nor is it the London that Leibniz thinks that God can see. It turns out that Leibniz runs into the same problem we found in the projector universe, and that is that the seeing object is still separate from the seen object. Ah hell, is that the old Mind-Body duality rearing its ugly mug in this otherwise unsullied thought experiment? Great. Well, what happens if the seeing object is separate from the seen? Another seeing object must exist until the world fills up with cameras, leaving Leibniz with a view of nothing but himself. Where’s London? Turns out that the only way to see everything while also seeing yourself is to create a world where everything can see everything else, including itself.
This is the idea behind The Camera of No Camera, everything is known and nothing needs to be explained. How awesome would it be to have documentation of your arduino project, not because you used a device designed to encode information about another device (camera takes pic of arduino), but because the underlying fabric of reality allows everything that exists to do so as an expression of the information encoded in it by everything else. The slight difference here is that the later objects are not objects that encode information about their surroundings (like a camera), but instead are objects that exist as physical expressions of encoded information. In this way, there is no difference between the camera and the picture it takes. Everything becomes a camera, and every camera takes the shape of an emergent pattern specific to the confluence of encodeable information at that particular place in spacetime.
Of course, we have a hard enough time as it is just seeing a 3D movie. Imagine the kind of glasses we would need in order to see images not only of infinite resolution, but from infinite perspectives in infinite dimensions. We don’t use today’s cameras to encode information. The encoding is already taking place everywhere. We use cameras to compress and filter the available information into a format we can directly experience. A Camera of No Camera would simply leverage this idea that everything encodes information about everything else. In other words, the outlandish idea of the Camera of No Camera is actually not so outlandish; in fact, it may already exist. The technology is not the bottleneck. The most advanced camera conceivable is reality itself. The real bottleneck is Leibniz’s inability to see things as they truly are: infinite AND full of stars.
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Summary of the Camera of No Camera
What is a camera?
1. A camera is a device; it is a thing used to “take pictures” of (or encode information about) anything or everything that exists (except itself).
2. A Camera of No Camera retains the ability to encode information about the world without it having to be a device separate from that which is being encoded. It retains the function, but without the need to exist.
3. Example: Imagine a world where objects need to be constantly projected in order to exist. That world would have the outlandish idea of The Projections Without the Projector. Imagine being in this world and thinking about what it would be like if every object could illuminate itself without the need of a projector. How would that differ from there being infinite projectors used to project every infinite objects? If projectors themselves could project their own existence, then there would be no difference. The difference comes about when the projector cannot project itself and we are left with a world of infinite projectors as a consequence of trying to increase the detail and resolution of everyday objects.
4. The Camera of No Camera exists in a world whose objects are physical expressions of the encodeable information they receive.
5. Leibnitz collected paintings of London so that he could free himself of pespective and see the world as god does, not from every perspective, but from no perpsective.
6. Imagine Leibnitz as a camera looking not at paintings of London but at live feeds of London. And then imagine a Meta-Leibniz who watches the live feeds of various selves each watching an array of live images. Meta Meta Leibniz camera watches an array of array of images. And if Liebniz is standing in London, then increasing the resolution (not of pixels across and down, but of perspectives up down and all around) would effectively increase the number of Meta-Liebnizs. In other words, if we are using an encoding device that is separate from the object to be encoded, then increasing the resolution (or number of perspectives) to infinite would require increasing the number of devices to infinite. Leibniz doesn’t think that that’s how God sees the world, unless he does, which would be a great argument for the idea that God is everywhere, how else could it be all-seeing?
7. Imagine your arduino documenting itself by virtue of the fact that it exists in a reality where everything can be seen from anywhere, where everything is encoding everything else, and where everything that is, is an expression of its encoding of everything.
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To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
-Bruce Lee
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One may indeed say that our memory is a special case of the process described above, for all that is recorded is held enfolded within the brain cells and these are part of matter in general. The recurrence and stability of our own memory as a relatively independent sub-totality is thus brought about as part of the very same process that sustains the recurrence and stability in the manifest order of matter in general. It follows, then, that the explicate and manifest order of consciousness is not ultimately distinct from that of matter in general
……as with consciousness, each moment has a certain explicate order, and in addition it enfolds all the others, though in its own way. So the relationship of each moment in the whole to all the others is implied by its total content: the way in which it ‘holds’ all the others enfolded within it…..-David Bohm, on the enfolding of the explicate structure into the implicate order [aka Computational Cameras]