Flying Blind by Doc Nolan

 A big part of civilization is living in an imaginary world.  First, humans invented writing to correct the deficiencies of human memory. They began to record ideas in more permanent places than on neurons inside of our skulls.  Soon after, folks began to write fiction, mimicking the deranged ‘stories’ screened in their dreams.  Some writers didn’t take long to claim that their stories were not fiction but history.  Very often, the line between what actually happened and what supposedly happened became a matter of controversy.  And that has continued.  Quid est veritas?

Is a photograph fictional or an image of something that actually happened?  (Before you answer, do you remember those postcards bearing the likeness of the jackalope, supposedly jackrabbits with antlers?)  And then along came television and those tedious arguments about whether TV wrestling was “fake.”  (We’re skipping over the world of political disinformation!  Thank me later!)  More recently, computers entered the picture, Photoshopping of images began, and it wasn’t long before no one knew if a photo of Grandma was REAL -- or Grandma as she wished she had looked in her 20s.  (We’ll skip over makeup and girdles and other disinformation tools).

So here we are in 2023 with artificial intelligence and new vistas of fiction masquerading as reality.  I take a photo of Lost Creek Wilderness (which, for all I know, was “fake”), and I run it through Mid Journey to see how the AI reinterprets it.  Then I /blend the original image and MJ’s rework.  I decide to ‘improve it’ a bit using post-production.  And then, I upload the result.  People look at computer screens and see the image.  Is it real?  It isn’t a hallucination, but does it show something beyond itself?

Think about me, the author of these musings.  Do you know me?  No.  You see words crossing your screen, but you have no idea who I am.  (Might I just be a “person” generated in some server farm in Washington State!).  If I tell you or any group of you that the image I uploaded is an accurate photo of a real place southwest of Denver up in the mountains, should you believe me?  (Of course you should!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!).  If in the next breath I say ‘this isn’t really what the Lost Creek Wilderness looks like!” how would you know?  One cumbersome way: drive to Jefferson, Colorado, go east down that long dirt road just north of town, and (at the very end) check it out for yourself.

What is my point?  We operate on trust a great deal of the time.  That’s the glue of civilization!  It’s a gamble.  And we’re never really sure what’s real and what is a fairy story.  And every year, the lines become more and more blurry.  A test you might have an opportunity to try: If you’ve ever seen an event on television -- after having “been there” -- how closely did the screen images correspond to what you remember seeing? 

We live in dream worlds.  There are realities, but we don’t see 99.9% of them firsthand.  We trust others.  That’s civilization.  And when the glue weakens and fails, so does society.  Maybe the truth does matter?