But What If We're Wrong? (14 page)

While talking with Linklater, I mentioned an anxiety dream my wife had had two nights previous: She dreamed I had been beaten by drug dealers as a result of her failure to pick up our son from day care. There were a few details from her actual life that clearly fed into this dream—she'd come home late from work the day before, I'd just experienced an unusually gruesome dental appointment, and we both watched an episode of
Bloodline
(a TV show about drug dealers) before going to bed. But these connections could go either way. It could mean the dream matters more than we think, because the narrative details closely mirror things that were happening in her day-to-day life; it could also mean that the dream is meaningless, since the details were just the detritus of the many assorted thoughts she considered and discarded. Both possibilities raise a host of related questions that we simply can't access without getting inside her brain (and since we can't do that, we've essentially stopped asking). Case in point: We know this dream was manufactured by my wife's mind, so every detail of the dream had to have come from that same mind. My wife could not (for example) dream about a specific character from an obscure modernist novel if she had no knowledge that the book itself had ever been written. But could she dream about something
she does not know
that she knows? Robert Louis Stevenson famously (or at least supposedly) wrote
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
after a dream he experienced in the autumn of 1885. He'd been interested in the subject of personality for years, but it was the dream that allowed him to suddenly craft an intricate fictional plot in a matter of days. The story came from his brain,
no differently from any other story he ever wrote. But could he have written this novel without that dream? Are we—as a society—discounting our only natural means of interacting with all the subterranean thoughts we don't realize we have?

Before ending our conversation, Linklater told me about a dream he'd had a week prior: He dreamed he was backstage at an Alice Cooper concert and saw the musician's son in a wheelchair (Alice Cooper does have two sons, but neither is paralyzed and Linklater has no relationship with either). In the dream, Linklater walks over to the son and asks him how old he is, assuming the child must be in his mid-thirties. From his wheelchair, the son says, “I'm eighteen.” The response made no sense and seemed to have no meaning. But two days later, it dawned on Linklater that “I'm Eighteen” was the title of Alice Cooper's breakthrough single, a song he's heard hundreds of times throughout his life.

“So I thought that was kind of witty,” Linklater said. “Here was an inside joke in my own dream that I didn't even get for two days. Not to get too far out there on this, but either it all matters or none of it matters. That's just sort of a view about life, and about how thoughts work.”

[
3
]
For a moment, let's get nutzo. Let's imagine the Phantom Time Hypothesis was proven to be true (this could never happen, but—at the risk of sounding like some kind of conspiracy Yoda—lots of things could never happen, until they do). To keep things conservative, let's stick with the “minor theory,” since it's less radical (in that it only negates three centuries) and is at least marginally explicable (we already accept that the Catholic
Church
slightly
manipulated the Gregorian calendar when it was invented, so it's not like the desire to change time doesn't exist). Let's assume the evidence for this event is compelling, and the theory gets support from all the necessary places—the scientific community, historians, the media, the Vatican. We accept that it happened. However, nobody wants to mechanically roll the calendar back, so life continues as it currently is. The only difference is that most informed people now accept that the Dark Ages were a myth and that the historical stories from that period either happened at a different time or never happened at all.

Why would this matter?

Yes, very old things would now be slightly less old, and distant human events (like the crucifixion of Christ) would be slightly less distant. And—sure—history books would require corrections, and
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
would be a little less funny, and the Steely Dan song “Kid Charlemagne” would have a weirder subtext. But the only real problem would be the subsequent domino effect: If we were wrong about something this fundamental, we could theoretically be wrong about anything. Proof of Phantom Time would validate every possible skeptic, including those skeptical about Phantom Time; almost certainly, a new conspiracy theory would instantly emerge, this time positing that the Dark Ages
did
happen and that the revisionists were trying to remove those 297 years for nefarious, self-interested motives. A sliver of the populace would never believe those years didn't exist, in the same way a similarly sized sliver currently can't accept that they did. But the day-to-day life of those in either camp would not change at all.

Conflicting conceptions of “reality” have no impact on
reality
.
And this does not apply exclusively to conspiracy theorists. It applies to everyone, all the time.

[
4
]
On the evening of February 26, 2015, I (along with millions of other people) experienced a cultural event that—at least for a few hours—seemed authentically unexplainable. By March of that year, most of the world had moved on from this. But I still think about that night. Not because of what happened, but because of how it felt while it was transpiring.

A woman on the Internet posted a photograph of a dress. The dress was potentially going to be worn by someone's mother at a Scottish wedding, but that detail is irrelevant. What mattered was the color of the dress. The image of the garment was tagged with the following caption:

guys please help me—is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and we are freaking the fuck out

When my wife saw this image, she said, “I don't get what the joke is here. This is just a picture of a white and gold dress.” When I glanced at the image and told her it was plainly black and blue, she assumed I was playfully lying (which, to be fair, is not exactly outside my character). But I wasn't. We were looking at the same thing and seeing something completely different. I texted a friend in California, who almost seemed pissed about this—he assumed everyone on Twitter claiming it was anything except blue (specifically periwinkle) and black was consciously trolling society. “I
don't know about that,” I responded. “Something is happening here.” And something
was
happening. Random pairs of people had differing opinions about something they both perceived to be independently obvious. At first, unscientific surveys suggested that most people thought the dress was gold and white, but the gap rapidly shrank to almost 50-50 (which might have been partially due to the discovery that the actual dress actually
was
blue and black).

The next day, countless pundits tried to explain why this had transpired. None of their explanations were particularly convincing. Most were rooted in the idea that this happened because we were all looking at a photo of a dress, as opposed to the dress itself. But that only shifts the debate, without really changing it—why, exactly, would two people see the same photograph in two completely different ways? There was a momentary sense that this stupid dress had accidentally collided with some previously unknown optic frequency that lay exactly between the two ways in which color can be perceived, and that—maybe, possibly, somehow—the human race did not see “blue” and “gold” (and perhaps every color) in the same, unified way. Which would mean that
color
is not a real thing, and that our perception of the color wheel is subjective, and that what we currently classify as “blue” might not be classified as “blue” in a thousand years.

But this, it seems, is not exactly a new debate.

The argument that color is not a static property has been gingerly waged for decades, and it always seems to hinge on the ancient work of a possibly blind, probably imaginary, thoroughly unreliable poet. In both
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
, Homer describes the Aegean Sea. Again and again, he describes this sea as
“wine-dark.” He unswervingly asserts that the ocean is the same color as red wine. To some, this suggests that the way we saw and understood color three thousand years ago was radically different from the way we see and understand it now. To others, this is just an example of a poet being poetic (or maybe an example of a blind poet getting bad advice). It's either meaningful or meaningless, which is probably why no one will ever stop talking about it.

“I think people really overstate the significance of that passage from Homer. He's mostly just being evocative,” says Zed Adams, an assistant professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research. “But I think it does hint at one important difference between the Greek use of certain ‘color words' and our own. The shiny/matte distinction seems like it might have been more central for them than it is for us, so Homer might have been thinking of water and wine as similarly colored, in the sense that they are both shiny. But, beyond that, I think the ocean
is
sometimes wine-colored, so I don't think the passage is that big of a deal.”

Adams is the author of
On the Genealogy of Color
. He believes the topic of color is the most concrete way to consider the question of how much—or how little—our experience with reality is shared with the experience of other people. It's an unwieldy subject that straddles both philosophy and science. On one hand, it's a physics argument about the essential role light plays in our perception of color; at the same time, it's a semantic argument over how color is linguistically described differently by different people. There's also a historical component: Up until the discovery of color blindness in the seventeenth century, it was assumed that everyone saw everything the same way (and it took another two hundred years before we realized how much person-to-person variation there is).
What really changed four hundred years ago was due (once again) to the work of Newton and Descartes, this time in the field of optics. Instead of things appearing “red” simply because of their intrinsic “redness” (which is what Aristotle
50
believed), Newton and Descartes realized it has to do with an object's relationship to light. This, explains Adams, led to a new kind of separation between the mind and the world. It meant that there are all kinds of things we can't understand about the world through our own observation, and it made it intellectually conceivable that two people could see the same thing differently.

What's particularly interesting here is that Adams believes Descartes misunderstood his own discovery about light and experience. The basis for his argument is extremely wonky (and better explained by his own book). But the upshot is this: Adams suspects the way we'll talk about color in a distant future will be different from the way we talk about it now. And this will be because future conversations will be less interpretative and more precise. It's an optimistic view of our current inexact state of perception—someday, we might get this right. We might actually agree that “blue” is
blue
, and arguments about the hue of online dresses will last all of three seconds.

“Descartes thought that the mind, and specifically ‘what mental experience is like,' somehow stood outside of the physical world, such that [this mental experience] could vary while everything physical about us would stay the same,” Adams says. “I think that idea will gradually become less and less intuitive, and will just
start to seem silly. I'd like to imagine that in a hundred years, if I said to you, ‘But how could I ever
really
know whether your color experience is the same as mine?' your response would just be, ‘Well, if our eyes and brains are the same, then our color experiences are the same.' End of story.”

[
5
]
Metaphoric sheep get no love. There's no worse thing to be compared to, at least among conspiracy theorists. “You're just a sheep,” they will say. “You believe what they want you to believe.” But this implies that
they
—the metaphoric shepherds—have something they want you to accept. It implies that these world-altering shepherds are consciously leading their sheeple to a conclusion that plays to their benefit. No one considers the possibility of a shepherd just aimlessly walking around the meadow, pointing his staff in whatever direction he happens to be facing.

On the same day I spoke with Linklater about dreams, there was a story in
The
New York Times
about a violent incident that had occurred a few days prior in Manhattan. A man had attacked a female police officer with a hammer and was shot by the policewoman's partner. This shooting occurred at ten a.m., on the street, in the vicinity of Penn Station. Now, one assumes seeing a maniac swinging a hammer at a cop's skull before being shot in broad daylight would be the kind of moment that sticks in a person's mind. Yet the
Times
story explained how at least two of the eyewitness accounts of this event ended up being wrong. Linklater was fascinated by this: “False memories, received memories, how we fill in the blanks of conjecture, the way the brain fills in those
spaces with something that is technically incorrect—all of these errors allow us to make sense of the world, and are somehow accepted enough to be admissible in a court of law. They are accepted enough to put someone in prison.” And this, remember, was a violent incident that had happened only hours before. The witnesses were describing something that had happened that same day, and they had no incentive to lie. But video surveillance proved their depictions of reality were inaccurate.