Cloud 5

In the air. That's where I am. Six weeks of sick leave to try and sort out a bad back. Moving house, travelling too much and being away from home, not to mention the timeframe within which I have to complete a film and thesis have led to this pause.
So I am at home in Sydney with my family laying up and trying to work out a way to accomplish this task as well as strengthening my body and soul.
The Research Centre have come good again and given me access to a G4 so i don't have the FCP problems necessitated in going back to an older version on my G3 laptop. I am lucky. No, more than that. The opportunity to do this Ph.D. is a gift which I value very highly and which drives me to finish. My supervisor, Howard Morphy, sat with me the other day looking at some footage and while I was talking about masks he observantly and diplomatically leaned me away from my tendency to say that masks are either this or that: black and white.
That is just not how things are. They may be black and white for me in a certain mood but that is far from a perspective that enables other people to enter into conversation and more than likely not a position I can hold for any length of time myself.
It is the grey area that makes life so rich and complex. The mediation between ideas is the fruit of academia. I'm no academic but I have gained a respect for an approach to learning which leaves behind my theatrical pragmatism of getting the show up and running at all costs. Such pragmatism seems to have led me to quite peculiar notions of common sense- primarily that somehow I had the best understanding of what common sense is. Now I am not so sure how common my sense has been.

Bishop Berkley formulated an exercise to demonstrate the relativity of our senses where, with 3 buckets of water, one hot, one cold and one luke warm when the left hand which has been placed in the hot and the right hand in the cold are similtaneously plunged into the luke warm, one hand will register the water to be cold while the other registers it as hot.

This is not right. I had believed it from reading the Bishops writings doing undergraduate philosophy. A few years ago when someone questioned the validity of this I did the test for myself. It didn't work at all as the Bishop wrote in his book. Perhaps because I knew what to expect there was no difference. In any case relativity is not circumvented as a state of being by the notion that the solution to the inacuracy of sensory perception is in a god who hangs out in a state of absolute and who recognises all the discrepancies of our humble senses.
On the other hand Charles Peirce does suggest that firstness is an absolute state that all humans have a certain contact with- that fundamental being. From that perception it is the personalised mediation of secondness and the socialsed mediation of thirdness that make up our understanding and life view- our common sense. So why is my view more or less deserving than anyone elses? That is precisely the point. If there are means to think about cross cultural experience by acknowledging our differences then perhaps we can aim to sense the firstness that people with dissimilar social backgrounds experience. This is what I am trying to experience and to share.