The Forbidden Decision: Balancing the Luminance of Opponent Concepts in Innovation

“Things that do not fit the existing paradigm are hard to think about”

But if we can bypass the hardwired opponency, we can access a perceptual filling-in mechanism that will yield the Forbidden Decision…

We should not be able to see yellowish-blue, or reddish-green. We are hardwired perceptually to attempt to amalgamate these colors to produce a singular hue that can be simplified. Ie. Our perception + cognition attempts to render a swift and simple conclusion that satisfies our need to understand what we are seeing. The resulting conclusion is generally accepted by ourselves because it is largely the result of our own rationalized conditioning.

Things that do not fit the existing paradigm are hard to think about….

But under the right condition, we can induce the “Forbidden Conclusion”. Perceptually, we can create a color palette such that a viewer will in fact see opponent colors flowing together(Scientific American, Feb 2010, pg 75). Thereby rendering a perception of what should in fact be incomprehensible. It presents a challenge to the viewer because it is something that has never been encountered, and can lead to momentary confusion, but importantly, the perception is not rejected.

In the color experiments, the “forbidden colors” were perceived only when the opponent colors were represented with identical luminance. Luminance is essentially “brightness”, and the inducement of forbidden-perception requires that the luminance be identical. It has been determined that by mirroring the luminance, the flickering effect of changing opponent colors is minimized, thereby making the transition between opponencies as transparent as possible. i.e the transition is less “startling” and therefore leaves a smaller cognitive disintermediation footprint.

So, how does this apply to innovation in the workplace?
1. Change is often capable of being defined as set of opponent concepts.
a. Just as Red vs Green are opponent colors, some may perceive that:
i. Casual and Business are opponent
ii. Distance and Intimacy are opponent
iii. Games and Work are opponent
iv. Service Quality and “face-face alternatives” are opponent
2. As with colors, our a priori hard-wired perceptions can be defeated if we are precise in our presentation of the opponent pairings. With colors, this is luminance. So what is the equivalent of Luminance in the context of business?
3. Contextual Change Opponency in Business
a. As with opponent color-swapping, the reduction of flickering when 2 opponent colors are rapidly alternated was the means by which forbidden colors were perceived. The brightness of the colors needed to be massaged such that the luminance was identical
b. The concept is: hold as many variables as possible constant, such that the cognitive-sensory disruption is tightly focused on a precise variable.
4. Organizationally, it might present as:
a. Face-Face vs 3D Immersive meeting spaces
b. The context, and variability between the 2 concepts must be contained, such that only the target variable is perceived as changing, and not the entire universe of variables
i. Therefore, if we consider *only*: face-face images, vs Avatar-Avatar images, we can contain the spectrum of sensory-cognitive change parameters
5. How to neutralize the luminance of face-face and avatar-avatar?
a. Take a Point-of-View photograph of 1-1 meeting in a real meeting room
b. Render a photo-realistic head from a photograph
c. Swap the Avatar head onto the 1-1 meeting counterparty.
d. Rapidly alternate between real-real, and real-avatar.
e. Additionally, create a POV photograph in which the viewer is meeting 1-2(eg. Viewer is meeting with 2 people)
i. Swap an Avatar head onto a single counterparty, and rapidly alternate between Real-real-real, and Real-real-avatar.
6. In this example, the luminance is perceptually defined as a combination of contextual visualization parameters
a. Contrast, color, shading – must remain precise
b. Avatar head must be of extreme quality(no goofy hair)
c. While this is a “photoshop” experiment, the avatar head must be expertly pasted into the photograph to appear seamless

The purpose of this exercise is simple: to advance a tiny step towards overcoming a common condition of hardwired opponency in business that conditions decision makers away from accepting that Virtual can be a “good enough” approximation of reality. The defeating of this perception is results in the “Forbidden Decision” that VR can be effective in the workplace.

Next steps include the one-by-one introduction of virtual elements into the photograph flip book. By Balancing the Luminance of Opponent Concepts, we are able to minimize cognitive disintermediation(i.e. we are not startling) and are able to tightly focus our audience on a single, discrete change variable, without incurring a rapid retreat to a more comfortable hard-wired opponent reaction(i.e. it will never work).

"Avatar" the movie, vs Quantum Darwinism

In Viral Loop, Adam Penenburg does a nice job of describing a few people(who are representative of 1000’s more) who have made a conscious decision to lives their lives as much as possible online. These folks stalk Wifi hot-spots like predators seeking prey(or maybe more like Vegans seeking whole grains?). They feel incomplete unless they are jacked-in to their digital counter-world. It is suggested by Penenburg that for these types of people, digital-only experiences, including music and relationships, have displaced “live” encounters as that person’s “new reality”. Or in my words “Preferred Reality”. So is the sign of things to come? Will the human race rapidly become “avatar like” with a perfect system of digital connectedness closing the gap between everyone and everything? Will augmented reality + Ning + Google + Twitter et all form the digitized neural-net that will forever bind us all together into an inseparable and unionized collective of assimilated consciousness? Mmmm, probably not.
I could now talk about things like Quantum Darwinism, but seems that I can get in trouble when I mention how biology tends to drive sociology, and that reality is formed via long strings of probabilities and decision trees. My point is this: sure the movie Avatar looks cool. Tron and the Matrix were cool too. “1984” was also cool. So, raise your hand if you believe that information/communication aggregation as manifested in today’s social media/devices is the beginning of an avatar-like existence…I see a lot of hands out there. So let me ask you this: Pick an example from human history that provides evidence of the indelible evolution of our social consciousness. Great, Everybody have an example? Now ask yourself this: In your example, does this example of “social consciousness evolution” require active administration by the person, or has it become reflexive/instinctually “programmed such that this evolutionary example could not be rapidly reversed by an event that happens to the person? What happened to your example?
Why should be care? In the same way that humans are able to construct technology that could cause our complete physical destruction, we are also able to construct technology that presents itself as Faux Evolution, or Fauvolution. What the heck is that? It’s a thin veneer of human-produced advancement that from 50,000 feet makes it appear that we have evolved ourselves as a race of humans. Trouble is, our social consciousness has not evolved(in the hard-wired sense) in any discernable way for an awfully long time. Take a human, put them in adverse conditions, and you will see social regression in effect like a freight train until we are once again “nasty, brutish, and short”.
The concept of an Avatar-like neural net scares me more than the Google phone. Why? Because we mistakenly believe that total connectedness is what we want. Where in fact, we need disconnectedness in the same way that we need sleep. Why have we not figured this out yet? Because no one has enabled scalable and sustainable “immersive connectedness”.
Avatar presents as just another probabilistic outcome of our social evolution, which in my opinion, would require a few thousand(million?) more years to become an indelible(as in irreversible) part of human nature. And before that happens, we will continue to do what we have always done….