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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

At a press conference after the success of initial Star Wars movie someone told George Lucas: "But spacecraft don't make that whizzzzhh noise as they fly in space!", and Lucas replied: "I know".

The truth in art is not the same as the truth in a physical experiment.

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At this point putting realistic sounds in movies would confuse the audience and take them out of the movie. Bald eagles don't sound like most of us think they do and swords don't make that sound when you wave them around or sheath them.

I definitely agree, but on the other hand I think it is cool when they try and do things realistically, e.g. in The Expanse. I don't think it lost anything for not having whooshy spaceship sounds. IIRC Battlestar Gallactica also didn't have sound in space? Been a while though I might have forgotten that.

Still, a camera isn't supposed to show you exactly what eyes would see. I think it's fine in this case.

Hypothesis formation is art. Without it there would be no physical experiments. Every scientist is an artist at heart.

I think the point is that what looks good in art (even in "realistic" art) is not necessarily what is "more like the real thing". The Simpsons made a joke about this ("cows don't look like cows on screen, that's why we use horses") but it's true.

More importantly, what the author intends to convey sometimes requires emphasis that isn't present in real life.

There was an extremely cool blog post about photography on HN a year or so ago, where the point was made that there are no "real" photos (in the sense of "accurately representing reality"), there's always a choice by the photographer (colors, framing, distance to subject, distortion, etc).

Very true. And not just the photography, all of the people who produce the tools. Like even film chemistry: https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias

Everything we interact with is the product of generations of people, shaped by artistic choice, and filtered by distribution and our own perception and cognitive biases.

Which sounds like I’m complaining but really I’m not… I think it’s inspiring and empowering to see the whole stack, imperfect as it is.

So yeah, conversations about computational photography that veer into “but it it doesn’t capture reality” betray an oversimplified view of how all this works.

The next logical step is to notice that the eye also processes the optical signal heavily, and the visual cortex,... etc. Any kind of perception, of making sense is a transformation.

To perceive something "truthfully" is just to be aware of the kind of processing involved, and the kind of information altered or lost in the process.

Exactly. Most of what we perceive is fabricated in our heads anyway. Brains are amazing and positively not designed for 100% pure reality perception.

Keep going.

https://tpp2014.com/catherine-malabou-concept-plasticity/

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262720212/the-embodied-mind/

The camera is our nervous system and chemical transports.

Whenever a friend tells me about the latest AI experiment resulting in AGI my stock response is, "Have they put it in a rat suit yet?"

Movies have score of noises that aren’t real. Most action scenes are filled with them. If considered part of the score, then fake starship noises are fine. They are signaling that ship is going somewhere, not would the camera would hear.

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