Music- Reflectivity

These are just some thoughts pertaining to one of my songs.

I named it Reflectivity after I finished it. Perhaps this decision was influenced by something in my personal life. I don't know. I'm naturally a very introspective person, more so than you're average joe... I think. I don't know, I'm not you, so I have no way to measure my degree of introspection... who does? Anyhow, this song has something to do with mirrors, although I'm not quite sure what that means. Maybe it's the thick reverb, but I'm reminded of a profound philosophical experience I had with a friend of mine.

We had two large mirrors. We could angle them at various angles to create multi-sided geometric shapes within the reflections of the mirror frames. If this doesn't makes sense to you, just try it sometime. We found that if we angled the mirrors a certain way, the geometric reflections would form a circle. For fun, we placed the mirrors face to face. The reflections formed a tunnel of infinite regress. We took turns sitting between them, thus immersing ourselves within this tunnel, watching our image fall away in stepped planes untill it disappeared deep into the back of the mirror. I wondered out loud whether or not I could grab a pair of binoculars or a telescope and peer deep into the reflections to see my image "up close". My friend thought that was rediculous, but I thought about it for a second, and noticed a paradox.

The light traveling between the mirrors was in fact traveling through space AS IF the mirrors weren't even there. Of course, the actuality of what the light was doing is more complicated than that, but more specifically, the "data" of my image as it is transmitted through light was moving through space AS IF the mirrors weren't there. This produced the "Reflected Images Of Infinite Regress" (RIOIR)effect. However, the RIOIR experience as I consciously saw it was much simpler than that. My image wasn't traveling infinitely through space... "Infinite Space" was confined between two large mirrors placed face to face each other. It was an optical illusion... but it was so much more...

I told this story to another philosophy buddy of mine. I thought it was a paradox, or a riddle, but I didn't know why it was significant. He couldn't help, but told me to remember it, and I did.

I finally figured it out. The paradox, if there is one, is that paradoxes only exist in the mind of an observer. When one pops up within a theory, just take away the observer, and the paradox resolves. I think this is true for every paradox one might encounter in life. Basically, we should reflect more on how our own minds shape our understanding of the world. Maybe that's the heart of Reflectivity. But then again, I'm just speculating...