In today’s episode, I continue our “Of Life” series by focusing on the reproduction of life. Now, when I talk about reproduction, brothers, I do not mean biological reproduction. Instead, I am talking about reproducing another being, or life. A good reproduction can encompass many things, like a painting, photograph, or recording.
In order to understand the reproduction of life we need to revisit the earliest examples of art, which dates back thousands of years to prehistoric cave paintings. These people weren’t called artists, but iconographers, because they were creating icons of things, not images or copies. Their purpose was to trigger a sense of divinity or spirituality.
Next, we take a big leap, brothers, to the Renaissance, when artistry and representation changed dramatically. Portraits, sculptures and other works of visual art were made to be incredibly lifelike and realistic. This realism took yet another leap with photography, ever since which human representation has become evermore realistic.
But with photography, brothers, we’re not fully capturing the essence of a person, just one aspect. We’re not truly getting what it’s like to be around or with or have an experience with this person. Which is where film and cinema enter the picture. And film, of course, has also evolved over time to become more fully representational, incorporating sound, better picture quality and even three-dimensional experiences. Finally, these images entered our living rooms with the invention of television.
But even as we pursue ever more realistic reproductions, like holograms, we can never truly recreate something fully. It’s just energy and electricity, brothers. It’s ultimately an illusion. The true question is ‘What does this reveal about our reality?’ Join me today brothers, for a deep dive into the many facets of reproduction, and the deeply surprising possibilities of what our reality could be!
What You’ll Learn from This Episode:
- Defining the reproduction of life.
- A history of art and reproduction.
- The pursuit of complete reproduction.
- Why technology can’t completely capture the essence of someone.
- What perfect reproduction means.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
- Remember to check out the new How to Live Your Purpose course.
- Enroll for the Elevated Alpha Society Spartan Academy here.
- Sign up for Unleash Your Alpha, your guide to shifting to the Alpha mindset.
[INTRO]
[0:00:08] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Alpha Male Coach Podcast, the only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence.
Here’s your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:31] KA: What’s up my brothers? Welcome back to the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. I am your host, Kevin Aillaud. We are continuing the Of Life series. I know we did in Of Life, we did the Candle of Life. This was about a month ago, maybe a little more than a month ago, but we’re going to do the reproduction of life today, the reproduction of life, and I’ve got a little bit of a twist ending, so make sure you stay to the ending of the podcast, because I think you’re going to love it.
Now, here’s what I want to begin, actually, brothers, I want to begin by defining this word reproduction, because I want to make sure you guys understand what I mean by this. When I say reproduction, I’m not talking about the biological reproduction of the species. I’m not talking about reproducing another being or life. I’m talking about making a good reproduction of something, making a good image of something, making a good copy of something in terms of, like a painting, or a photograph, or recording, or a videotape, or a movie, or these kinds of things. Because we talk about reproduction and when I begin with this podcast, I want you guys to understand where I’m going with this.
Let’s actually start before reproductions became necessary or we’re entered into, I should say, into the artistic world as sort of like this idea that we could make a copy of a human being, because before, and this really began in the 15th century. It really didn’t begin too long ago, just a few hundred years ago, because even though art, like cave paintings the earliest cave paintings can be, I think, 40,000 years ago is the oldest dated cave painting or whatever.
I mean, again, just after last week talking about time, who even know, it’s 40,000 years or whatever that means. Some of the art that we had earlier on was – when I say earlier on, I mean in the first, second centuries and before to predate the Christian era even going back to BC times. Art was typically iconic. It was done in an iconography. There wasn’t even the term artist. The term artist was reserved for musicians or builders of architecture, builders of buildings, people that would work with large slabs of earth, whether it be marble or stone or whatever.
People that would create visual representations of things, what we call paintings today. They were not called artists. They were called iconographers, because they were creating icons of things. They weren’t creating images. They weren’t creating copies. They weren’t making reproductions. They were making icons. So, number one, they were heavily religious. They were usually paintings were done for religious or spiritual reasons. They were done in an iconography that was less a reproduction of the image or deity or being they were trying to create and more of an allegory or a metaphor for what that image or being or deity or Godhead, whatever it is. They were trying to convey.
The images or the icons were usually not reproductions. They weren’t copies. They weren’t made in a way we say, “This is what this person looked like.” It wasn’t about creating an image of what they looked like. The icons were meant to create a experience. They were meant to create a feeling. They were meant to trigger within you a sense of divinity or spirituality. Again, they were typically more done for religious or spiritual reasons. They were not reproductions by any means. They weren’t meant to, at least at the time, no iconographer would say, this is what this person looked like.
The old icons, the images that we had of Jesus and Mary and all the saints, for example. No iconographer at the time would have said, “This is what Jesus looked like.” Or, “This is what his mother looked like.” It wasn’t until centuries later that human started to think that the icon was some actual reproduction or copy to say, “This must be what these men and women looked like. All the saints.” You can even see. You can go back. You can look at them. You could say that they all looked the same.
All their faces looked the same, because it wasn’t about creating an image or reproduction. It was simply about inspiring a feeling, inspiring an experience within you. Usually, there were no backgrounds as well. The backgrounds didn’t come into art until hundreds of years later, because it wasn’t until then that the background started to matter and all that really mattered was the foreground. All that mattered was the icon itself was the experience itself. Then later art began to add in the background in contrast to the foreground where we began to see more clearly the separation. We actually, began to separate more by adding that background and foreground to art where it wasn’t before in the icons, it was simply a gold background, usually some gold leaf or paint.
[0:05:22]
Then in the 15th century in Europe, in the West. The king specifically, they wanted more power, essentially. They wanted more control, more power, they wanted more alliances. In order to form alliances, they did so through marriage, they did so by marrying the princesses of far-off states of other lands. They would have painters, they would have artists go and create portraits, create reproductions, copies of the princess of the female who was going to be presented to the king of Europe, to the majesty, to be approved of before he got her as a wedding gift.
It’s like, so instead of having all of these women come to England, for example, to be presented to the king of England. They would contract painters to make reproductions, to make copies of these women in paint on canvas. That way, the king would have an idea on what he was getting into visually with possibly marrying the princess and creating an alliance with her father.
In fact, there’s a famous story, Henry VII of England, what he felt, I guess you should say, he felt badly cheated. I don’t want to say he was badly cheated, but he felt badly cheated, because the painter who painted, basically, too flattering a portrait of Anne of Cleves. The artist was so good that he made her look so amazing that Henry VII just chose her to marry, but when she arrived in England, he was not as happy as he was with her painting.
Anyway, the technique began with the marvelous work of Renaissance painters and Flemish painters and going on to what we call the Renaissance. This burgeoning of art where you went from portraits to paintings to busts to sculptures to full-on replications. The artists got so good that the images, the reproductions, the copies that they would make on canvas began to really look a lot like the humans that they were meant to represent. We can see some of these. A lot of these paintings, a lot of these portraits have existed have lasted today that you can see, and we can see paintings and portraits of some of these old kings, queens.
Even in the 18th century here in the Americas where we have some of the higher, some of the wealthy class, the founding fathers and so on. We can see them. We can see the paintings that were done of their life-ness and likeness. Then later on, we humans, our species evolved. We evolved into greater ways of reproducing the image, of copying the image of the human. We got into what’s called photography. Photographic realism. They said, we got to figure out a better way to do this instead of just using paint and canvas, instead of just putting colors on a white background. Isn’t there some more scientific way of doing this? Isn’t there some better way of reproducing the human image? They discovered the camera.
First of all, when those very beginning cameras were – they were just brownish. They had the big – remember the Wild West, right, the Old West? It’s funny, because How the West Was Won, one of Seth MacFarlane’s movies. He invented, Family Guy, How the West Was Won. They actually have one of those in that movie. It’s very, very funny, because they talk about smiling in it. They talk about the pictures.
The pictures back then, they were just brownish, there was no color. They were almost like a black and white or like a brownish. The replication was no longer with paint on canvas, but it was an actual image. It was like taking out a snapshot, a photo. It was an image of the moment, but it was, there was no color. It’s is drab and brown. People would say, “Well, that looks amazing. It looks great. Look at how great grandpa looks like. Looks just like him. So much better than the painting, so much better than the bust, so much better than the sculpture.” They say, “It really looks like him, doesn’t it?”
They go on and say, “Yeah, yeah. It does. It does.” But there’s some things missing, right? One of the first things we noticed missing is the color. It is the color. They went in, they started tinting the photographs. They started tinting the photographs after they were taken, just adding color into them after. They said, “Well, it’s real life like.” But then they went on and they say, “You know? There are some people whose whole style of life, whose whole personality is in the way they move. If we just take that photograph, we just take that instant, that moment that we don’t have the actual. We were not capturing the essence of the person. We’re not really getting it. We’re not really getting what it’s like to be around or with or have an experience of this person.”
[0:10:13]
Where the painting was one level, we get the artist’s representation, what they see, because they’re using color to put together an image that’s in their mind. Then we move to the photograph where the artist has very little to do with it. They might work with lighting a little bit to get the right shadows or the right distance, but really the image that’s captured, well, it’s a photograph. It’s like freezing time, but then it’s close. It’s a good reproduction. We’re getting better. It’s no longer this color on canvas. It’s now a frozen moment, but we need to add something. The personality isn’t there. It’s the way they move. It’s the way they behave.
They said, “We’ve got to make these people move. How can we make these photographs move? How can we make these photographs come to life?” So, they invented the movies. They invented the film recorder. Of course, you guys remember maybe, I mean, not remember when the first movies came out, but you remember those movies when they came out and everybody was getting excited that they were jerky and they were silent films. If you remember on those, like Charlie Chaplin films, the silent films that are really, really jerky, right? Because really what they are is a bunch of photographs, a bunch of photographs run in a loop.
Yeah. It’s a film. They’re just cells. They’re just little bits of photographs strung together, so it looks really jerky. It’s like taking a bunch of pictures that are drawn and flipping them, having a flip story where you take the book and flip it and you see the movement, because every picture is a slightly different image. That’s what the original movies were. But then they said, “Well that’s great. We have this. Let’s clean this up. Let’s make this better.” They said, “There’s something else we can do.”
Here’s another thing about reproducing people. We’ve reproduced the person in color on canvas that we’ve reproduced them in form, in the now in a photograph. Now we’ve reproduced them in movement. Now we can see them moving in choppy, but they talk. People talk and a whole lot of their personalities in their voice. We can’t have them talking at the same time of moving. They added sound to the pictures. They added sound. They added color. They added smoothness to the film.
Then we say, “Now, while we’re really getting it. Now we’re getting it. Now we’re getting somewhere, you see. This is starting to look like real life. This is starting to look like a reproduction of life. It’s starting to look like the real thing.” But here’s the problem, of course, when we go to the movies, what is the problem, brother? Well, it’s on a two-dimensional screen, of course. You see, we go to the movies and it looks real to us. It’s smooth and it’s colored and we have sound and all looks real. We have surround sound. We got the big boom boxes and the great big giant screen that pops out at you, but it’s still on two dimensions, still on a screen.
Somewhere along the line to make it even more real, this concept of 3D was added to the movies. 3D movies and you put on these glasses, these red and blue glasses it made of some tint over your eyes and to see the movie in that way, to see the way it could be in three dimensions. But they said, “Well, look, okay. I’ve got this movie, I can watch it in 3D, but look, I have to go down to the cinema to watch it. I have to go down to the movie theater.” This is not reproducing life here. It’s not fully reproducing life. It’s not the reproduction of life, because it’s not copying life adequately enough. It’s two dimensional, even three dimensional, but got to go to the theater to see it. We all have to come together to the center of town. We can’t have it all at home. So, the television was invented.
Now, instead of going to see the movies, going to see the pictures. Television came on and in television just like with film, it started out with black and white. Then it grew and became colored. That’s where we are now. We have television and we have three dimensional movies. But three-dimensional movies are a funny thing, aren’t they? Because they’re not really three dimensions. It’s not quite a reproduction, because you have to wear the spectacles. You got to wear a little blue and red filters. You got to go down the movies. You’re sitting there knowing that the image is being made, because of the glasses.
Eventually somebody’s going to come out with a thing that we’re going to see, I think pretty soon, which is the hologram. The holographic television set. A television image produced by laser beams that you set up in your living room or family room or viewing room, whatever you call your room where you have your television. You set up these laser beams in the same way you would set up a surround system, speakers, and you have this a three-dimensional figure right out there in the middle of the room for you.
A reproduction of life, a copy, an image in three dimensions, not because you’re wearing glasses and it’s coming out of a two-dimensional screen, but because it’s there. It’s there in your viewing room. This three-dimensional figure, right there in front of you. We say, “Wow, that’s amazing. Look at this reproduction of life. Look at what we’ve come to. We have this reproduction here, this copy, this image. It’s amazing. Look at how far we’ve come. We’ve come from this image of paint where we’ve just put in color on canvas, to now we have a third dimensional image in my house, in my room. I don’t have to go down to the cinema.”
[0:15:28]
It’s still not enough, is it? It’s not a true reproduction. It couldn’t be a true reproduction. Why not? Why is it not a true reproduction? Why is it not a copy? Why is it not a reproduction of life? Because you can walk up to this hologram and you can put your hand right through it. Your hand goes right through it. You can’t touch it and you see that that’s the trouble. Even with our television now, even with-it non-holograph, is that you can’t touch it. That you’re seeing whatever it is behind the screen. It’s intangible. You can’t touch it. You can’t smell it. You can’t taste it, or you can hear it, you can see it, but it’s there. It’s lost to you, and it won’t relate to you.
These are further problems in the reproduction of life, in the copy. Then to be solved in the techniques of electronic reproduction, in the technology that we have yet to build, we’ve yet to see. I’m sure that they will. I’m sure that they will, especially with artificial intelligence coming out. I’m sure that there will be an electronic technology where they’ll do it, and first of all, they’ll do it and manage it in a way where the electronic emission sources can solidify and make the air of the hologram vibrate, so much so that you can go up to it and you can touch the figure and you won’t be able to put your hand through it.
It won’t be a ghost or an apparition, because the lasers that are creating the image have underneath them, a platform maybe, that of air, that’s blowing air, that’s vibrating air so fast, because what is hardness? Let me back up, brothers, because let me explain this, I’m not sure if I’ve explained this in a podcast before. The phenomena that we know is hardness is nothing more than really, really fast vibration in a really, really small spaces. It’s almost, like a ceiling fan, where you have a ceiling fan when it’s stopped, you can see that it has four or five blades on it, four or five blades of a fan.
When you turn the fan on, it starts to spin. It starts to move. Once it starts to move, I mean, when it’s stopped, I can put my hand through, like between the blades. I can put my hand through, but once it starts to spin, I dare not do that, because I’m going to get hit. I’m going to get my finger hit and my hand chopped, right, especially the faster that it moves, the faster that moves, I’m really going to start moving so fast that if I try to put my finger in there, breaks my bone or even chops my finger off. But you can get that fan to move. You can get that fan to move at such a high amount of energy that in that space, because that’s a lot of space.
When I talk about high amounts of energy at small spaces, I’m talking about amounts of energy that could power the entire earth for the entire lifetime of the human species in a space the size of smaller than an atom. That’s what hardness is. That’s why we can’t put our finger through it. That’s why it’s vibrating so quickly. If we were to do that same thing with a ceiling fan, if I were to get that ceiling fan to move so fast to create the amount of energy that it’s moving so fast in that amount of space.
It would eventually be a solid circle. It would just be a solid block of wood or whatever your ceiling fan blades are made out of. Then I wouldn’t be able to put my hand through it. Not only would it not be chopped off or broken, must be like a solid object. I would tap it the same way I would tap a wall or a floor or a desk, because it’s moving so fast. That’s what hardness is. The phenomena of hardness is the illusion created by empty space vibrating massive amounts of energies in small spaces. That’s what hardness is.
If we did the same thing with this holographic image, if we were able to create and I’m sure they will eventually, but if we create technologically some fan that vibrates the air of this image so fast in that space that it creates a hardness, a firmness in the image itself that you could go up and touch the figure. You could give it a hug, because the air is moving faster than your hand. You see the energy of the air is vibrating faster than the hand. Imagine you can actually, like you’re watching television, you’re watching a hologram of a dancer, of a beautiful dancer and at the end of her performance, you can walk up to her and you can embrace her. You can give her a hug.
You could feel this image, but she won’t know that you’re there and she won’t respond to you. You’ll say, “Well, that’s not very life-like. That’s not a reproduction of life.” Because as – as one said, yeah. If the photograph doesn’t move, it’s not very life like. If it doesn’t talk, it’s not very life like. It’s not an accurate reproduction. It’s not an accurate copy of life. Once we have this technology, once we have this hologram technology. We’ll say, “That’s not life, because I can’t touch that image.” “Well, let’s create a way for you to touch it.” Well, it’s still not life like, because if the reproduction in three dimension is solid, it doesn’t respond to me, well, that’s not like life. That would be like, me walking up and hugging a stranger and they’re not responding. They just go about their day, as if I wasn’t even there, as if I’m invisible.
[0:20:16]
The next thing is that they’ll have to figure out a technique for doing that. What they do, they’ll get you to sit in your room, in your home, in your viewing room where you’re watching the scene on a stage, right? See, it’s not on a screen anymore, because now it’s a holographic image. Now, it’s a stage. Well, maybe it’s a fan that’s creating this air in such a way that’s vibrating this air faster than your hand, so they become solid. But there will be a TV camera, observing you while you observe the stage, while you observe the image, and that TV camera observing you, and that TV camera report back everything that you do as you observe it. Then report back everything you do into a computer.
This is where we get into artificial intelligence, brothers. Because I’m telling you, this is coming, right? Report back everything you do into a computer and the computer will be able to manage each bit of information that’s being reported back to it through this camera. It’s to say, every tiny little unit of information going into the image that you’re looking at will be fed back to you as you’re feeding into the computer, so that it will immediately decide and report to the image in response. What is the appropriate response to the approach that you are making to the image?
You understand what I’m saying there, brother? So, that as this image is being holograph and hardened is also being educated by a computer that is getting its information by watching you. Wouldn’t that be crazy? Wouldn’t that be crazy for you to have in your living room, in your viewing room a holographic image that feels, smells, looks, sounds, tastes, just like any other human being and responds to you the way a human being would respond to you in life.
You have this dancer. You finish her dances and you decide I’m going to go up and hug her. Instead of you just hugging her and her not being aware of you anymore and you’re not even there, some ghost, right, like you’re an invisible thing. Well because this computer, because this television or this television camera is watching you, this camera is watching you feeding in the computer and then feeding it back into her, she’s going to react to you. You give her a hug, she may push you away, she may slap you, or maybe she embraces you back and gives you a big kiss, but you never know what is going to happen. You never know what’s going to happen. It’s a mystery. It’s still a mystery because the computer is running it.
It’s artificial intelligence whose running it, but then you say, “No, no, this is not, this is not really the reproduction we want.” This is not a reproduction of life. This is not a copy of life, because we wanted what we wanted when we looked at the scene and what we want is to be able to identify with one of the characters. We wanted not just to watch the drama that’s being performed on the stage in front of us, but we actually want to get into it. We want to be a part of the dance itself. We don’t want to watch the dancer and then give her a hug at the end. We want to be involved in the dance. We want to get into it.
We want to be wired into the technology. We want to be wired into, we want our brain to be technologically, to be electrically connected to that hologram, that image, so that we will actually feel the emotions of the people acting on the stage. Eventually, when that happens, we will get absolutely perfect reproduction and we will be able to see that image so vividly that we could be coming into this question that, could that be where we already are?
Could it be that we here in 2023 are reproduction, a copy which over centuries of evolution has worked out to be a replica of something else that’s going on and we are where we always were, sitting in a viewing room, electrically connected to a computer that is watching, listening to our thoughts, feeding them into a holographic image, making that holographic image appear real through creating high amounts of energy and low amounts of space.
Then feeding back what’s coming from our mind into that image, so that they are a symbiotic response, a relationship of outer and inner and that the whole thing is occurring while we are sitting in a viewing room or as another analogy, I have given you, asleep in our beds, while we simply go through our technologically created holographic reality where you woke up into this hologram, because you turned on your little TV and decided to play a role, fulfill a fantasy.
[0:25:46]
That when you think you die, you just wake up in your viewing room. It’s like Total Recall. It’s like the Total Recall movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger or I don’t know what the remake guy was it. It’s the Australian dud. I don’t remember his name right now. I’m not going to think about it, because it’s beside the point. That’s the reproduction of life. Is that, we don’t know if we are in the reproduction or for creating the reproduction and for doing it perpetually over and over and over again.
A dream within a dream. A reproduction within a reproduction within a reproduction within a reproduction. That every time we die, we just wake up into another viewing room where the whole thing was holographically displayed for us through technology of our own creation and we just keep waking up into another, into another, into another, into another reproduction, because that seems to be what we’re doing here.
We seem to just trying to be reproducing. Reproducing, copying with the metaverse, with movies, with artificial intelligence. We think this is the first time we’ve done it. We think it’s 2023 and this is the first time we’ve ever discovered artificial intelligence. This is the first time we’ve ever discovered whatever, a hologram to television, a movie, a film. But how do we know that we’re not just doing it over and over and over, getting deeper and deeper and deeper?
Now, of course, I’m having fun here. I’m just talking about a fantasy or an analogy with you, guys. But recognize, brothers, that the reason why I talk is because it’s what I do. I’m a philosopher. I talk. I think. I speak. If any of this resonates with you, then maybe you’re beginning to see the world and that’s what I have for you today. Until next week, my brothers. Elevate your alpha.
[END OF EPISODE]
[0:28:25] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Alpha Male Coach Podcast. If you enjoy what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for Unleash Your Alpha: Your Guide to Shifting to the Alpha Mindset at thealphamalecoach.com/unleash.
[END]
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