Perception is not possible without sentience AND thought. Merely seeing without thinking about it grasps nothing beyond its field of vision. Merely thinking about something without seeing it grasps the reality of something but without its phenomenal presence to us. To really perceive something as real in front of us we have to both see it and think it at the same time.
But since our attention is inherently indivisible, it can't attend to what is seen and what is thought at the same time. That's why when you are just looking at something, you're just watching it, and are incapable of thinking. It's also why when you are thinking about something, you are no longer watching it, essentially blinded to what your eyes are looking at.
To solve this problem, we have to, unnoticeably to ourselves, go back and forth between or iterate thoughtless seeing and sightless thought, alternating these two phenomenally-opposite manifestations of the real into one seemingly coherent event called perception.
"Iteration means repeating a process to generate a (possibly unbounded) sequence of outcomes. Each repetition of the process is a single iteration, and the outcome of each iteration is the starting point of the next iteration.
In mathematics and computer science, iteration (along with the related technique of recursion) is a standard element of algorithms."----- Wikipedia
Two distinct things cannot be the same thing at the same time. Well, at least beyond the quantum level of superpositions. Schrodingers' cat and all. So when we really want to be something we see and experience, the gods blessed us with a loophole: we can pretend to be that thing we want to become, being it as imagined and imitated by us.
But hidden inside this gift hides a danger: that too many start to believe they have actually become that thing they so idealized and admired. The performance becomes too literal and duplicate. They end up a perfect replicant or mere clone of an original, hollow of any thoughts and feelings or even a life of their own.
7) being immaterial like light waves travelling in space.
8) being surrounded by a large number of identical things.
9) being a gas like the air.
10) being extremely bright like the sun.
11) disguising yourself as something else.
12) absorbing light and not letting it escape like a black hole.
13) being very far away like the American flag on the moon.
14) being extremely large like the earth is to a person standing on it.
15) being totally distracted from by something more noticeable.
16) being non-existent.
17) being inconceivable in terms of everyone's worldview.
18) being what the observer is seeing with, like their eyeball or a TV screen.
19) being in a higher spatial dimension, like a sphere is to a circle.
20) being everywhere at once all the time, like space and matter.
21) reflecting an EM frequency human eyes are not tuned to.
22) happening much faster than the human brain can perceive.
23) being obscurant to sight itself, like fog or smoke.
24) being extremely thin like a spider web.
25) being forgotten permanently.
My latest new invention idea: A solar powered flashlight. It only works when being powered by being in sunlight. Buy one get one free! Hurry while they last!........Patent pending.
If we had to consciously attend to each of the scenes flashed before our eyes in a movie or to every word we read or hear spoken to us, we wouldn't be consciously experiencing much of anything. Consciousness by itself is simply too slow and bound to sequence to generate for itself anything like a "hallucinated" movie or telling of a story. The images and scenes and words and sentences have to be tracked by a much more efficient part of our brains. One that is computer-like and that streams the succession of discrete percepts into one constant flow of meaningful happening. There is some sort of automated semantic processing going on that spares us the task of having to recognize each discrete chunk of information and incrementally add them together into some plot or story. It is the transition itself--the flowing of the discrete pictures and words so quickly they blur together into one smooth happening of meaningful happening--that gives us the phenomenal experience of "storying". Thus does it all arise up in us as if spontanously-generating itself, happening together as a continuous epiphany of events happening all of their own accord.
We need to update this old metaphor of consciousness as a movie projector of an unrolling reel of film. We need something more like the DVD, basically a spinning mirror disc a mere laser beam can reflectively "read" digital 1's and 0's from to generate a whole seeable and hearable movie on a screen! It is always our latest greatest cutting-edge technology that metaphorizes and make possible our understanding of our own experience.
It is my belief that there are kinds of thinking, forms of speaking, styles of writing, and ways of seeing that can themselves make us more conscious and more understandingly experiential of reality and ourselves. And it is metaphorically algorithmic and unboundedly fractalesce--re-iterating the output of each sequence of thoughts or images with the input of the next adjacent sequence of thoughts or images. I've said it before: there are endlessly creative infinities lurking in our depths.
“Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.” –Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Deathbed tip #70:
Remember..you don't have to kill complete strangers in a foreign country to "defend your country." You can just impress people with your intelligence and respectfulness and tea-sipping etiquette when you visit their country.
(Apr 29, 2026 05:43 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: Deathbed tip #70:
Remember..you don't have to kill complete strangers in a foreign country to "defend your country." You can just impress people with your intelligence and respectfulness and tea-sipping etiquette when you visit their country.
Try that in Iran, as a gay or Jew. Would definitely lead to your death.
Quote:Try that in Iran, as a gay or Jew. Would definitely lead to your death.
Liar. How would anyone in Iran tell if I was Jew or gay just by looking at me?
You can go there and fined out. I'm guessing the regime would be very interested in an American and have ways to make you tell them many thing about yourself.
I have no interest in traveling anywhere near the Middle East now to "fined" out. Why don't you head over there to prove your dubious claim? Maybe they'll frag your ass for looking like "a dancer". Or maybe they just won't give a shit about your paranoid ass. I'm thinking the latter.
Apr 25, 2026 10:43 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 25, 2026 11:53 PM by Magical Realist.)
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