Apr 27, 2026 05:06 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 27, 2026 07:57 PM by Magical Realist.)
If we had to consciously attend to each of the scenes flashed before our eyes in a movie or an actual series of events 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 a "trance" of a told 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 developing plot or story. It is the transition itself--the flowing of the discrete pictures and words so quickly they blur together into one smooth nascence of meaningful happening--that gives us the phenomenal experience of "storying".
Thus does it all rise up in our consciousness as if spontaneously-generating itself, accumulating instant by instant to build a continuously-morphing epiphany of a story happening all of its own accord. As if not being constructed by the successive presentation of discrete sights and sounds to our senses at all!
Of course even this is overly simplistic, as we know the discrete images and words are also being actively interpreted by the context of what came before and what comes after at the same time as being deciphered in themselves as syntactical/semantic representations of real things and events. In short, semantic processing is extremely complicated and fast and autonomous, occurring effortlessly as we seem to be merely watching and listening to what is already there embedded somehow inside of time itself..
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 developing plot or story. It is the transition itself--the flowing of the discrete pictures and words so quickly they blur together into one smooth nascence of meaningful happening--that gives us the phenomenal experience of "storying".
Thus does it all rise up in our consciousness as if spontaneously-generating itself, accumulating instant by instant to build a continuously-morphing epiphany of a story happening all of its own accord. As if not being constructed by the successive presentation of discrete sights and sounds to our senses at all!
Of course even this is overly simplistic, as we know the discrete images and words are also being actively interpreted by the context of what came before and what comes after at the same time as being deciphered in themselves as syntactical/semantic representations of real things and events. In short, semantic processing is extremely complicated and fast and autonomous, occurring effortlessly as we seem to be merely watching and listening to what is already there embedded somehow inside of time itself..