We are all happy to see. To smell. To taste. To be able to touch and interact with our environment. But there is a great fallacy in this.
By relying too much on our vision we become more passive. All the senses are inherently passive in the sense that we expect to RECEIVE signals from our environment. But humans are not meant to just receive. Humans are small “gods” able to change the “reality” even by simply observing it (quantum mechanics has shown how the observer actually changes the thing observed).
As said in the previous post, the point is to just take the world in as it Is. And you must actively not interpret your senses in order to do that. You must not feel in order to feel.
Maybe we should start being more active.
Maybe we should just be blinder in order to see.
Just a stupid thought.
From someone who just writes posts as they come into his mind.
An astronomer by training but a photographer at heart, Zoltan Levay creates images of the cosmos with one of humankind’s most advanced optical instruments: the Hubble Space Telescope. Producing photos with the telescope, he says, is not that different from shooting mountains and rivers in national parks. “We’re just shooting landscapes of the universe instead”, he says.
Levay transforms Hubble’s raw data into iconic images. Hubble’s cameras take black-and-white shots and record color with filters. Levay converts the data into reds, greens and blues of space.
A famous Hubble image is the Pillars of Creation, released in 1995. Its fingerlike projections show where stars are born. Using newer infrared cameras on Hubble, Levay and his team have now refashioned the image with greater clarity and a view inside the cloudy pillars (SN Online: 1/6/15). “It was a nice way to bookend Hubble’s mission”, he says. (1)
In manuscripts…
A legendary medieval book has revealed secret images that have been hiding in the margins for centuries — including ghostly faces and long-lost poetry.
Written in 1250, the “Black Book of Carmarthen” is the oldest remaining medieval manuscript written solely in Welsh. It contains prophetic poems and stories of legends and heroes from the Dark Ages, including some of the earliest references to King Arthur and Merlin the wizard (referred to in the text as Myrddin the “wild man”).
But a new analysis by University of Cambridge researchers using ultraviolet light and photo editing software shows the book once contained even more: pictures and text drawn in the margins, including ghostly faces that have recently captured the imagination of people around the world. (2)
We like using images to show what we think. We like seeing images to understand what others tell us. We rely too much on our eyes and yet what we see is in our brain. We see what we like to see. We feel scared when we see something scary only when we are ready to be scared. We feel nice when we see something nice, only because we are in a state of mind which needs something nice to see. We are what we think and yet we believe – we WANT to believe – that what we see is something “out there” independent from us. We crave for a creator, for a higher power which has made things as they “are”. Call it God, call it Ideas (Plato), call it One (Parmenides), the fact is that we all believe in the external image. And yet the image lies deep inside us. We are fooled by our eyes into believing into Existence. And yet we are the ones who make everything “exist”.
Mathematical model shows how brain remains stable during learning.
Complex biochemical signals that coordinate fast and slow changes in neuronal networks keep the brain in balance during learning, according to an international team of scientists. Neuronal networks form a learning machine that allows the brain to extract and store new information from its surroundings via the senses. Researchers have long puzzled over how the brain achieves sensitivity and stability to unexpected new experiences during learning – two seemingly contradictory requirements. (1)
Our minds change. And yet you are constantly you.
We conctantly change. And yet we remain the same.
The world gradually changes. And it’s laws and structure remains the same.
In the chaos order is inherently there.
In our mind you are constantly there.
We exist through our mind.
We think through our mind.
We see through our mind.
And yet we insist on seeing through our eyes.
Oh how have we been misled by our trickster senses…
How much do we need to follow the example of Democritus…
PS. Myth says that Democritus pulled how own eyes off so that we would not be misled by his senses.
Two Americans and a German researcher on Wednesday were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work fine-tuning optical microscopy so that molecular processes could be viewed in real time.
The 2014 laureates in chemistry are Eric Betzig of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia; Stefan W. Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Germany; and William E. Moerner of Stanford University in California.
In awarding the prizes at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, the Nobel Committee said in a news release: “For a long time optical microscopy was held back by a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light. Helped by fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension”. (1)
We believe we have progressed. But science is still based on one and very limited foundation pillar: What we SEE. From the Unbelieving Thomas to modern biologists, we all have to see in order to believe.
We cannot see that our eyes are not our eyes.
Democritus chose to pull them off.
So as he was not blinded by their use…
We do not trust our intuition.
We do not trust our mind.
We already know what we see before we see it.
We already understand things without ever laying eyes on them.
We already had the greatest Science before we had the first microscope.
We stopped having good Science the moment we started using one…
Expanding and contracting circles, mutating colors, and false image matches dominated the 2014 Best Illusion of the Year Contest, held on May 18th in the TradeWinds Island Grand in St. Petersburg, FL. One thousand perceptual scientists joined artists and the general public to determine the TOP THREE illusion masters from a pre-selected group of TOP TEN finalists, chosen by an international committee of judges. Each winner took home a trophy designed by the acclaimed Italian sculptor Guido Moretti: the trophies are visual illusions themselves.
The First Prize winner of the contest, an illusion by Christopher Blair, Gideon Caplovitz and Ryan Mruczek from University of Nevada Reno, took the classical Ebbinghaus illusion, where the perceived size of a central circle varies with the size of surrounding circles, and put it on steroids by making it into an ever-changing dynamic display. Blair rhymed his 5-minute presentation Dr. Seuss-style. (1)
We see what we see.
But what we see is wrong.
And we know it because of what we have… seen.
