User:SBJ/Perception, Time, and History/Perception

In the meditations that follow, perception has a rather narrow interpretation. Our current and common use of the word means looslely "from one point of view". My usage follows that a bit more literally than in the everyday sense.

As a way of getting into the mindset, try looking at a pen. We think of a pen is something we use to write with, contains ink, is cylindrical with a tapered point, and is often found on a desk, in a pocket, or sometimes is stuck behind the ear. None of those descriptions are simple perception: they rely on relational connections that we naturally make.

Look at the pen again. Ignore it's "pen-ness", and what do you see? You will probably see a cylindrical object with a tapered end. But even that conception relies on one's experience.

Look at the pen one more time. Notice the graduations of color between the middle of the pen and its edges. Look at the difference in color between the pen and the surface its sitting on. Ignore (or "put in brackets") your mind's instinct to assume that there is another side to the pen that you don't see. Ignore everything but the patches of color that the world and the retinas of your eyes present to you. Stop seeing the thing, and just see.

It's not easy
It might sound easy enough to do this, but it's not. Every (male, heterosexual) student of drawing will have trouble ignoring the naked woman on the stand and just see the patches of color. It takes time and effort to see without assigning meaning or objectivity. We are constantly distracted from perception by associations we make, or motivations we have. Learning to "bracket" these influences takes years of practice, but is possible with vigilance.

Bracketing time can be even more difficult. A good excersize is to look at a stream or creek and watch the changes on the surface. The immediate conception is to see the water moving downstream, but the perception is more basic: what you see are patches of light and dark moving around. Look closely: Are they moving in a direction? Do they always folow the flow?

Things aren't always as they seem, or are they?
Buddhist philosophers have long held that there is no being, only process. This has been backed up quite well by our modern science: mountains are created and then erode away, and in the end even the atoms will decay. In a nutshell: everything is both becoming something, and ceasing to be something else. The "something" is just what has meaning or objectivity to us at a certain moment and for a certain purpose: nothing more. Science has let us know that all of what we are and confront came from energy, has been changed by force and time, and is in the process of eventually become something else. That's not accurate, but it's true: the weakness in the statements of science are due to our language, because we need something to talk about: the reality can best be described as "becoming/ceasing-to-be", but even that describes things, and we know that there really aren't "things", just states of things at one time or another, or better yet just snapshots of reality that we call "things", because that's the only way we can make sense of reality.

We know from a deeper field of science that "things" only appear as "things" when they're observed: for example we only know where a photon is when it actually interacts with somehting. This property of matter (the "Heisenberg principle") has often been interpreted as a proof of "free will" or a place where God might step in, but all it really proves is that things are only "things" when they interact with something else (percieved), and only matter one way or another when they become part of a conception.