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Saturday, December 31, 2011

Behind Ahead

Trey Smith


For the past week or so, the media has been awash with 2011 retrospectives and 2012 projections. Re the latter, these often are phrased as "Looking Ahead to 2012."

What's interesting to me is that we can't see the future nor the non-immediate past; we can only see N-O-W which, in truth, is the immediate past. By this I mean that it takes a few nanoseconds for our brains to interpret what our eyes view, so while our eyes may see now, our brains always are a step or two behind.

We live in the past. Not the far past, mind you, that's come and gone.

But this idea of seeing the future is pure balderdash. The future doesn't yet exist, so what exactly could we see of something that isn't there in the first place?

4 comments:

  1. The I Ching can give you some interesting perspectives on change if you know how to interpret it. If you are open to it.

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  2. I've recently purchased several books on the I Ching -- including the Huang book you recommended. So, I'm going to give it a go.

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  3. Our brains could be behind on what our eyes see or possibly even in front! Recent investigations tell me (that we don't know shit) but our "vision" could be a projection produced from gathered information, that the mind extends well outside the skull (ever known you're being looked at from behind) and that we render the world "out there" and not "see" the world on the optic nerve only to then form the idea that the image is out there.

    Anyway, yeah, we don't know, and, yeah, bollocks to all those predictions of this and that, they are at best time filling and at worst attempts to program and prejudice peoples ideas.

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  4. Yes, what we "see" is a projection; the eye is a remote sensor rendering light energy in the visible spectrum of electromagnetic energy --390 to 750 nm-- to an RGB perception or image processed by the brain. What the mind does with the image, to interpret it, is something else.

    The technology of remote sensing in regions even beyond the visible is fascinating; this is how we can know that planetary bodies are made of certain minerals (objects have a "spectral signature" of reflected wavelengths which can be detected and analyzed in interesting detail). This has great application, although it is very expensive to do, in environmental monitoring, surveillance, astronomy.
    +++
    Good luck with the I Ching; bear in mind that its "predictions" are, like science, a matter of probability based on trends. I didn't really begin to appreciate it until I studied with my Chinese teacher, and it is a lifetime effort, even for him.

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