SEEING

     Seeing is a hard concept to grasp mostly because of the tortuous
route between the physical apple on the table and the final conscious
display, 90 percent of which is not seeing at all.

     The light bulb emanates a wave front of photons which hits and
bounces off the apple towards the eye, where the image is refocused by
the lens and formed on the retina.

     But you know that wave front that hits the eye could just as easily
have been created by a holograph film with lasers pointed at it, there
is no way for the eye to tell the difference in theory from an actual
apple or a hologram film plate.  That's the whole idea of a hologram, it
recreates the wave front of an actual apple as if the apple were there.

     That's what holograph film does, it recreates the wave front of the
objects behind it when the hologram was first taken.

     So just because the wave front purports to be coming from an apple
on the table doesn't mean there is or even was an apple on the table.
The whole thing could be a computer artist's rendition.

     The being could just create an apple in his consciousness, and have
an apple.  But then it would as-is and then he wouldn't have the apple
any more.

     So as-isness has been a problem to the being.

     He solves as-isness by adding a lie into the apple, which then
makes it persist.  One of the primary lies is that he didn't make the
apple, somebody else did!  You see if he can just get the idea that the
apple came from somewhere else than here now, then it must have already
existed before he ran into it, and so it wasn't his creation, so it
won't as-is.

     You can only have what someone or something else made!

     But where did that somebody or someone else come from?

     In truth the being created the other's presence in his dream too,
they had to co agree to a co resonance, so the minute the guy realizes
he created the other guy, the other guy as-ises, leaving the apple to
have come from nowhere and so it as-ises too, and again the being has
nothing.

     You see the problem?

     So the being goes on a mad "everything had to come from somewhere"
campaign.  He creates giga cubic light years of space and time, puts
untold numbers of untrackable particles in it, creates unbelievably
complex and beautiful laws of mathematics that no one could possibly be
bright enough to understand, just so all this stuff can evolve for
billions of years, and finally a seed drops in the forest, a tree grows
and an apple forms.

     Now the guy can HAVE the apple and have NO idea where it came from.

     That's persistence and thus happiness and havingness.

     But there is one last lie the being has to subscribe to in order to
glue the whole thing together so it doesn't unravel the next time he
sneezes.

     The being has to believe that HE HIMSELF is made of and evolved
from all this stuff that he created.

     He considers his creature, all this stuff, to be his own creator.

     He becomes a creature of the universe with the same ontological
status as his apple.  Then he too came from somewhere else than himself,
and the self locking loop is complete.

     True responsibility as knowing willing cause, becomes defined out
of existence as 'obeying orders'.

     Thus belief in the apple, space and time, out thereness and out
thenness, external cause and mechanics is very strong because he HAS TO
BELIEVE HE HIMSELF IS MADE OF THESE THINGS OR THE WHOLE THING WILL
UNRAVEL.

     You tell him the world is a dream, and he will go ok that's fine,
so what?  You remind him that includes his BRAIN, and he will go Ooooh
Noooo.....

     He needs to have one little thing left that is physical and actual
to account for the hallucination.  For without the brain, who or what is
hallucinating?  This forces him to FIND HIMSELF for the first time.

     Naked and without a brain.

     WHO OR WHAT IS *MAKING* THE MOCKUP?!

     If there is no outthereness, no external space and time, no
external cause that created him out of external mud and grime, then he
is left holding the bag again, and the whole thing begins to unwind.

     That's vanishment, unhappiness and unhavingness.

     Since his belief that the apple is actually out there is so solid,
so is his belief that he is seeing the apple, when in fact he isn't
seeing it at all, he is seeing a representation of it in his
consciousness, his internal color TV set.

     Now even a slightly educated meatball will tell you that by the
time the photon wave front hits the eye, the apple that reflected it is
long gone in space and time.  There might still be an apple there, but
the original apple that actually reflected the wave has vanished into
the past.

     Thus the best the being will ever do by absorbing wave fronts
across space and time into his retina is get a possible symbolic
representation of how an apple WAS, not how the apple IS, if there even
is one still there.

     For example if the apple is a light year away, then in the year
between when the wave front reflected off the apple and when it hit the
eye, the apple will have long rotted and become worm food.  Thus the
apple the guy sees is actually not there any more.

     And if you consider that the wavefront could have been created by a
hologram, then the apple may never have been there.

     And if you consider that the whole universe may have been created
by God only half a year ago, with wave fronts in mid flight, to look
like the universe had been there for a whole year, then the apple AND
hologram never existed at all.

     This is not silly, fully 50 percent of the population believes that
God created the universe 6000 years ago to look like it has been here
for billions.

     In this scheme, Andromeda which is some 64 million light years away
may not actually exist 64 million years ago, although the wave front we
are receiving from it today indicates that it did.

     As long as the universe is only 6000 years old, and as long as it
will never actually last 64 million years, then there is no need for God
to actually create Andromeda, when he can save time and money by
creating only the wave front hitting us now while purporting to come
from Andromeda 64 million years ago.

     And since no one has actually ever been to Andromeda or back, and
the waves of light originating 6000 years ago from 6000 light years
away, are just hitting us now, the existence of anything more than 6000
light years away from us in all directions is merely a theory necessary
to make sure that the apple continues to exist long enough to eat it.
lest we all wake up with the realization that 6000 years ago God has
created an illusion of an old universe that looks 12 billion years old.

     Scientists won't like that theory, but they can't prove it one way
or the other.

     This is always the problem with learning by being an effect of
messenger waves of causality, one never knows if they really and truly
got created where and when they represent themselves to have been
created.

     OK, so the wave front that left the apple finally hits the retina
and forms an image there.

     More technically the retina changes state, the cells start firing
where before they were quiescent, and energy is sent down the optic
nerve towards the brain.

     Now here is a really deep philosophical question, suitable only for
the most advanced of 3rd graders.

     Does the fact that an object is IN a state mean that the object
KNOWS that it is in a state?

     This is a hard one because the temptation for lazy minds is to
anthropomorphize their own conscious experiences into the physical
universe.

     It is true that if the conscious unit is in a state, of seeing red
for example, it CAN KNOW that it is in that state.

     This is self awareness.

     This is the hall mark of consciousness, resplendent self awareness.

     But is the retina self aware?  It has the image of the apple right
there on it's surface but does it know that it does?

     Is a retina capable of KNOWING at all?

     Or is it just capable of BEING in a state?

     Now some people ascribe consciousness to everything, including a
rock on the ground.  So in that case if the rock is warm, the rock will
know that it is warm.

     That's fine.

     But most meatballs consider that consciousness is a very complex
process in a very complex system of biology called the brain, and
without a nervous system to convey data to a brain, there is no way a
rock can know what state it is in.

     In other words BEING IN A STATE and KNOWING YOU ARE IN A STATE are
TWO DIFFERENT STATES!

     And worse, knowing that you know you are in a state is a third
state.

     Thus if a rock were warm and knew it was warm, someone studying the
rock should be able to see the two different states, namely one, the
rock is warm, and two the rock knows that it is warm.

     The first thing we have to notice here is that 'knowing you are in
a state' can be simulated by a computer.  Any computer can be in a state
and also know it is in a state.  Its got one register that has the
number 1 in it, and another register that also has the number 1 in it
indicating that the first register has the number 1 in it.

     Notice however that it takes TIME for the second register
to notice that the first register has a 1 in it, thus the second
register can never know what state the first register IS in, only
what state it WAS in.

     Any possible self awareness on the part of a machine is always
of its own PAST, never of its present.

     So what happens if we wish this computer to not only be in a state,
but then know that it is in a state, and then also know that it knows it
is in a state.

     Now we have 3 states, each one needs a register, indicating the
existence of the register before it.

     Clearly if we wish to build a truly self aware computer that can
know that it knows that it knows, which is an infinite regression, then
it will need an infinite number of registers to hold each state of
knowing about the prior register.

     Since things move at a finite speed in the physical universe, it
would take an infinite amount of time for the computer to actually
complete all infinite levels of knowing that it knows and so would never
complete.

     The same is true of any biological computer such as the brain.  The
impossibility of infinite self recursive certainty does not lie in the
stuff of which something is made, the impossibility arises from the
dimensional substrate which underlies it.

     In other words it doesn't matter WHAT you put into a space and time
continuum, it will never be able to complete knowing that it knows in a
finite amount of time.  This is a problem with space time, a problem
with the nature of separation and TWO DIFFERENT OBJECTS, not a problem
with the stuff filling space time, namely matter and energy.

     In other words more complexity of parts will not create self
awareness where before it did not exist.

     Notice that true consciousness has no such problems with being
resplendently and self luminously self aware, any conscious unit can
know that it knows instantly and completely.  This is a significant fact
overlooked by the meatball community.

     Self luminousness is in fact the infinite regression of knowing
that you know that you know, all happening in ZERO time, because its not
a sequence of consecutive learning events the way it would have to be in
a computer.

     Self luminousness is effectively an infinite number of knowing that
you knows in one event!  That creates conscious light which illuminates
nothing but itself.

     Now if a rock has a conscious unit in it, then perhaps it can know
that it is warm, and know that it is knows completely, ie be self aware.

     But in any case this conscious function in the rock would NOT be
possible given any *PHYSICAL* mechanics going on in the rock even if it
did have a central nervous system and a brain.  That's because mere
physical mechanics can't produce zero time self luminousness.

     So if we are to consider that a rock is conscious, then that
consciousness would have to be a function external to the rock's space
and time, just as a human's consciousness is external to the alleged
space and time of the body.

     If we are to consider that a rock does NOT have a conscious unit in
it, then we must conclude that being in a state is not sufficient to
knowing one is in that state.

     Thus the rock may be warm, but does not know it is warm.

     Just so for the retina.

     Just because it has an image of the long gone apple on it, doesn't
mean that the retina knows in any sense of the word that the image is
there.  Its just a rock being warm, instead of cold.

     The retina is being "apple", rather than "not apple."

     The data then travels from the retina through the optic nerve,
through the optic chiasm, to the visual cortex and finally to the
conscious display where the conscious looker can finally SEE his looked
at.

     Notice there is no redness in the optic nerve nor visual cortex,
nor is there anything that looks like a picture in any sense of the
word.  The data in the brain before it gets to the conscious unit is in
a form that has almost zero geometric congruency with the original
referent, the apple out there on the table.

     But once it hits the conscious display, the data is once again in a
high picture form format, a symbol for the original referent, with
almost perfect matching geometric congruency.

     This image in the conscious display is what is being 'seen' by the
conscious being.

     The being is not seeing his visual cortex nor anything in it, nor
his optic nerve, not anything on the retina, and certainly not the apple
on the table which is long gone by the time the conscious display lights
up with a red apple.  
 
     In fact by the time the the conscious being sees the image in his
conscious display, the data is gone from the retina, optic nerve AND
brain.  By the time the wave front hits the optic nerve is its gone from
the retina.  By the time the wave front hits the brain, it is gone from
the optic nerve.  By the time the wave front hits the consciousness, it
is gone from the brain.  The wave front is continuously moving on,
leaving all bridges behind intact for the next wave front to come in and
do the same thing.

     Thus when people think they are 'seeing' a physical universe apple,
they are collapsing their conscious symbol onto the physical referent.

     It's easy enough to prove that what is seen is not the physical
apple, close your eyes and the conscious displayed apple of red goes
away, but the physical referent surely is not affected.

     Since in the process of closing one's eyes, the conscious displayed
apple changes and the physical referent does not, the conscious
displayed apple is not the physical apple.

     If B changes and A does not, then B is not A.

     Such a difficult theorem, but you can't pass 3rd grade without it.

     Homer

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homer Wilson Smith     The Paths of Lovers    Art Matrix - Lightlink
(607) 277-0959 KC2ITF        Cross            Internet Access, Ithaca NY
homer@lightlink.com    In the Line of Duty    http://www.lightlink.com

Sun Feb 25 01:23:40 EST 2007