It is time for me to unleash another secret of the universe, therefore going into hiding until the whole world realizes that nobody really cares what it is that I write here. Are you ready for this? You can go back to the top of the page and select another option if you are too tired right now. I do not want to be responsible for you falling asleep at the keyboard, especially if you are pretending to do your class work right now.

And the survey says that we look with our eyes, but see with our minds. What the eye sees is a collection of colored photons arrayed in a pattern on the retina. This image is actually backwards and upside down. When the photon density is too low, what we see is just the brightness of this pattern and the colors fade beyond perception. The human eye is a remarkable machine that collects gigabytes of raw data that makes no sense whatsoever to the eye.

Image processing hardware inside of your skull recreates the array of dots that the eye detects. There is a little clean up and the images are combined once they are flipped and rotated. Then your mind gets the result and the question, “What is this?” Your eyes would never know the difference if you lied to them. It is not like your mind is ever going to call you a liar.

Belief is a bigger factor in what you see than the image is. Just last night, I saw something crawling across the ground in front of me. It was not really there. My mind was making sense of the visual data of a moving shadow in terms that it could accept. We all do that.

The hardest people to break out of illusions are the people who honestly believe that they do not believe anything. For them, the illusion must be real because they have denied any alternate explanations than their own. You have to witness the faith of a zealot to believe it. Your mind always tells your eyes what it is that they see. There is no way for your eyes to dispute this conclusion.

There is a way that this unimportant secret relates to stand up philosophy. Perception is a significant part of thought and understanding. Reality would not even have to be out there for us to believe in it. Our minds will not allow us to reach any other conclusion. The flesh and the spirit are always at war.

Everything that you know about the world around you is the work of your mind, informed by your senses. It is a poorly kept secret but it keeps because it is something that we do not want to hear. We need the certainty enough to make it for ourselves. Without a foundation, the smallest structures in the world are at risk of collapse.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 12:03 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.