This piece follows pretty directly on from the last one. I don’t start dating and numbering entries until the next book but it almost flows directly from the notes of the last piece into the more verbose prose of this one. It ties into the idea of thinking about the language we use and why we use it, and how it can be used to manipulate us. Language lies at worst, and only tells part of the truth at best. We have to trust each other to be honest about our experience of the universe, and be as honest as we can ourselves. As laid out in the last piece. 

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Another bit of thinking from what passes for a mind in this sack of meat and chemicals.  It follows a line of reasoning I’ve been picking at for a while, which starts from the assumption that reality, as we experience it, is a construct of our nervous systems and associated senses which translates it’s chaos and terrifying glory into something we can comprehend. The first filter is the point of contact; our senses. We can only hear a limited range of sounds, and see a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum, so our view of reality is already restricted. This data is then filtered through our unconscious minds and edited according to a whole slew of psychological factors which we were either born with (animal fight or flight instinct, territoriality)  or had imprinted on us during our childhood (Basic morals and ethics, social conditioning). Finally, the language we use comes into play when we want to communicate our experience to others and they want to communicate theirs to us. We have to organise our thinking according to the rules (overt and unwritten) of that language. What we end up with is a picture of reality that is more revealing of ourselves than it is of real Reality.
So, this piece starts from the assumption that “Perception = Reality”, of which the inverse is not necessarily true,  and forms the basis of an honest personal morality. We’ve no way of knowing unless we can experience it directly, without using our nervous systems and all the baggage they come with and forms the basis of an honest personal morality.
I have added and edited for clarity and to improve the flow, jotted as this was in short spurts between editing images of scary children’s nightlights it was rather disjointed, more like lecture notes than anything publishable. This is the first piece that I’ve done this for on any great scale, and I will inform you if I do it again to such a degree. Onwards!

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Inspired by something that popped up in my FB feed. One of those ‘feel good’ posts that seek to lift the spirits and provide some perspective on the world, but which, more often than not, are simply sickly and saccharine and make me cringe. This one made me think though and prompted the writing of the following.

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