Continuity

Nobody asked but …

I have encountered two very interesting concepts recently.  They are both implied by this observation from Henri-Louis Bergson: “The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.”  So there is, according to Bergson, a continuity in the connectivity among past, present, and future.

Human beings, however, do not necessarily perceive reality in this way.  We see (hear, feel, smell, taste) still shots of reality.  Our conceptual tools must construct reality from the sum of the signals we receive.  An intriguing capability is predictive cognition.  Not only do we receive information in particulate messages, we must make predictions based on those messages.  An example of a practical matter is that we could not catch a baseball without predictive cognition.  We must put our catching hand, predictively, where the ball will be, based on our inputs of where it has been.

Do we perceive reality?  Not really.  We perceive constructions of partial reality based on our biased view of what we sense.  We participate in reality a remove from its actuality.  It is important to understand that bias and its nature.

— Kilgore Forelle

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