sound and vision - more about time
Stories can be said to be composed of events and events can be made of moments but all of those words are indefinite and almost interchangeable. Sort of reflects the fractal nature of time. Events can be made of stories which in turn can comprise a moment in history. It's all very relative.
Images appear to us as independent of time - gestalt frames of frozen shapes and colors made of pixels, while sound cannot be experienced without time. Something here about the breath of life...sound being like dye for the flow of time, making emotive currents visible to to our ears through the air. Clues as to why music is so intimate and powerful for us, why we experience it as more 'inside us' rather than projecting from it's actual audio source. Visual information pretends to be more objective, particularly the phantasm of color which, even when faced with the unmistakably subjective, substanceless nature of it's existence stubbornly subdues our reason into acceptance of it's ongoing bluff.
Sound is a bit more honest in presenting it's ephemeral quality. We don't ask 'Is a tree still green during the night?' because we are so hypnotized into believing that trees actually are green and not just appearing that way because of how our particular sort of eye sees. We aren't so sure about sound. Seeing is believing but hearing is sometimes uncertain and non-transferable. How much of that hum is your computer fan and how much is tinnitus? How much is ambient aural odors blandly radiating from unspecified domestic-municipal vectors? Not at all like vision. The floaters are in your eyes, the smears are on your glasses, and the light is from the bulbs on the ceiling - case closed.
We don't need eyelids to block out sound because sound is easier to ignore most of the time. It's just sort of there in the background for us, more a part of the background hum of consciousness than the words you are reading. So much of what we think time is seems to be based on visual experience. We imagine our lives in images attached to moments and build stories out of them. How different if we primarily imagined a soundtrack without the perfume of music or speech to anchor our memories to.
Because time is invisible to us. We don't experience stories directly, they must be harmonically stepped down, compressed, abstracted so that we can take them in in a matter of minutes rather than weeks or years. The psychic gluten that holds the chronological pointillism together gets spread too thin over time, the air of it becomes unbreathably light for us.
I think this is why the passage of time always comes as a surprise to us. "Is it that late already?"; "I can't believe how much you've grown!", "It seems like we just moved here.", etc. We don't experience the passage of time directly, it's always just 'now' and so the passage of time must be inferred psychologically, deduced from material evidence such as differences in physical appearances or the angle of a spring-loaded number trap mounted on a wall.
Why have we no immediate sense of time? Why must we rely on clocks and calendars, both internal and external to give us a handle on what is clearly as real as light or heat or solid objects? The answer that makes sense to me is that it's because the essence of what we are and what the universe is more about time, moments - events - stories, than about the properties of substance. Gold is more than 79 protons in a self-perpetuating ball and we are more than 26,383 self-propagating protein-coding genes. Substance seems like a big deal to us because it's exotic, outside of what we truly are - whereas time seems like absolutely nothing, not even space or an absence, just the understanding of the idea of an open-ended flow in the single dimension of before and after.
Images appear to us as independent of time - gestalt frames of frozen shapes and colors made of pixels, while sound cannot be experienced without time. Something here about the breath of life...sound being like dye for the flow of time, making emotive currents visible to to our ears through the air. Clues as to why music is so intimate and powerful for us, why we experience it as more 'inside us' rather than projecting from it's actual audio source. Visual information pretends to be more objective, particularly the phantasm of color which, even when faced with the unmistakably subjective, substanceless nature of it's existence stubbornly subdues our reason into acceptance of it's ongoing bluff.
Sound is a bit more honest in presenting it's ephemeral quality. We don't ask 'Is a tree still green during the night?' because we are so hypnotized into believing that trees actually are green and not just appearing that way because of how our particular sort of eye sees. We aren't so sure about sound. Seeing is believing but hearing is sometimes uncertain and non-transferable. How much of that hum is your computer fan and how much is tinnitus? How much is ambient aural odors blandly radiating from unspecified domestic-municipal vectors? Not at all like vision. The floaters are in your eyes, the smears are on your glasses, and the light is from the bulbs on the ceiling - case closed.
We don't need eyelids to block out sound because sound is easier to ignore most of the time. It's just sort of there in the background for us, more a part of the background hum of consciousness than the words you are reading. So much of what we think time is seems to be based on visual experience. We imagine our lives in images attached to moments and build stories out of them. How different if we primarily imagined a soundtrack without the perfume of music or speech to anchor our memories to.
Because time is invisible to us. We don't experience stories directly, they must be harmonically stepped down, compressed, abstracted so that we can take them in in a matter of minutes rather than weeks or years. The psychic gluten that holds the chronological pointillism together gets spread too thin over time, the air of it becomes unbreathably light for us.
I think this is why the passage of time always comes as a surprise to us. "Is it that late already?"; "I can't believe how much you've grown!", "It seems like we just moved here.", etc. We don't experience the passage of time directly, it's always just 'now' and so the passage of time must be inferred psychologically, deduced from material evidence such as differences in physical appearances or the angle of a spring-loaded number trap mounted on a wall.
Why have we no immediate sense of time? Why must we rely on clocks and calendars, both internal and external to give us a handle on what is clearly as real as light or heat or solid objects? The answer that makes sense to me is that it's because the essence of what we are and what the universe is more about time, moments - events - stories, than about the properties of substance. Gold is more than 79 protons in a self-perpetuating ball and we are more than 26,383 self-propagating protein-coding genes. Substance seems like a big deal to us because it's exotic, outside of what we truly are - whereas time seems like absolutely nothing, not even space or an absence, just the understanding of the idea of an open-ended flow in the single dimension of before and after.