THE LIMITS OF ASSOCIATION - PART 1
In various movies, etc., you get the scene where someone is in their apartment, looking out through a peephole, and someone is out there - Kramer, or Leslie Mann - looking back at the peephole, and their eye or nose is gigantic, and the rest of their head is just a squashed round circle, (yes I'm being redundant, for effect). That's how things look through a peephole, or a fish-eye lense. And this may be how things look to a very tiny being, when something comes out of nowhere - like a giant finger - and gets very close all of the sudden. Yah! It is as if the picture is one of a silver globe, reflecting, a lot in the middle, and then everything else becomes a circular horizon.
It might not occur to you, big person that you are, that the same thing happens to you, to how you observe reality. In high school art class, you may have been asked to make a drawing or painting showing perspective... In my case, I painted the corner of a building, with streets going off to the left and right. You know how perspective goes - everything gets smaller, further away. But the true artist also adds a bend to everything, as everything regresses together. So, the streets bend as they go off. The buildings bend as they get taller. If you take this to the logical conclusion, it becomes fish-eye. The horizon is a 360 degree circle, where everything bends into one.
This is also a logical extension of your visual perception, where everything bends, to some degree. It is a kind of personal relativity. You see an airplane off to your right, travelling in a straight line, but the line "bends" as the plane passes nearer to you, and the plane disappears in the opposite direction. Because, the plane was travelling in its own straight line, but it was also approaching you and then moving away from you. These are two different realities, which your perception merges into a kind of fish-eye awareness of one wider, more objective reality. It is space itself, being observed from one point, i.e., from one point in time, (i.e., from one timeline), which necessitates this phenomenon of fish-eye. Fish-eye will always occur, to some minute degree, no matter how big the eye, unless the eye is as big as the universe itself. Get the picture?
There will always be the bend - the circling of everything into an observational singularity - because observation itself is part of the relativity of space and time. We just take for granted that we are seeing what is real. But what does it mean when another person sees things from a different perspective? Which is from where most of our social and political problems arise? What does it mean that you and that person get together and discuss your different perspectives? You associate. And, if every point in the universe is looking out through fish-eyes, is it so much that the outside world is Reality - or is it the association - the agreed observation - which makes reality real?
It would be easy to insist that your eyes look first out at a concrete reality, and then this is what you discuss for the rest of your life, until that concrete reality does you in. But you would not be taking into account all of the associations being made, within your cells, molecules, DNA - your quantum magic and weirdness at a distance...
That's part one. This will be fun...
It might not occur to you, big person that you are, that the same thing happens to you, to how you observe reality. In high school art class, you may have been asked to make a drawing or painting showing perspective... In my case, I painted the corner of a building, with streets going off to the left and right. You know how perspective goes - everything gets smaller, further away. But the true artist also adds a bend to everything, as everything regresses together. So, the streets bend as they go off. The buildings bend as they get taller. If you take this to the logical conclusion, it becomes fish-eye. The horizon is a 360 degree circle, where everything bends into one.
This is also a logical extension of your visual perception, where everything bends, to some degree. It is a kind of personal relativity. You see an airplane off to your right, travelling in a straight line, but the line "bends" as the plane passes nearer to you, and the plane disappears in the opposite direction. Because, the plane was travelling in its own straight line, but it was also approaching you and then moving away from you. These are two different realities, which your perception merges into a kind of fish-eye awareness of one wider, more objective reality. It is space itself, being observed from one point, i.e., from one point in time, (i.e., from one timeline), which necessitates this phenomenon of fish-eye. Fish-eye will always occur, to some minute degree, no matter how big the eye, unless the eye is as big as the universe itself. Get the picture?
There will always be the bend - the circling of everything into an observational singularity - because observation itself is part of the relativity of space and time. We just take for granted that we are seeing what is real. But what does it mean when another person sees things from a different perspective? Which is from where most of our social and political problems arise? What does it mean that you and that person get together and discuss your different perspectives? You associate. And, if every point in the universe is looking out through fish-eyes, is it so much that the outside world is Reality - or is it the association - the agreed observation - which makes reality real?
It would be easy to insist that your eyes look first out at a concrete reality, and then this is what you discuss for the rest of your life, until that concrete reality does you in. But you would not be taking into account all of the associations being made, within your cells, molecules, DNA - your quantum magic and weirdness at a distance...
That's part one. This will be fun...