The image presented to the brain by the eyes is not a continuous picture but is actually full of gaps, maybe not an image at all but perhaps more like a page of computer code. The brain decodes the data and fills in these gaps without our noticing. This is curious and troubling. It does however offer promising possibilities for understanding how other people who are not oneself can be so deeply and importantly wrong about things. No, wait. Forget it.
The sense of being in a room with other people is a couple more levels of complexity and data-collation up. You have the sense-of-sitting-in-a-room-with-people. If you're a teacher you scan the room looking for whatever seems important: signs of questioning, comprehension, the desire to speak, boredom. And you hold in your consciousness all these people, and they--along with your own physical self-awareness and your awareness of your objectives in the class, and the annoying colleague loitering unaccountably by the doorway, and the desire for prime rib and beer and some other stuff--constitute a total social situation. And then this combined with the Chinese economy, Bruce Springsteen, the Shroud of Turin and stars dying or being born, constitute Reality.
But actually as you look around the room you can only see one face at a time. Or really you have to assume that it's a face because you can only focus, can only verify the precise visual print, of some small region of one face. And as you attend closer to this, even this becomes less certain. You begin to the notice the imperfections in your field of vision, the difficulty the eye has when tasked with seeing only one thing exactly. The whole machinery is build to survey and interpolate, not to isolate and verify. Writ large, this seems the condition of knowledge(, man). What we assume is the world is actually an unmanageably vast river of stuff gathered into a small number of familiar-shaped jugs. It only takes a small number of images and experiences to constitute a world, and most people seem to resist admitting new ones. Although there is a sneaky doubleness to how Nature has us respond to strangeness.
But so here's what I want to come back to:
1. In much the same way that consciousness creates (or is?) the simulacrum of a seamless reality from fragments of perception and fragments of memory, so political awareness is composed of isolated data run through a filter of assumptions.
2. Another thing this seems connected to is the experience of beauty. Particular key fragments can evoke responses to enormous complexes of experience: I see a basketball and remember the total experience of walking on a fall day down to Yreka Elementary to play in the crisp, woodfire air until my fingertips split along the prints. Or sometimes I see some small thing and think that maybe the world could be remade according to some pattern that it suggests, as if you could extrapolate from a cup of coffee to a just society. Which seems like something we both sort of think.
And here's the bogglingest thing of all, i.m.h.o: we all share the illusion. It isn't that each individual assembles all these bits and frags into a subjective reality, but that, despite some disagreement, there is something objectively determinable in all of this: stuff that can be observed and described consistantly and predictably from different p.o.v.s in such a way that ordering laws are evident if you care to sytematize and categorize enough. As that old Chinaman said: that anything appears at all, out of all these frags, is cause for hilarity.
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