Vision as Reflection
It is a permanent side effect that comes naturally from the function of perception that things appear to be external. The eye reflects the light it derives from the object.
What is being reflected by the eye is the form of the matter. This is reflected and produced as an external scope to the extent of the limit of vision. So far as the eye is an evolutionary product, it is a natural achievement of primal objects of nature, such as crystals and pearls. The eye is a synthesis resulting from crystal and pearl.1
The geometry of the crystal and the eye are the same. This is one exhibition of a reiteration in nature, which is the repetition of the same form in different, unrelated objects. But “unrelated” in this context does not mean that both objects, despite their different quantitative measures, do not share the same essential nature. Rather, they are only unrelated by being in contradistinction to their relation. In other words, the relation itself stands independently from each component that makes it up, and only when the variables constitute that relation can they be said to be unrelated as varying conceptions of the same substance.2
The eye and the crystal share the same basic geometry because this geometry is able to capture every angle of dimension. It is the universal geometry of every dimension, and the eye mimics this so as to replicate an exact external copy of the object. The eye reflects light very similarly to a crystal because it uses a process of refraction of light onto one of its outermost extreme points constituting its circumference, so that it can, in turn, reflect back upon the reflection of light which is already too weak to be picked out as a single ray by the eye.3 The eye becomes blurry when something is in the way. When washing your face, you see as if there is water between what your eye picks out as light and how your mind interprets that light into a definite kind of form representing a variable object.
Like a fingerprint, the lens exhibits the necessary print that captures the geometry required to pick out every angle of a light beam, or rather, to pick out every possible angle that a light beam can disclose. For perception, the size of the object carries with it a conception reciprocal in size until the extent of vision is reached. The eye, like a beam, uses a method of focus—the focal point—which is a signal produced by the nerves of the eye concentrating the refractions of its muscles and sending a ray of electrical signals through the central nervous system into the brain, carrying a bundle of all sides of the object being caught.4
The eye “sucks” in these discrete “quanta” beams of light into the brain via an electrical system, that is, the nervous system. The brain constantly receives these variable degrees of rays and keeps up with their organization into the static and particular image of the object directly perceived by the sensible organ. The mind is always ahead of the eye in forming a coherent picture for the observer to understand, but the eye is faster in catching the amount of light that contains and holds the necessary information to be unfolded and interpreted by the brain. The eye organ and the brain organ are in a constant play of catching up with each other, where one is faster in providing the material, and the other is faster in forming that material into a conception.5
The problem is that perception provides an external reflection. This does not concern the accuracy of vision in deriving the object, because it is as accurate as objects naturally can be, given that the geometry is matched with that of the object. The object, however, is a scope for vision between the actual geometry of the object and that captured by perception. Yet perception, for reasons of efficiency, captures the object only as one thing and not as the spectrum that it is.6 This is because vision captures the object as accurately as possible, but the way in which it captures it is the problem. In reality, there are no external objects, but they are made external only by the function of vision.
The world and the objects in themselves are only internal entities.7 Vision, so far as it is an evolutionary advancement, is the capacity to operate externally within a completely disclosed internal system. Inside the internal system, perception externalizes objects. This is because the very function of vision is to distinguish and differentiate, just as all other sensations do. That is the nature of sensation as a function of the understanding. Thus, for example, the organism does not bump into things: vision captures a certain amount of distance between the tree and the man so that he can simply walk around it, whereas a blind person may bump into it.
Footnotes
1.This is a metaphysical claim akin to forms of transcendental idealism or idealist philosophy and is not a conclusion established by empirical science.
This is a philosophical hypothesis rather than a claim accepted by evolutionary biology. Modern biology explains the evolution of the eye through gradual natural selection rather than as a synthesis of crystals and pearls.
2. This appears to express a metaphysical distinction between relations and relata, namely that relations possess a conceptual independence from the variables that instantiate them.
3.Scientifically, the eye primarily functions through refraction, not reflection. Reflection occurs within the eye to a limited extent, but image formation is chiefly produced by the refraction of light through the cornea and lens.
4.Physiologically, the optic nerve transmits electrochemical nerve impulses rather than rays of electrons. The description here should therefore be understood as philosophical rather than anatomical.
5. Contemporary neuroscience generally holds that visual processing occurs in parallel, with retinal processing and cortical interpretation unfolding almost simultaneously rather than in strict succession.
This reflects the philosophical idea that perception presents stable objects instead of the continuous spectrum of physical information available in the environment.
Focal Point Focus
If you try the exercise of meditation known as focal point focus, where you bring an object right before your eyes and try to look as far as possible within it, not at it, you must look not as the eye normally sees it by looking at it, but instead try to look within the object.¹
The idea is to look as far into the object as possible until eventually the eye begins to look within the light that travels from the eye to the brain.²
In this light there is the reflection of the moment itself.³
The moment is reflected from the fabric of spacetime onto that light and consumed through the eye into the brain, where an experience is being underplayed.⁴
This powerful and ancient technique of focus allows the self-conscious aspect of the human mind, if only for a momentary period of time, to witness the infinite duration of the ongoing continuum of time.⁵
Just as a river passes along all objects within it toward a definite direction, so too time, being guided by a variation of observers, is determined into a definite direction.⁶
In one aspect of nature this process is determined; on the other side of nature, the abstract side, this process is a determination—an action and not merely a sustenance for it, or a reaction to it, but a subsistence of actively being itself.⁷
The internet, for example, is a future platform of spacetime which can allow full-time access for self-conscious reason to look at the fabric of itself.⁸
When there is no duration between moments, the duration being the value of time itself—that is, duration requires that a certain distance of space be covered in order for a thing to transform—if that distance is taken away, all that remains are distinct, discrete moments of time, flickering one after another and capturing different moments of what is supposed to be a continuous process.⁹
However, without space you do not experience the process as continuous, in the sense that there is a continuous dimension within the scene being disclosed by the moment; rather, moments lose their continuity with one another and instead appear one after another without any intermediary duration. It simply happens: one event appears immediately after another, like a scene in a movie cutting to the next.¹⁰
In perception, consciousness, instead of merely having forms of reason constantly appearing and disappearing in thought, grabs hold of each and discloses it within a spatial continuum where the moments seem to lead into each other—for example, I fell down because I slipped.¹¹
Within this space, two moments are not simultaneously seen at the same time, and so one moment does not exclude another.¹²
The eye is a complex sphere made out of tiny nuclei of elongated fibre cells, each of which captures a dimension of the object directly perceived, like an angle of it, almost like a pixel, each capturing a certain part of the whole, and the brain associates these together into a final resolution which appears to be the same object moving places and changing its shape while remaining the same identity.¹³
However, this general picture of the object directly perceived is itself disclosed by a reference frame.¹⁴
This reference frame is the two-dimensional framework of spacetime.¹⁵
Our total experience of reality is three-dimensional, but this is not fundamentally the case because experience, mentally and not just sensibly (through sensations), is only two-dimensional.¹⁶
A two-dimensional reference frame is more fundamental than a three-dimensional one.¹⁷
Footnotes
This introduces the meditation practice as a phenomenological exercise in redirecting visual attention rather than a medically established visual technique.
Contemporary vision science understands light as travelling from the object to the eye; “looking within the light” is presented here as a philosophical description.
The “reflection of the moment” is a metaphysical conception rather than an empirical claim.
The expression “fabric of spacetime” is used philosophically and should not be understood as a literal mechanism of visual perception.
The claim that meditation allows direct awareness of the continuum of time is philosophical and contemplative rather than experimentally established.
This compares temporal experience to the directed flow of a river as an analogy.
The distinction between determination and determined reflects a metaphysical distinction between process and being.
The internet is described metaphorically as an extension of self-conscious access rather than literally constituting spacetime.
This presents a philosophical analysis of duration drawing on concepts similar to those found in discussions of time and continuity.
The comparison with film editing illustrates discontinuous succession rather than making a claim about physical time.
The example illustrates consciousness synthesizing separate events into a unified causal experience.
This sentence concerns the phenomenology of temporal awareness rather than the physics of simultaneity.
Anatomically, the retina consists of photoreceptors and associated neurons rather than elongated fibre-cell nuclei acting like pixels; the analogy is philosophical.
The “reference frame” is introduced as a condition for perception rather than as a physical coordinate system.
This identifies the proposed perceptual framework with spacetime as part of the author’s metaphysical theory.
The claim that mental experience is fundamentally two-dimensional is a philosophical thesis and is not the consensus of neuroscience or psychology.
2-Dimensional
The first and second dimensions are not more primary by being more primitive or less developed dimensions, but rather they are the more advanced dimensions.¹
Dimensions such as the second, and especially the first, are the way consciousness can manoeuvre within the infinite scale of spacetime.²
They are more fundamental than the third dimension by being more advanced and more complicated in the sense of disclosing more.³
Every dimension after the first is more primal by being more finite, limited, and therefore more certain of a specific entity.⁴
Finite, in this sense, does not mean simple.⁵
The further away a dimension is from the value of one, the more finite it is, because by picking out more finite details it picks out from a finite conception of a limited thing.⁶
One is the true value of infinity, coming closest to zero, which is the real value of infinity because it is an innumerable value.⁷
One is the first infinity because every number is fundamentally a one, and the higher the numbers go after one, the higher-dimensional complexity they capture in the combinations of infinity.⁸
The tenth dimension, for example, is finite by being a very complicated set of variables limited to a certain type of relation.⁹
The relation is finite because it is limited, even if that limitation is a very complex set of relations.¹⁰
When we add an exponential value to the tenth dimension and make that into the one hundredth, one thousandth, ten thousandth, one hundred thousandth, one millionth, and so on, these are all to the power of one: any number raised to the power of one equals the number itself.¹¹
Any number raised to the power of zero, except zero, equals one.¹²
This multiplication rule tells us that we can simply add the exponents when multiplying two powers with the same base.¹³
The power of one takes any number and multiplies that number by itself.¹⁴
A second dimension is the pure reference frame disclosing the moment where a third-dimensional point of view can take place.¹⁵
A third dimension is entering into the moment of the scene disclosed by the second so as to be identical with it and therefore partake within the moment—as commonly said, “being one with the moment” or “how to live in the present.”¹⁶
In the third dimension you are in the finite moment itself and can go in every direction within the confined disclosure of the reference frame, or period of time.¹⁷
Whereas the second dimension is the actual disclosure of the moment itself in a series of other moments forming the sequence of time.¹⁸
The first dimension is that entire sequence itself as a single point.¹⁹
The first dimension is the most interesting because it does not have any specific form, since at that level the conception loses any discernible form by which it can pick out anything.²⁰
The first dimension is not discernible, not because there are too many things happening within it, which could be the case, but also because the disclosure of the dimension does not disclose anything at all.²¹
The conception is not one with the object being conceived, and so the conception ventures off in one way, while the object for it remains in one place to be conceivable, and both of these become disclosed within a third conception which views them as venturing away from each other.²²
When a point becomes so far away, another point comes to disclose that reference frame which views the point as far away.²³
The first dimension is duration itself, meaning the “entrance” into any dimension.²⁴
In order for there to be a duration, there has to be an entrance at one point and then a movement toward the exit at another point.²⁵
This is what stands between the eye and the brain, for example.²⁶
In the phenomenological sense it is a light ray which gets reflected with the light from the object, capturing each detail of its form.²⁷
Footnotes
Contemporary vision science explains image formation through the refraction of light and neural processing. The present account is philosophical rather than physiological.
This distinguishes “primary” from “primitive,” arguing that greater fundamentality consists in greater explanatory scope rather than developmental simplicity.
Consciousness is treated here as operating through dimensions in a phenomenological and metaphysical sense.
“Disclosing” is used in the phenomenological sense of revealing or making experience manifest.
The text associates increasing dimensionality with greater specification rather than greater universality.
Here, “finite” denotes limitation rather than lack of complexity.
This presents a metaphysical relationship between dimensional hierarchy and the degree of determinacy.
Mathematically, zero and one are not generally regarded as values of infinity; this sentence expresses a philosophical interpretation.
The claim that every number is fundamentally one is metaphysical rather than mathematical.
The tenth dimension is used symbolically rather than according to any established physical theory.
The limitation of a relation is presented as the source of its finitude.
This sentence combines mathematical notation with a metaphysical interpretation of dimensional structure.
In conventional mathematics, any non-zero number raised to the power of zero equals one, whereas (0^0) is generally considered indeterminate.
This refers to the law of exponents for multiplication of like bases.
Mathematically, a number raised to the power of one equals itself; it is not multiplied by itself. The statement reflects the author’s conceptual interpretation rather than the standard mathematical definition.
The second dimension is identified as the condition for the disclosure of experience.
This connects dimensional theory with the phenomenological notion of presence in the moment.
“Disclosure” is retained as a technical philosophical term.
The second dimension is presented as the ordering principle of temporal succession.
The first dimension is described as the totality of temporal succession viewed as a unity.
The absence of determinate form is linked to maximal abstraction.
The first dimension is characterized as preceding all determinate disclosure.
This describes a separation between conception and object mediated by a higher-order conception.
Distance is interpreted phenomenologically as depending upon the standpoint that discloses it.
Duration is identified with entry into dimensional existence.
The “entrance” and “exit” function as metaphors for the temporal structure of duration.
This introduces the eye-brain relation as an example of the author’s phenomenological framework.
Perception Escapes Uncertainty
When we say that the end is already present in the beginning, the difficulty arises when we ask: What is the point of advance? Why is there a process of recollection? What is the point of experience? The answer relates to the function of consciousness, which is to achieve certainty, knowledge of itself.
To say that everything already exists does not mean that everything is already in a certain way of existing. The point of experience, of going through the process, is by way of achieving a certain way of being, which, in the absolute state of infinite flux, is to go through the indefinite by having knowledge of it.
There is psychic comfort in the evolutionary development of perception because the sensible faculties, on some level, escape the indeterminate constant flux of thought and rest the focus of consciousness on a certain abstraction of infinity.
Vision as Reflection of Mind
The presupposition in the onset is that mind does not come after the individual, but rather the individual comes after mind. In other words, the organism is adapting to its mind alongside its environment.
What is vision a reflection of? The lens of the eye, being transparent, reflects externally the internal operations of the mind. For the eye is technically looking into the brain. It does so indirectly only insofar as it makes it appear as outside. But the world perceived by vision is really the same world of the mind, for it is a reflection of it.¹
The mind is not blank; it is the world of details perceived. It is the eye that is blank, transparent, in order for it to reflect the details of the mind. We become aware of the eye as an object when it is ill; we see spots.
Human perception and its function as an organ of understanding is an example of a natural manifestation of self-consciousness. When an eye sees an object, it delivers that object as an inverted image to the brain, so that the mind has to reinsure that image into its natural form as first conceived.²
An ant, for example, does not see in this manner. Instead, an ant does not differentiate itself from what it sees but is fully immersed in what it sees as identical with itself. It sees itself as the path it is maneuvering on, such that it is the consciousness of the path itself, the path being the non-conscious element in the experience.
We see, unlike human perception, which sees an object as an external entity and sees the object in its own individuality. Insects, like ants, perceive themselves as internalized in the object they perceive, such that they are internal in the object.
What we divide as a fundamental difference between organism and environment is itself a result of the understanding and the phenomenon of our self-consciousness differentiating the capacity to observe from the object. In truth, the organism is the conscious component and the environment is the non-conscious component, both of which are the same spectrum from the internal point of view of their relation.
The perception of the ant is based on the level of its understanding. It is not that it sees less or more of the object, although that could be the case also, but that what it sees does not involve the connections the human mind can apprehend.
However, the human mind, when observing complex systems, also operates on the same level of abstraction as the ant does in relation to environments humans can easily apprehend.
For example, when an ant ends up on the sink of your washroom, the ant does not realize the danger it is facing because, from its perception, it sees a flat, smooth surface that is the sink. Perhaps it may see the water tap, but to it, that water tap is an arbitrary object. It does not realize it is standing on the surface of a sink which, at any second, will be flooded with water coming from the tap. In other words, it does not make the connections because those are outside the scope of its reality. Therefore, from its point of view, if it dies from the water tap, that is a natural event.
Insect Eyes and Compound Vision
Insects’ eyes portray a less refined and more primal version of the eye, showing it more as a differentiated entity composed of many smaller versions.³
A mosquito has two eyes only; however, there are hundreds of lenses in one eye. This is why they are called compound eyes. Compound eyes are better than simple eyes (eyes having a single lens, like ours) at detecting motion, though they are weaker in focusing and differentiating textures and shapes.⁴
The vision of the dragonfly is precisely relevant to experience in spacetime. The size of insects is microscopic compared to larger mammals like humans. Their minute size enables them to move through space at a different time frame than larger mammals.
If, for example, an insect were the same size as a human, its movements would defy the laws of nature. If it takes a certain amount of time for an object with a certain amount of weight to move from position A to position B, then the relation between size, mass, movement, and perception determines the experience of time and space.
Insects are evolved to perceive simultaneous possible events happening instantaneously. This means nothing else than that they see a set of actions happening all at once, like someone moving, sitting, falling, running, and walking at the same time.
Rapid Eye Movement and the Scanning Function of Sight
Rapid eye movement, the constant movement of the eye, acts like a scanning mechanism that infinitesimally alternates between different frames of reference, disclosing certain objects within the scope of sight.⁵
The eye itself is composed of millions of microscopic components, and these cells operate by expressing the general function of sight, which is the reason for their relation.
This does not mean that the cells of the eye are all able to see like the eye that consists of them, but rather that the cells conceive elements like colour, shape, and light intensity that constitute the conceptions necessary for sight.
For example, within the retina:
Cone cells, or cones, are three types of photoreceptor cells. They are responsible for colour vision and function best in relatively bright light, as opposed to rod cells, which work better in dim light.⁶
The cells in your eyes have different shapes. Rod-shaped cells enable you to see shapes and detect light intensity, while cone-shaped cells allow you to perceive colours.
One macro eye is millions of micro eyes. The cells of the eye all operate, expressing the general function of sight that is the reason for their relation. The whole emerges as a unity from the relation of its parts.
Footnotes
¹ Alan Watts discusses related ideas about perception, mind, and the relationship between inner experience and the external world in various lectures, including discussions of water, flow, and perception. The philosophical interpretation here reflects his perspective rather than a scientific claim.
² The image formed on the retina is inverted due to the optics of the eye. The brain processes this information so that perception corresponds to a stable external world rather than an upside-down visual field.
³ Insects do not have “lesser” eyes in a strict evolutionary sense; compound eyes are highly specialized adaptations optimized for detecting motion and rapid changes in the environment.
⁴ Compound eyes contain many individual visual units called ommatidia, each with its own photoreceptor system. They provide wide fields of view and excellent motion detection.
⁵ Eye movements such as saccades rapidly shift the gaze between points of interest, allowing the visual system to construct a detailed perception of the environment.
⁶ Human retinas contain two major photoreceptor types: rods, which are highly sensitive in low light, and cones, which provide colour vision and higher visual acuity in brighter conditions.
Compound and Simple Vision: Evolution and the Logic of Parts
“Dragonfly eyes are made of tens of thousands of individual light sensors.” Dragonflies can see in all directions at the same time. That is one of many advantages of a compound eye; you can wrap it around your head. The spherical field of vision means that dragonflies are still watching you after they have flown by. If you swing at them while they are approaching, they will usually see the net coming and easily avoid it.¹
Each ommatidium is a functioning eye in itself, and thousands of them together create a broad field of vision for the fly. Flies have five eyes: a pair of large compound eyes and a triangle of three little simple eyes called ocelli on the “forehead” between the compound eyes.²
Digger Wasp
Simple eyes of Ectemnius (digger wasp) with condensation.
(Evolution adapting to the discrete measure of possible events happening simultaneously.)
It is interesting that “simple eyes” are evolutionarily more advanced than compound eyes because we normally associate a simple categorization of a thing as prior and more primal than compound. But this is not the same as saying that compound is more developed than simple.
The term “simple” is a logical predicate of compound because it means any thing that has no proper parts. The simple body predicates the compound, not because the latter, by the fact of having parts, is part of the former having no parts. Not merely due to the logic that because a thing has parts, it must by its nature therefore be a part, and therefore, as part, it is secondary to that which, having no parts and being simple with itself, is primary.
What it means for a body to have proper parts has nothing to do with the actual body having attributes, because we first have to ask what it means for a variety of differences to come together into the same whole to form yet a single difference distinct from the differences constituting it.
What it means for a relation of different things to form one single thing is not explained by the perception of a single body having different parts that can be distinguished out from each other, because we cannot ascertain that a single body has different parts just by perceiving it.
The mere perception of a body exhibits it as a continuous whole where the boundary of one thing has no clear distinction from another, as they all make up the body we see as one and the same.
To ascertain that an identical body exhibits differing parts is a conclusion deduced in the abstract when the body is out of sight or when we “think” about the body after looking at it. Even while looking at it, this is still after the fact of perceiving it because the brain is registering the object as it passes in time before the mind.
A compound body having parts is an abstraction of distinctions disclosed by conception.
Sometimes the atom is used as an example of a simple body because it is indivisible. Yet the categorization into simple and compound, the name “simple” suggests that it has a more fundamental place than compound, while “compound” suggests being more complicated than simple.
But in evolution, we see the opposite case: compound bodies are evolving towards simple forms, like the eye.
Compound becomes simple because it can be discernible into parts, whereas simple is complex because it is the whole whose parts must be understood.
The notion that a simple form is more complex than a compound one confronts us with epistemological difficulties.
Truth, Complexity, and Determination
It is important not to merely adopt the notion of truth as negative because every fact is then derived as a limit within which its form of consciousness is trapped.
But how, nevertheless, science moves towards the ascertainment of other facts means that a limit is a power for determination.
For example, the general critique of American culture, granted as it may be, begins off by saying that American society does not live by truth as opposed to other cultures who are more truthful because of their cruder ways.
That is the same as saying that a chimp is more truthful than a human because he is more primitive and simple by nature. The simplicity is taken as more truthful than the complexity.
But vice versa, it would be unsound to say that a caveman’s stone is more truthful than an iPhone given the difference of complexity between each form of technology.
The idea that the simpler version is more truthful than the complex one is an epistemological fallacy based on the fact that because the simpler can be understood more than the complex, it is argued as the more truthful.
A classic epistemological mistake, but only insofar as being inconclusive because it does not alleviate the doubt it purports to dissuade.
Conception and Perspective
There is no difference between something conceiving itself and being conceived by something other because that continuity constitutes the same power of conception; only the perspective changes.
The change in perspective constitutes a change in the experience and expression of that experience as an object.
When you perceive some object, you are experiencing how that object conceives itself. How it conceives itself is the same as how you conceive it.
Distance, for example, from the first perspective, having distance away from something else, or from the third perspective, looking onto two things distant from each other, space constitutes the measure of distance in either form of conception.
Footnotes
¹ Dragonflies have highly developed compound eyes made of many individual visual units called ommatidia. Their wide field of view and strong motion detection abilities help them track and capture moving prey.
² Flies and many other insects have compound eyes made of many ommatidia, along with simple eyes called ocelli. Ocelli generally detect light intensity and help with orientation rather than producing detailed images.
³ Compound eyes are not necessarily evolutionarily “less advanced” than simple eyes. They represent a different specialization: compound eyes prioritize motion detection and wide fields of view, while camera-type eyes prioritize image resolution and focusing ability.
⁴ The distinction between “simple” and “compound” in biology refers to physical organization, not necessarily philosophical simplicity or complexity. A simple eye may have fewer visible components while requiring more complex interpretation by the organism.
⁵ The relationship between parts and wholes discussed here relates to philosophical questions of emergence, identity, and abstraction rather than a direct biological definition of anatomical parts.
⁶ The idea that simpler systems are more truthful because they are easier to understand is related to epistemological debates about reductionism, explanation, and the relationship between simplicity and truth. Simplicity can be useful for explanation but does not necessarily indicate greater truth.
Perception and the Concealed Void of Conception
When an organism, like a shark, changes its environment by migrating to a different one, it witnesses features unique to those environments that it was not previously exposed to. These features become sublated into the conception of itself, and they become scripted physical characteristics within its living, surviving form.¹
The organism does not merely encounter an external world; rather, its interaction with the world becomes incorporated into its own organization. The environment becomes part of the organism’s developing conception of itself because survival requires the organism to internalize relations that allow it to continue existing within changing conditions.
The rapid movement of the eye, constantly alternating between different references and disclosing particular objects within them, filters out the conception of the object by replacing it with a perception.
In perception, the void which discloses the object, making it a distinct conception from another, does not appear as part of the object. The conception of the object is a void, and so it cannot itself be conceived. What is conceived is the content of the conception; these are the activities of experience forming objects.
Sensations, and specifically perceptions, are particular evolutionary states of conception generally, which have developed in such a way where the conception itself became a means for conceiving other objects.
In other words, the capacity for conception manifolds into objects conceiving other objects.
This is not unique to perception because we already see that, in the different sense of the word conception, conception is generation. Self-reproducing organisms are objects that conceive a perpetuation of themselves as objects.
But perception is unique because it is a conception in the form of an object that conceives others in their respective form as objects. It does not conceive itself as perpetuating a production of itself into further objects, like in the form of generation.
When perception overlooks the conception disclosing the object and goes directly into conceiving the content of the conception, i.e., objects, what it must first do is actively avoid the void between each thing.
This going back-and-forth movement, hurdling over the void, makes it seem that there is the same continuity between discrete entities.
Our common sensations find difficulty in the idea that their objects are abstractions from more fundamental faculties of reason.
Objects as Generalities and the Function of the Void
It is often stated that perception observes generalities. A given object perceived in the environment is really an abstraction of the environment generally in a particular way.
Any particular object is a generality because implicit within it are not necessarily perceived details.
We do not even need our microscopic empirical observations to confirm this; its evidence is already contained in the fact that perception presents a unified object rather than the infinite relations composing that object.
The void acts as the generality because when it is taken out from the relation between objects made distinct by it, objects appear to come into contact with each other from their own volition within a general framework they all share, and within which their interactions occur.
The void itself cannot be perceived, but its remanence is present as a distortion at the boundary where one object lies and another begins.
Our eyes have filtered out this distraction caused by an inconceivable void at the macroscopic level of magnitude within which sensible organisms operate.
But at a greater magnitude, like what we observe in space, there is an obvious warping in spacetime between terrestrial bodies, which we now know is caused by massive objects such as black holes.²
However, this effect is not extraterritorial but present even in objects on Earth. Our eyes, at this level, have adapted to filter such distortions out for obvious efficient purposes.
Perception as an Organizing Mechanism
Perceiving is determined by understanding.
Perception alone, without understanding, does not indicate what the nature of an object is, but only that there is some object. Sight has evolved as a mechanism of understanding; the content of its perception indicates what things are.
Perception alone forms a continuity between different conceptions so as to make the relation of the objects in conception logically understandable.
Another aspect of understanding is that it is built into the very object of sensation.
The elements form the organ of sensation in order to experience them.
For example, light does not merely enter the eye as a neutral external thing. The structure of the eye itself is shaped through evolutionary adaptation to the properties of light. Photoreceptor cells respond to specific wavelengths, and the visual system organizes these differences into experiences such as colour, brightness, and form.³
The organ develops in relation to the very conditions it is structured to perceive.
Perception and the Reversal of Conception and Object
For example, in the perception of some object later discerned as a cat, perception may pick out an object, but that does not distinguish an understanding of what that object is.
It only indicates that it is an object, and it may have some role.
Sensations are mediums for the apperception of understanding, and they operate by reversing the abstract relation of conception and object.
Instead of seeing the object disclosed by the conception, they see the conception as part of the object, such that what is before it is only an object to be focused on.
This is done by assimilating the idea of an object into a body from which it has received the idea.
This is the active role of perception and not what we normally assume as the passive seeing of things as they enter our frame of sight.
At some level, the eye is the organ of sight, which naturally is structured for apperception. The eye functions as an image-reflecting structure, projecting the internal operations of the nervous system outward as an external world.⁴
The visual image is not simply received; it is constructed through the organization of sensory information.
But vision, so far as the bare structure of apperception, does not by this function alone produce understanding.
For example, the eye of a cat may perceive movement, light, and form, but the perception alone does not contain the full understanding of what the object is in relation to the wider conceptual framework of the organism.
The understanding arises through the organization of perception into meaningful relations.
Footnotes
¹ In evolutionary biology, organisms can adapt to environmental pressures through processes such as natural selection. The phrase “sublated into the conception of itself” is being used philosophically to describe how environmental relations become incorporated into an organism’s form and behavior.
² General relativity describes spacetime as being affected by mass and energy. Gravitational effects occur everywhere, but they are usually imperceptible at everyday scales because they are extremely small compared with the forces and conditions humans typically experience.
³ The visual system evolved alongside environmental properties such as available light. Photoreceptors in the retina respond to different wavelengths and intensities, allowing organisms to extract information from their surroundings.
⁴ The eye does not literally project internal images outward, but perception does involve the brain constructing a representation of the external world from sensory signals. The philosophical interpretation here treats vision as a reflection of internal organization.
⁵ “Apperception” traditionally refers to the mind’s ability to organize and recognize perceptions as meaningful experiences rather than merely receiving sensations.
Conjunction of the Senses
The decoherence of the senses is that they are in a coherent state, but the coherent state itself, being their conception, is decoherence.¹
The senses appear separated because their modes of reception are differentiated, but their differentiation presupposes an underlying unity. The senses are not originally separate realities that later become combined; rather, they are differentiated expressions of a prior conception.
This relates to Alfred North Whitehead’s point that when you see something, you do not necessarily smell it. There is a disorientation of the senses. Space and time cause disorientation in the senses, so that when you see something, you do not necessarily smell it. However, this is only because the sense organs perceive various forms but not what they perceive, which is really the point Whitehead makes.
The sense organs perceive different wavelengths of things. Hearing sound waves is different from perceiving light waves, so it appears as though there is a discontinuity of temporal extension between what you see and what you hear.
You see something before you hear it, or you hear something after you see it.
However, insofar as what the sense organs conceive, there is no break in the way information is distributed. The different forms are present all at once.
When you look at someone, you also smell them. All forms of information from the same entity are distributed simultaneously, which does not mean they are received all at once.
The breakage of the senses is in the reception of the experience.
The senses are discrete in their reception but continuous in their conception.
This distinction between the discrete and the continuous is essential. The discrete refers to differentiated moments or separate expressions, while the continuous refers to the underlying relation that allows those expressions to belong to the same whole.
In the Hegelian sense, the separation of moments does not destroy their unity; rather, the unity expresses itself through the differentiation of its moments.²
The Object of Sensation
The object of sensation is disclosed by perception. Objects are contained within the extent of vision.
Vision is disclosed by the mind; therefore, the objects of perception are contained within the mind.
We can also say that the mind is contained within nature as an organism with a brain, but this is quite incorrect because there is no way of knowing that without a nature of mind to know that.
To be in nature, nature as a circumstance is predicated by nature as capacity.
The condition of being within nature already presupposes the capacity to conceive nature. The mind does not discover itself as merely another object within nature without already possessing the ability to distinguish and understand objects.
Information and Reception
Receiving information comes in different forms, but the information provided comes all the same at once.
In order to have different forms, everything already has to be there at once.
The conjunction of the senses and their place of origination is the conception disclosing them.
The conception of the senses is their abstractive set, the mental capacity of reason, the idea.
The senses originate from the abstract idea of the object, which is undifferentiated, and this is the synthetical aspect of mind.
There is a particular idea extended to a pure conception.
The senses are analytical because they differentiate objects within this pure conception, but their pure conception is naturally synthetical because it discloses their differences.
This is the absolute pure quantity: the undifferentiated possibility of difference before difference is separated into particular forms.
In modern science, synthetical knowledge is acquainted with as coming after or following analytical knowledge.
However, analytical knowledge is synthetical insofar as it maintains the relation of concepts as differentiated from each other.
Synthetical knowledge is organically foundational to the sensible organs of understanding because it concerns the objects of sensation related in pure conception.
The mental capacity of a pure conception of things, which is the undifferentiated platform where different things operate, is the first kind of synthetical knowledge.
Vision, Sound, and Differentiation
Vision is more differentiated than sound.
Sound is more undifferentiated than vision because when you see something, you can differentiate it from something else because there are various variables picked out by sight, like colour, alongside shape, texture, and spatial relations.
However, hearing only picks up varieties of the same variable, like volume, bass, depth, and frequency.
When not looking at something, you can hear different things and identify the sounds with objects. However, objects discernible by sound are still undifferentiated wavelengths, whereas in vision things appear as differentiated states of shape and spatial form.
Vision divides the object into visible relations, while sound reveals the object through changes within a continuous field of vibration.
Contact as the General Conductor of the Senses
The general conductor of all the senses in the pure physical undifferentiated way is touch, or more generally, contact.
Contact is the first undifferentiated sensation.
Contact is the natural physical form of the indivisibility of logical relations.
Contact is the conception of thought consisting of indivisible logical relation.
Con-t-act, which is the action of contraries, constitutes the undifferentiated state of unity known as touch.
Everything is always in a state of touch.
The geometric example of contact is demonstrated by the tangent. A tangent touches a curve at a single point without occupying the whole curve. Yet that single point of contact expresses a relation between two different geometrical forms.³
Contact is therefore the simplest expression of relation: two things remain distinct while sharing a point of unity.
Magnetism, and Unity
Contact, for example, is demonstrated by the nature of magnetism.
Earth’s magnetic field, for example, is what maintains many of its properties intact and under the same general gravitational relation.
Magnetism expresses a relation where bodies influence each other without direct mechanical contact in the ordinary sense. The field itself represents a continuous relation distributed through space.⁴
The unity of physical systems is not merely the sum of isolated objects but the network of relations that allows those objects to exist as a coherent whole.
Footnotes
¹ “Decoherence” in physics refers to the process by which quantum systems lose their coherent superposition through interaction with their environment. The philosophical use here differs from the physical meaning: it is being used metaphorically to describe how a unified conception differentiates into separate sensory expressions.
² Hegel’s dialectical method emphasizes that unity and difference are not mutually exclusive. A concept develops by expressing itself through distinctions that remain connected within the whole.
³ In geometry, a tangent line touches a curve at a single point. It provides an example of relation without complete overlap, where distinction and unity occur simultaneously.
⁴ Earth’s magnetic field is generated primarily by movements of conductive material in its outer core. Magnetic fields represent forces distributed through space rather than direct physical contact between objects.
⁵ Sound and light differ physically: sound is a mechanical wave requiring a medium, while light is electromagnetic radiation. The sensory systems that detect them therefore translate different physical phenomena into experiences.
The Art of Marijuana Ingestion
The first rule is to never smoke weed.
Ironically, smoking is one of the best methods of ingesting THC in terms of dosing because the effects are felt almost immediately, making it easier to regulate the amount consumed.¹ However, it is also the most harmful method outside of the THC itself because of the smoke that the lungs inhale.
Smoking is harmful because the lungs are very sensitive organs and are meant primarily for the respiration of air. Gaseous products produced through combustion, such as smoke, contain hot particles, tar, and other by-products that are harsh, thick, and heavy for the lungs, damaging their tissue over time.² Therefore, whatever benefit one may gain from the THC is, at least in part, counteracted by the damage done by the smoke.
This leaves us with the ingestion of THC by the method of digestion—that is, eating it.
This is generally the healthiest method in terms of avoiding damage to the lungs because it deals directly with the ingestion of the active compounds without the harmful side effects associated with smoke.³
However, the issue with eating cannabis in the form of edibles is that dosage is much harder to control or determine. Because the effects are delayed, an individual will often take more than the body is comfortable with before the first dose has fully taken effect.
This can produce unpleasant experiences and, in some individuals with frequent long-term use, may contribute to disorders such as cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome.⁴
The key, therefore, in this system is moderation.
The term “moderation” is used loosely because, ideally, the individual should remain sober. However, we are not taking this as the practical reality. Instead, we assume that if the person should take part in any psychoactive substance, THC is probably among the less physically harmful options when compared with many other recreational drugs, although it is certainly not without risks.⁵
The key to moderation is that less is more in this respect.
Meaning, the less you take, the more of the effects you will actually feel.
The idea is not to develop a strong tolerance but to keep the level of THC intake at a minimum so that the body can maximize the effects without continually requiring larger doses.
Tolerance gradually diminishes the subjective effects of the drug, leading many individuals to consume increasingly greater quantities in order to achieve the same experience.⁶
The principle is therefore one of economy rather than excess.
Purpose of THC
The other reason for doing THC should never be merely for fun.
The drug, although commonly labelled a recreational drug, should not be taken purely for recreational purposes but rather for creative purposes.
Meaning that if you do the drug, you ought to produce some creative element, insight, or principle out of it.
Otherwise, it is a waste, and the individual would be better off remaining sober.
The taking of the drug does bring with it sacrifice.
Like all psychoactive substances, there are adverse side effects whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, and whether they are immediately apparent or not.
The question here is not simply whether one should or should not do it.
Rather, if one is going to do it, the question becomes:
How should it be done properly?
It is important that such mind-altering substances be taken primarily for the purpose of keeping the mind intellectually altered rather than merely emotionally stimulated.
The mind, like the muscles of the body, becomes atrophied if it is not continually engaged, challenged, or transformed.
This transformation is primarily intellectual.
Mind-altering substances, when used correctly and sparingly, can become occasions for intellectual activation rather than passive entertainment.
They should serve thought rather than replace it.
The purpose should never be intoxication for its own sake.
The intoxication should be subordinate to understanding.
The experience ought to culminate in reflection, writing, artistic creation, philosophical insight, or some other enduring product of thought.
Otherwise, nothing remains once the intoxication has passed.
The drug has merely consumed time rather than transformed it.
The art of drug taking, therefore, should be undertaken only insofar as the pursuit of truth persists.
If the pursuit of truth is absent, then the intoxication lacks purpose.
Without understanding, the experience dissolves into mere sensation.
Without creation, the experience leaves behind no lasting conception.
In that respect, it is better to remain sober.
Footnotes
1. Inhaled cannabis generally produces effects within minutes, allowing users to adjust dosage more easily than with edibles, whose effects may take 30 minutes to 2 hours to fully appear.
2. Most health risks associated with smoking cannabis arise from inhaling combustion products rather than from THC itself. Vaporization may reduce exposure to some combustion by-products but is not risk-free.
3. Oral cannabis avoids smoke inhalation but changes the way THC is metabolized. In the liver, THC is converted into 11-hydroxy-THC, which often produces longer-lasting and sometimes stronger psychoactive effects than inhaled THC.
4. Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome (CHS) is a condition associated with long-term, frequent cannabis use that causes recurrent nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. It appears to affect only a minority of regular users, and the exact biological mechanism remains under investigation.
5. Compared with substances such as alcohol, opioids, methamphetamine, or cocaine, cannabis carries a lower risk of fatal overdose. However, it can impair memory, coordination, judgment, attention, and may contribute to anxiety, dependence, or psychosis in susceptible individuals. “Healthiest” therefore depends on which risks are being compared.
6. THC tolerance develops because repeated exposure causes adaptations in the brain’s cannabinoid (CB1) receptors. Reducing frequency or dose can help limit tolerance and preserve sensitivity to the drug’s effects.
Ancient History as a Quantum State of Time
We mentioned earlier that the essence of consciousness is history itself. Because consciousness is also biological, meaning that it is part of an organic network and system where the memory of a species is stored and transmitted over long periods of continuous time, history is literally witnessed and perceived by an observer.
These grandiose notions are actually only superfluous if we do not see their physical equivalence or correlations. Then they appear abstract and devoid of substance. But the substance itself is not merely the physical per se; the substance is the form of the physical. The substance is the measure and the effect. Yet we can even have that too—we can have “our pie and eat it too,” as they do not say. We may understand the physical while preserving the rational principle that gives it form.
At a quantum level, the reality we experience is not the objectively comprehensive structure of reality generally. This notion of “at large” is not really speaking about size, as though the largest-scale aggregates constitute the actual full scale of reality.
Reality, as to what reality truly is, is not determined merely by its largest scale. We commonly suppose that what reality is, or how it is, depends upon its greatest magnitude. We say that at the largest scales is all that there is to everything; therefore, that must be how reality is structured.
But the answer is not necessarily the case.
The great progress made in science during the last one hundred years arose from a simple assumption about reality: that if we explored and understood its microscopic, or smallest, scales, we might observe how reality operates fundamentally.¹
Indeed, in this respect the opposite claim became true.
Instead of beginning from the greatest aggregates, science sought the smallest unit aggregates of reality, believing that there one could observe the fundamental operations by which reality exists.
Into this light we go, where matter, at its barest level, is fundamentally composed of photons.²
This purely physical claim is also the denotation of a rational principle.
Light is a faculty of matter, but it is also a faculty in relation to the observer.
Otherwise, light would merely be electromagnetic or ultraviolet radiation. Even then, however, we may still say that these forms exist either for some unknown observer or are at least potentially factors for an observer, just as they are factors within things observed.
If we take the eye itself as an organ, we can actually conclude that the entire structure of reality—the outside world and everything we see—is disclosed by the crystalline sphere.
Reality, at a quantum level, is within a crystalline sphere floating within an organism that is operating within its own conception.
This conception is greater than itself in infinite scale and determination, yet it is always disclosed through its limited conception.
This is not merely metaphorical or abstract, as we ordinarily say, but physically instantiated through the relation between light, perception, and the nervous system.³
Literally, the essence of the objects we observe outside ourselves, no matter how great in scale they are, enters into relation with the eye.
Their size does not determine their quality. Rather, size is itself the measure of some quality in the first place.
The entire universe ultimately ends within the eye, or within the organ of rational perception of the observer.
At the level of photons, the whole known universe extends infinitesimally within the eyes and into the mind.
The mind, to some ultimate degree, keeps the whole in a stable place.
Yet this whole is not limited to a merely subjective field.
Rather, we think in terms that there are many finite agents, and that, in relation to each other, they belong to a greater world within which they are kept.
Without this world, they become isolated and, indeed, could not even exist within the universe to which they belong.
Yet these differences are themselves part of the objective phenomenon that keeps them in place in the first place.
They still belong to this greater reality, so they must be part of it rather than it merely being part of them.
The individual is categorized within a general principle known as the species.
We always find that the smaller is considered part of the greater and not that the greater somehow belongs to each part, for that would appear to make the greater lesser or more finite.
Yet there is another possibility.
The greater whole belongs to each part precisely because each part discloses the whole according to its own measure.
The organism is not merely contained within the universe; the universe is also disclosed within the organism.
Ancient history, therefore, is not simply the chronology of past events but the continuous transmission of consciousness through living forms.
The memory of a species is preserved not merely in written records but biologically, culturally, and rationally.
Each generation inherits a world already conceived before it and, by conceiving it again, extends that history into the future.
History thus exists as a quantum state of time—not because history is literally a quantum mechanical phenomenon, but because every present moment contains the possibility of innumerable past determinations being realized within present consciousness.
The observer does not simply remember history.
The observer is one of history’s present manifestations.
Ancient history therefore survives within the observer as the continuation of consciousness itself.
The past is not behind consciousness but constitutive of it, and the future is not merely ahead of consciousness but implicit within the same conception through which the past continues to disclose itself.
Footnotes
1. Modern physics advanced significantly through the study of microscopic systems, including atoms, electrons, and quantum phenomena. While understanding smaller scales has revealed many fundamental interactions, this does not imply that larger scales are reducible without remainder to microscopic descriptions.
2. Matter is not fundamentally composed solely of photons. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, ordinary matter consists primarily of quarks and electrons, while photons are the quanta of the electromagnetic field that mediate electromagnetic interactions. The philosophical use of “light” here extends beyond its technical physical definition.
3. The eye contains a transparent crystalline lens that focuses incoming light onto the retina. The claim that the external world is “disclosed” by the crystalline sphere is a philosophical interpretation grounded in the biological function of the eye rather than a literal statement that the world exists within the eye itself.
4. Information from the external environment reaches the brain through electromagnetic radiation reflected from objects and detected by retinal photoreceptors. Perception results from neural processing of this information rather than a direct internal duplication of the external world.
5. The notion that the organism discloses the universe rather than merely existing within it parallels themes in phenomenology, process philosophy, and German Idealism, where the relation between observer and world is understood as reciprocal rather than one-directional.
6. The phrase “history as a quantum state of time” is philosophical rather than scientific. It employs the language of quantum theory metaphorically to express the idea that the past remains present as a field of potential determinations within consciousness, rather than referring to an established interpretation of quantum mechanics.
last updated 07.20.2026