itsbenagain

There is a distinction between saying that the Earth is not a globe and asking a much stranger question: why does a globe arise as the stable form through which consciousness encounters the Earth at all? The distinction matters. The conventional picture treats the globe as an objective geometric fact that exists independently of observation. Consciousness subsequently develops representations of that object. The hypothesis developed here reverses the direction of inquiry. It does not deny the...

There is something strangely precise about the relationship between yellow and purple. In the visible spectrum, yellow occupies a kind of central territory between the blue and red extremes. But purple is different. Purple is not a single spectral wavelength in the way yellow is. It appears through the combination of the far ends of visible light, red and blue, brought together in perception. So yellow and purple form an interesting axis: Yellow: the center. Purple: the union of the extremes....

One of the strangest assumptions we make about time is that the past is a line and the future is a cloud. The past feels singular because we remember only one history. The future feels open because we imagine many possibilities. But I am increasingly convinced that this intuition may be backwards. Take any point in Pascal’s Triangle. There are many paths that can arrive at that point. In fact, the farther down you go, the more histories become compatible with the same outcome. The present...