Through a Glass Concretely

September 21st, 2006 Fred McVittie

It seem likely that the consciousness we have of the world ‘out there’ is not achieved through process of simulation, in which we somehow reproduce an image of the world inside our heads and refer to this image, but rather that the world itself, as presented to the senses, is its own image (Velmans etc). This is not to say however, that we do not produce abstract models of the world, models which are inevitably partial, contingent and purposive. The purposive nature of mental modelling comes from the logic that the ability to produce such models can only have been provided by evolution, and evolutionary parsimony would limit such modelling to the concrete needs of physical survival. Our inability to directly model an image of those elements of the world which are not concrete, which in the complex world of human culture is probably the majority of experience, means that the world is reflected in our mind but the reflection is imperfect. The mirror of consciousness is constructed with ancient tools; embodied cognition and the limited senses that produce it, and these tools cannot model ‘justice’, ‘love’, or any other abstraction literally. The representation we build of the mind through the use of these tools is of a world as seen ‘through a glass darkly’.

Posted in Abstract, Cognition, Mirror, Velmans, Max | No Comments »

Where I’m Looking From

October 29th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Hold a mirror in front of your face. See the face in the mirror. See the eyes in the mirror. Imagine the eyes are your eyes. Imagine the eyes looking out of the mirror. See through the eyes in the mirror. Close your eyes. Imagine seeing through the eyes in the mirror. Move the mirror behind your head. Imagine the eyes that look out of the mirror are now the eyes that look out of your head. Open your eyes. See through the eyes in your head, and through the eyes in the mirror. Imagine your mind is a mirror.

Posted in Exercises, Mind, Mirror, Seeing | No Comments »

Visual Duality

December 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The visual sense (and the visual imagination) has an inbuilt tendency to objectify experience by locating concepts at a remove from the body, thus transforming them into objects, and simultaneously creating a viewing position separate from those objects; the subject which is ourself. Inevitably, our eyesight gives us the impression that our ’self’ is located here, behind the eyes, while the world is ‘out there’, beyond the surface of the skin. The faculty of sight is not therefore conducive to the development of non-duality. Wherever we look we cannot see ourselves and, from this perspective (sic), whilst we may visualise the rest of the world as a unity; a single big picture, we ourselves are not in that picture. Visually, we are not in the world. Mirrors do, of course, provide a visual image of our selves, evidence for our worldly existence, but this evidence is circumstantial, not experiential. We usually do not identify ourselves literally with the reflection, or feel our consciousness to be located behind the mirror.

Posted in Imagination, Mirror, Non-duality, Objectivity, Seeing | No Comments »

Exploding Mirror

November 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Before the beginning was no thing and no thing was before the beginning, and in the beginning was no darkness and no light, and no space for the light to illuminate and for the darkness to consume. There was no time before the beginning and no time for time to be absent from. No skin marked the separation of nothing for there was no separation and nothing to be separated from. There was no zero before the beginning as there was no number to be subtracted from itself to generate such a zero, no one any where, no where, no how, and no asking of any question whatsoever. Nor was there a vacuum, or absence, or silence, or the absence of silence, or the absence of the sound of silence. There was no Simon and Garfunkel before the beginning, no old friends and new friends, no best friends and worst enemies, and the qualities and values of friends and enemies alike were not present. No face moved upon the surface of any water, and there were no dried-up riverbeds to mark the water’s departure, and no departure for the water and the river and the face. No thing, no at, no all. No holes punched in the fabric and no damaged goods requiring the attention of an expert. No thing provided a destination from which something might originate and nothing had the powers of containment from which something might emerge. In the beginning was no ‘in’, and at the beginning was no ‘at’.

The beginning was the beginning of the beginning and the beginning was the beginning of the bang, and the beginning was cracked in the shock of the bang.

The broken beginning was without form but the form that was the break, and nothing was each part of the break other than its similarity to the other part of the break. The two parts of the break were as the parts of a broken mirror in which each reflects the contents only of the other because there can be no other thing to reflect. And there was no difference between the parts of the break save that they were not the other part of the break, and the only contents of each part was the part that was the other.

Posted in Beginning, Darkness, Mirror, Universe | No Comments »