Seeing With My Eyes Shut
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- Created on Saturday, 08 October 2011 08:35
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What is this all about? Seeing with my eyes shut? Why put this slogan on the web page?
It all started a while ago when I happened across an article of someone complaining that he couldn't see anything when he closed his eyes. My immediate response was, well, no one can and so I wrote back to say just that. I've been trying to find the site where this was being discussed but I can't find the same one. There is plenty of other chatter out there about this topic but not the original site; when I find it I'll post the link here.
Anyway, that first interaction led to another and another and each time that I thought deeply about this topic I found new ideas on how to express it while still with an overall feeling of total inadequacy in being able to describe it with a sense of satisfaction. At about the same time I was reading a book by Dr Daniel Dennett called "Consciousness Explained" and in that book were also many ideas and concepts that I had not really thought deeply about before. This led me to try really hard to describe exactly what experience I had when I closed my eyes and thought of some object. I also tried to describe the experience of consciousness - what is it? Does it have a shape, size? Where exactly is it? It was incredibly difficult to descibe and I have by no means been successful in doing this so far. This article and a companion article - "Consciousness Unexplained" are my notes on the nature of thought processes and consciousness.
Over time, "seeing with my eyes shut" has taken on a broader meaning (for me, that is). Trying to describe the experience of consciousness, of what exactly I saw when my eyes were closed or what a thought really was brought home to me how complex seemingly simple things are when you take time to inspect them closely. Our brains neatly wrap complex things up in a wrapper of simplicity and so we go on living our lives - able to cope with a simplified version of the world. "Seeing with my eyes shut" is a phrase that I use to jog me into looking at things in the world more closely, not letting detail pass me by, observing at all times even when I have my eyes shut.
More to come....