Allan mentioned that there might be nothing in the mirror to see. Self-recognition in this sense has long been thought specifically human, though chimps can do it. In many ways we live in a smoke and mirror society of personal image without depth. Advertising seems a classic example. Who would want to be an image in this wider mirror? Gabby said a little on the individual sums of history that make the present - very Feynman in my reading. No one is stronger than the man who can harness his emotion and his past - very military terminology leading to singing one's own death song and dying like a hero. We have our own fundamentalist nonsense. Good self knowledge is easily perverted to Attic tragedy. This is presumably not what Gabby meant, yet the way most of our literature has gone, along with the bubbles of soap. There are many mirrors in our society that do not reflect to direct perception.
Mirrors, in a wider scientific sense, collect the signal in the noise. Sometimes the noise is the signal. Society seems to have mirrors collecting information and sending out something completely other than data, a form of extra-somatic mind control. There may be good reasons not to see oneself reflected in this. Tin foil hats don't seem to help. The skin reflected in the real mirror is more of a block to any real image of what we are. We reflect what is being decided outside self, rather than form internal identity in the sense of subjectivity. The machine is already with us. Consciousness in important ways is no longer human, but more like an extra-somatic hall of mirrors. -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
