At 07:47 PM 8/21/2012, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson wrote:
Humans are very good a filling in the dots. I suspect the ability to interpret (and particularly to extrapolate) ones immediate surroundings was probably a very good survival trait in which to pass on from generation to generation. When one is peering through thick foliage and wondering if those odd looking black and orange vertical strips might belong to a tiger, or not your progeny will thank you, if youre lucky enuf to have any.
Yes. It's a blessing and a curse. "The human being is a meaning-making machine." We are quite good at it. The fly in the ointment comes when we believe that the intepretations we invent are real. They are *useful*, sometimes, but they aren't real. A collection of pixels is a collection of pixels. It is not the thing portrayed, it is neither true nor false, it is what it is.
