Interpreting the World is Seeing the World

Continuing today’s philosophical musings –

“Study reveals individual neurons in the human brain are triggered by the subject’s conscious perception, rather than by the visual stimulus.” (Redorbit).

Through the examination of morphed faces, researchers concluded that only in the act of recognition did neurons actually fire. Subjective perception rather than objective visual stimulus caused the firing.

Professor Rodrigo Quiroga at the University of Leicester then went on to say, “In a sense, the interpretation of this result goes way back to British Empiricism and even to Aristotle. As Aristotle put it, we create images of the external world and use these images rather than the sensory stimulus itself for our thoughts. These neurons encode exactly that.”

Subjective perception… and the power of worldview and our mental models of the world around us.

Ever so subtly the chains that bind

Wrap us in their siren embrace.

And though I see you,

I see you as I see you –
Not as you really are… and rarely your true face.

An Alaskan Tiny House (Part 1)

As my wife and I aged (gracefully, I like to think) out of tent camping, I began looking for an alternative that wouldn’t sacrifice the spirit and feel of the outdoors at the expense of comfort. I didn’t want to tow a trailer as I wanted to be able to camp in more out-of-the-way places than RV parks. The same for a motorhome – in addition to mileage constraints and the expense of gas. Truck campers, meanwhile, had always seemed a bit unwieldy to me.

So I began researching alternatives a year or so ago. My preconceptions were changed, of course. None of my initial thoughts were totally accurate and I developed a personal feel for the pros, and not just the cons, of each type of recreational vehicle. But it wasn’t until I looked at the many versions of pop-up truck campers, trailers and vans that I started to hone in on a solution that seemed to meet our criteria – which not so surprisingly from this side of the search, turned out to be a pop-up truck camper. A four-wheel drive truck might not be a Jeep Rubicon, but it could go most of the places I thought we’d want to go.
Continue reading An Alaskan Tiny House (Part 1)

Dreams they Stack as Prayers

Dreams may rise,

Ethereal as smoke they rise.

They neither scatter nor dissipate,

Nor constrain through rigid form,

But stack, instead, one upon another

Our yearnings toward heaven.

Rarely wall-solid,

Seldom sensible in appearance or use,

They remain precarious in balance, and

They rise.

Fleeting structures,

Half glimpsed longings,

Urgent desires of our nighttime,

Rich compass of our days.

Testing and setting up site

IMG_1431

This is a test of image and text… so maybe a couple of random flower photos are as good an object as any to test a post. If I wanted to be a bit more granular, I guess I could say that they are photos taken at Butchart Gardens on Vancouver Island near Victoria, BC.

IMG_1486

At the next level, I could even say what kind they are…but I’ve forgotten 🙂

My levels of wonder ranged from the beauty of the island to the gardens to these flowers. And could have gone on to petals…to cells…to atoms, and then on to quantum fluff, I suppose.

So if the eye of an observer plays a deterministic role in reality itself at certain levels, then just maybe his wonderment has its own effects across its infinite hierarchy as well…

One rainy night…


Dark mist rising,

Drum beneath a keening sky –

This scent of loam, of leaf, of yearning,

   Of memory’s wail

   And piacular’s cry…

This fragment of verse sprang from a rainy summer evening full of smells, sounds and dark, misty half-glimpses into the surrounding forest. Peering out through shadowy trees, I could have been sitting around a campfire with my Neolithic kin so many thousands of years ago.

The mood became a pensive, quiet centering that gradually gave rise to what I can only think of as one stream of those ancient, primal feelings that seem to lie hidden beneath daytime’s logical, civilized veneer.
Continue reading One rainy night…