I’ve written about perception before, and I will again, for perceptive mistakes manifest not only in our minds, but in our instruments as well. There is a distinct difference between what we see and what we think we see – one is related to the eye, the other to the brain. We see a myriad of colours and lines, our brains try to make sense of the giant jigsaw puzzle by comparing known objects and shapes, or their appearance at the very least, to the patterns it finds in the signals from our receptors in our eyes. What we perceive is the interpretation of these patterns. But neither our mind nor our eyes are perfect, this is painfully obvious.
“Daniel saw in a way he’d never seen anything before: his mind was a homunculus squatting in the middle of his skull, peering out through good but imperfect telescopes and listening-horns, gathering observations that had been distorted along the way, as a lens put chromatic aberrations into all the light that passed through it. A man who peered out at the world through a telescope would assume that the aberration was real, that the stars actually looked like that—what false assumptions, then, had natural philosophers been making about the evidence of their senses, until last night? Sitting in the gaudy radiance of those windows hearing the organ play and the choir sing, his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.”
- “Quicksilver” by Neal Stephenson
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