Our brains create the images we see. We know this intellectually, but we have not yet fully absorbed its implications.
Donald Hoffman likens what we see to a desktop interface on a computer. The email file appears as a blue square in the lower right corner of my screen. In truth, the email is neither blue nor square. I am seeing an icon, a representation.
The image may not be literal. But it is not, I believe, arbitrary. The images our brains create are designed to convey information. It is up to us to decode what that information means.
Perhaps we are seeing the same 2D plane in different ways. When we are beneath it, it curves above us. When I am beneath a concave curve, I am seeing too much information.
When we are above it, it curves below us. When I am above a convex curve, I am seeing too little information.
What is “too much information”? Too much information is both outcomes, superimposed. The dead cat and the alive cat, stacked on top of each other.
What is “too little information”? Too little information is either/or. The cat is dead, or the cat is alive.
Both of these perspectives, I believe, are wrong. The truth is neither “both, superimposed” nor “either/or.”
It is “both, parallel.”
The truth is not a purple bunny. Nor is it a red bunny or a blue bunny. It is a red bunny and a blue bunny.
We cannot see parallel worlds.
When we observe the future, do we see more than will be? When we observe the past, do we see less than what was? These are some of the questions I ask in the essay, “Seeing at the Speed of Light.”
When I am behind time, it curves above me. When I am behind time, it is a dome.
When I surpass time, it curves below me. When the universe reaches the speed of light, do we go “over the rainbow”?
“[O]ur observable universe is at the threshold of expanding faster than the speed of light.” ―physicist Lawrence M. Krauss
The following is from the Wikipedia entry for firmament. It’s called the Flammarion engraving.
“The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion‘s L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888). The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond. The caption underneath the engraving (not shown here) translates to “A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet…”
This is why I have called this site Welcome to Heaven.
