Aid Perception
Perception, whether sensory perception or perception in general, is conditioned
by many things, including: expectation; training; previous experiences; goals
and motivations associated with perceptual acts and activity; sophistication about
the various types of illusion that exist and about ways to avoid them; perceptual
methods and devices that may perhaps be made use of; capacity to assimilate what
is perceived and to make room for further perceptions; logical analysis, synthesis,
and imagination that may accompany simple perception.
It is profoundly true that we see what we expect to see, Ideonomy can reveal that
human perceptual expectations and habits are really embarrassingly limited and
orthodox, because in fact there is so much more to perceive, discover, and contemplate
in experience and as the structure of reality and possibility. It can not only
show that this is so, but train or retrain the mind to seek out, apprehend, and
exploit this far greater magnitude of things. Indeed, it may even make us aware
that physicomental reality forever opens out and has no absolute limits whatsoever.
It is a great irony that perception acts as a barrier to further perception, that
what we see blocks our sight of anything else. This, too, is a problem that ideonomy
can relieve, by defining more precisely and explicitly what it is that we see,
and the interrelation of what we have already seen to characterizable immensities
beyond it.
Ideonomic technology, or technology based on ideonomy, can be designed with a
fantastic power to transcend the boundaries of normal sensory, motor, and mental
experience, to remake, transform, and clarify experience, and to provide wholly
artificial experiences.
To give insight into experience its basic dimensions, ranges, quantities, formulas,
entities, relationships, processes, events, phenomena, data, structures, etc,
must all be discovered, investigated, and characterized.
Technology that enabled man to systematically and exhaustively manipulate all
of these aspects and bases of experience could ultimately revolutionize his perceptual
faculty. He might as a result learn of the existence of unsuspected forms of order,
patterns of events, laws of causation, levels of being, significances of occurrences,
etc. He might gain greater understanding of his own nature. He might suddenly
find himself able to cultivate new forms of logic and intelligence. And over time
the sum diversity of the human race might be increased immeasurably.
Describe the Present
To any honest person the fundamental nature of the present, of that unique moment
dividing all past from all future time, stands as an enigma. The now is
immensely important, it is almost synonymous with being and becoming, it imprisons
us, and yet at bottom it is strange, unknown, and seemingly contradictory.
Is the present relative or absolute? Is it truly singular or is it plural? Is
it simple or complex? Has it one level or levels that are multiple or innumerable?
Has it finite, infinitesimal, or infinite temporal duration or spatial range or
richness of content or structure? Is it in itself static or does it evolve, and
if it evolves, is its capacity for such development limited or unlimited? Has
it a discrete edge or does it merely degrade into a continuum? Is it altogether
free of the past and future, or do past, present, and future in some degree, sense,
or way coexist?
Such questions are not purely philosophical; they harry physicist, neuropsychologist,
mathematician, and logician. But of course the real problem is the nature of time.
The systematic study, development, and exploitation of the present has merely
begun, and such endeavor has only recently shown signs of acquiring a scientific
footing.
It is crucial that interest in the present not be divorced from interest in history,
the future, and eternity; their proper interrelation is not merely supplementary
but complementary, for each is logically subservient to some greater and transcendent whole.
The reasons for studying the present are diverse and include: The need
to inventory resources; The importance of anticipating problems, and of excluding
problems at or before their birth; The wish to recognize fresh opportunities;
The intellectual and experiential fascination of the present (of its novelty,
scope, detail, structure); The immediate challenge of the present; The infinite
possibilities and consequences of the present; The value of the present as a mirror,
analog, and model whereby to study moments past or future that are otherwise necessarily
inaccessible and conjectural; To discover its fundamental and transcendental processes,
phenomena, and laws; To completely explore and map its topography; To improve
our technology and methodology for responding to and operating within the present;
To expel false notions about the present; To better know the boundary between
the past, present, and future; To ascertain what is no longer true, actual, or
possible; To enlarge and enrich the present; To evaluate and criticize the present,
or describe its virtues, defects, limitations, and errors; To intensify
human awareness of and about the present; The need and opportunity to understand
oneself, and all that pertains to oneself, better; Etc.
More specifically: Business wishes to know about public trends, fads, and
fashions; Scientists need to know what other scientists know, believe or no longer
believe, reason, have need of, and are doing; Those who govern need to keep abreast
of the state of society and of changes in public attitudes, opinions, needs, and
wishes; We all have reason to know of and be exposed to the richness of contemporary
culture, both locally and universally; Meteorologists need to monitor the instantaneous
conditions and variations of the atmosphere planet-wide; Particle physicists are
interested in simultaneous and sequential events whose 'present' is a trillionth-of-a-trillionth
ours; One's physician would like to know as much as possible about one's body
at the time he examines us or from moment-to- moment across our lives; A teacher
in a classroom needs to know about the instantaneous knowledge, ignorance, thoughts,
errors, questions, needs, understanding, and interests of her students, individually
and collectively; A microbiologist may need to know about the coinstantaneous
status or interaction of two or more different biochemical pathways or organelles
within a unicellular individual; Cosmologists are desirous of discovering epochal
correlations over the sky of galaxies visible at the same Hubble distance and
time; Future developers and users of massively parallel computers will want to
know with exactitude the simultaneous relative states of all their computer's
parts and 'computations'; During a concert every member of the orchestra needs
to know what every other member of the orchestra sounds like at the same instant,
to enable the organic coordination and coevolution of all of the parts of the
composition being performed--mostly via a massive number of nearly instantaneous
unconscious intercommunications among the assembled musicians (it may be conjectured);
An archeologist may seek to discover the totality of climatic, geologic, botanical,
economic, technologic, linguistic, social, political, religious, and other factors
that concreated the 'historical present' of some extinct civilization; And so
on.