The Bubble of Perception Part One

The bubble. I know only my own. It’s a small thing really, following me around wherever I go. Sometimes it's like a cloud of cotton, sometimes it's sticky and clingy in all the wrong places like plastic wrap. It used to be invisible, but now I sense it all the time. Borrowing from my favorite bubble author, I’ll call the sensing of this bubble seeing. Where he just italicized it, I’ll also bold it, just in case.

The bubble works for us best and most efficiently when we’re totally unconscious of it. Unfortunately, it also causes immense problems: narrow mindedness, what I call tunnelvision, perfectionism, dogmatism, and a host of human biases that have been dealt with by others elsewhere.

The problem I have with my bubble lately is that it can’t hide very well anymore. At least not all of it. As a result, I’m constantly playing with the edges of it and they are getting quite worn and frayed. Most of the internet argumentation I see online seems to be argument at the edges of our own bubbles and of those we argue with.

I’m of the older cycle and am seeing the newer cycle in my children’s generation. Unlike some other philosophers, I don’t see my view as necessarily superior. It works for me and worked for my time. It is most of the bubble I still carry around.

Castaneda spoke of tearing out of this bubble, but as I’ve said, mostly I’ve succeeded in fraying its edges. True madness has eluded me, which is what it would look like outside the bubble: incoherent shapes and patterns.

Maybe the easiest way to sense your own bubble is to take a textbook or other book on a technical field you know nothing about and attempt to read it. Or even a book in another language. You’ll immediately see the limitations of your own bubble. A way to play with the edges of it is to look up random articles in an encyclopedia. You’ll soon see how tiny your bubble really is.

Most of us spend our lives meandering around our bubble, keeping it tidy and self consistent. This is called sanity.

Continuity isn't the only thing to be concerned about (Part 1)

It is starting to become noticeable. There are periods of time when I seem to be across a continuum. The linear self is beginning to take a backseat to the personhood that is in several places, if only mentally, at one time.

This is not a lot of fun, either. It becomes difficult to keep track of things. The only recourse is to focus in on one thing for as long as I can, at the expense of everything else, because there is just too much else. When I stop and look up, I can see it all around me, the different levels on which things work, the different responsibilities, the different personalities I am capable of wearing.

If all of this seems abstract and hard to visualize, that's because it is. An example: I find that posts I have never made are in my memory on some level as having been made. So I make them. It's sort of the reverse of Alzheimer's. It's as if my short term memory is not functioning on one, but a thousand things at once, and they all get compacted together. What I had for supper last night is lost behind where my keys are and the ten things on my incomplete to do list, and my need to journal my latest observations on continuity:

My latest observations on continuity: It is an illusion. Continuity is an idea that takes infinity and compresses it into every place you look. To assume that finite man could operate on a continuum is gross hubris. We, humans, are painfully discretized beings, only capable of a thin version of continuity. Indeed, we are so impressed with infinity, which is just continuity at the end of things.

We don't think about the mind-numbing case of infinity everywhere and all between. We blank it out. Discrete infinity is child's play next to this, but we get the two confused.

Consider: an infinite lifespan is to us just somewhere out there past our 100+- years, 101 is just as infinite as 1*10exp1000000 if we die at 99.

But continuity implies that every moment is infinite. Yes, it sounds like a trick, but what I'm talking about is the mathematical presence of divisibility completed, throughout one unit and the next. And physically, we are just not capable of that. Even though we work on the nanoscale now, for true continuity, we can just go on breaking things down forever. That is true continuity.It is an asymptote around every corner.

Is this the path that Georg Cantor traveled on his way to madness?