Quote: Originally Posted by Continuum Hard lines only exist in concept, everything is shades of grey. We have a tendency to see things in black and white because of our ability to interpret patterns. This ability is what allowed us to evolve past our very early ancestors, but it's an illusion. illusion? continue I look at it like the static on a t.v. When I look at it for what it is there is only black and white, but throw in that crazy scrambling and I mostly see grey. So in reality there is only the black and white but there is an illusion of grey.
It's a very useful illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. The reason our ancestors were able to evolve is because they were able to survive, and the reason they were able to survive was because they were able to discern patterns. Predator/prey, seasons, hot and cold, good and bad to eat, dangerous and safe. None of those things are really separated to such an extent in nature, but it's useful to survival to divide things up like that, because you end up with the extremes of either spectrum. For example, when deciding which berries to eat, if you split them up into 'these ones are bad, and these other ones are good', you end up eating the best berries and staying away from the most deadly ones. But it's an illusion, all the way down to the lowest level. In reality there are lots of different berries, some better than others, and some less or more dangerous than others, but there's a wide spectrum of them to eat. There exists no line between your desk and the air surrounding it, you just have to look close enough to see where it blurs. If you had a powerful enough microscope, you could look very closely at the edge of your desk, close enough to see the atoms that make up both the air and the desk, you would see that they aren't different from one another, only a slight difference in arrangement. The electrons in the atoms that make up the air mingle with the electrons that make up the atoms that make up the table. Every animal has the ability to see patterns, to some extent. Predators know the eating and migration patterns of their prey, some animals know when to migrate, and when to hibernate. My contention is that the only thing that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is that our patternicity is very advanced. Our ability to see patterns goes so far as to apply it to abstract things like mathematics, language, morality and art. We catalog our history, we fold our clothes and separate them into drawers. We organize all life on the planet into complex charts with species and families. We've organized ourselves onto living in squarish houses on squarish blocks in squarish cities. Even our art belies this tendency to organize and patternize. We like things to make sense, to be symmetrical. We assign meaning, either to our own are or to art we see or hear. Our music is organized into elaborate categories. Drum beats keep time, organized patterns of sound, that's all music is. There are millions more examples, in every facet of human life. Even this post, I'm making the claim that some things are real, and some are illusions.
You my friend are one very intelligent person. I think that its also possible that as humans we might not possess the ability to percieve through certain illusions if for what they really might be.
you can use the example of the tv when its static. black and white lines. but think of light, and how it reflects off of things like a brown shirt and white shirt. its all perception, which is _____
This thread is from 03. Black, white, grey? Haha. We've advanced past those timely insignificant concepts!
no frozen lemonade rules get a tall plastic cup, like the hard kind.. , then fill it up with lemonade, put it in the freezer, give it like24 hours. get a spoon . enjoy
it is what you make it. situations for me demand black and white thinking, other times you need to dip in the grey to get a better understanding of things. one or the other is just stupid, impossible to grasp the full idea if your only doing one or the other.