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Sophie F's picture

That our sight literally

That our sight literally limits our ability to perceive the world in its entirety makes sense. Were we to have heightened awareness, through visual acuity, this may serve to overwhelm the nervous system and limit us in other ways. If any one sense were heightened over the others, would this make the world around us, our perceptions, more “real?” I would tend to think not, as “real” is only a best “guess,” a piecing together of diverse and simultaneous input to create a tapestry that is “reality.” It seems there is no one, uniform reality, as such. Given the variance in human perception. This seems, in some way, to reconcile the continuum of human behavior in that disparate realities generate disparate behaviors. Are people with autism, who experience heightened sensory perception, hindered by this ability?

Is the I-function, therefore, as Dickinson suggested, a part of the vast possibility that is human reality-generation and behavior? Perhaps the I-function serves to mediate between the nervous system as it pieces together visual stimuli and enables us give shape and texture in the emotional, not literal sense, to what it is that we are seeing. How things that we see make us feel and about what we think upon seeing certain visual cues. Is this the realm of the I-function? The I-function must also work in concert with parts of the nervous system to recall previous experiences and how what we are seeing is in some way a pattern, which can be related to something we have seen in the past. And, so we return to the nervous system’s looping mechanisms. And while we do “see” without the I-function, the I-function may somehow personalize the experience of sight and give it context, layers and meaning beyond the mere physical “reality” of sight.

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