Sonar Perception- More Of

For the earlier piece (which one should read before embarking on reading this piece, if interested enough to embark on such as activity) on sonar perception and the translation of this information by ingenious cognitive processes into a visual world existing purely within the mind, perhaps some clarification would be helpful. As said, this sight is not in itself a sense organ, but a codified version of the sensory information which has actually been received by means of sonar; a sense organ, if we call it such, in which the mind body self is a far more active participant in the act of perception of external reality than merely the passive receptor of a visual stream( though this is of course a gross simplification of the far from passive role of the mind in such activities). The auditory neurophysiological mechanisms for echo reception and signal processing, and the computational basis for transforming waveforms of sonar broadcasts and echoes into acoustic images, and in turn into the visual images we 'see', while fascinating, is superfluous to our area of interest here. We do not need to concentrate on the precise mechanisms of the mind involved in the forming of the world of imagined sight. The results of such processes are sufficient, and in any case our understanding of those processes is at best at an embryonic state of development.

So the self acts as a constant transmitter and receiver of an incessant swarm of mental activity, and simultaneously forms an inner visual form of the processed information. But while it is true that the visual world is not 'out there' but 'in here'- a mental creation-, still it should be realised that the visual world or simulacrum is exactly faithful to the sonar information, and so should not be considered to be a fabrication. It is a perfectly faithful rendering of the stream of perception, and we could say that if the world of sight did actually exist, instead of appearing to exist, the world we would see would correspond exactly to the world we think we see.

The act of dreaming, as many readers will have already guessed, is another indication of the true state of play with regard to sight. The waking mind has shut down, the eyes are closed, there is no influx of visual information, and yet the mind continues to produce mental images, just as the body continues to perform the functions of respiration and the flow of blood when in the unconscious state.

Interestingly, William Blake appears to have been fully aware of the reality of all of this, as shown in his Auguries of Innocence: "The bat that flits at close of Eve Has left the brain that won't believe."