Everything we see is an image. Different energies are involved: the radiant energy of light: and bio-energies generated by the digestion of food by an organism with some kind of multiple feedback system: mind. Theorizing light has driven us crazy for centuries, though we seem to be getting somewhere. Semiotic epistemology in theorizing imaging makes one thing clear: Whatever is "out there," what we see, what we think, is wholly in our processing of it.
When we’re drunk, we can see double. When we look through a crystal we can see double.
Without careful study, all this business about transverse waves, wave versus particle, interference ... medium ... can be very confusing.
My interest isn’t physics though, but social intelligence. Societies see double all the time: though we can typically "think" only one image at a time. Still: contradictions go together like strawberries and cream.
For the moment what I have to say is mere introductory metaphor. But I intend to construct careful analogies in the near future.
Meantime: Culture puts glasses on its members. (Is society made of individuals? or of something else involving individuals? (Think particle vs. wave.) How does a culture’s glasses handle polarization?
How is it possible for us to imagine that we’re a democracy one moment and to have a Hitler or a Nixon or a Bush the next? How is it possible for us to imagine that we’re Christian, or at least moral, one moment and to napalm little girls the next? Why, if we’re interested in the free flow of ideas, do we fund institutions that man-handle ideas: and fund ONLY such institutions?
There’s a lot to relate here, a lot to resolve. I intend to do it.
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