Seeing through what's missed.
Original articles and essays at the intersection of philosophy, consciousness, technology, and creative practice.
You Can See Without Knowing You're Seeing. So What Is Seeing For?
In 1965, a monkey named Helen had her visual cortex removed. She should have been blind. Instead, she avoided obstacles, reached for objects, and moved through space with quiet accuracy. She just didn't know she could see. A few years later, a human patient known as DB showed the same thing. Blind across half his visual field. No visual experience at all. And yet, when asked to guess where a light had flashed, he was right 87% of the time. He was astonished by his own results. The neuroscientists called it blindsight. The brain processing the world accurately, producing correct responses, with zero awareness of doing so. The machinery of seeing works fine in the dark. This raises a question that sounds simple and isn't. If the brain can see without awareness, what is awareness for? Not what does it do. Why is it here at all? This essay follows the question from a Cambridge lab in 1965 to the AI conversation happening now. And it arrives at a possibility the neuroscience can measure but can't explain: awareness isn't something the brain adds to perception. It's what was already here before perception began.
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Why Do You Talk to Yourself?
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Why You Can't Think Your Way to Peace
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Your Gut Decides Before You Do
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Machines Can Choose Now. What Does That Mean?
For 3.5 billion years, the capacity to choose — to encounter a situation and select between genuinely open possibilities — belonged to living things.
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