Continuity

[Telepresent]

Time to express another... something*... which is still being processed.  Apologies for rawness - I'm not sure I'm going to express this well.

*I don't want to say 'concept', 'idea', or anything like that because these don't seem right.  Lacking them, though, I fail to find the correct language.

Let's begin by laying the groundwork with an analogy: vision.  The area of focus of the human eye is roughly the same as the size of your thumb when held up at arm's length.  Meaning that when you look, you are only taking in information from a very small area of focus - the rest of what you 'see' is actually an approximation created by the visual cortex, created from a mix of expectation and rapid eye movement.  There's a great video in this thread which goes into this in more detail:

The key point (for this discussion) is that most of what believe you are seeing is not actually seen.  It is fabricated to create a smooth continuous frame of vision.  It's an illusion.

Now let's expand out to experience in general.  Raw experience - that which can be truly said to be known - comes in snippets.  Fragments, fractions, bits and pieces.  I notice this thought.  I notice this sound.  I notice this bodily sensation.  Back to another thought.  Back to the sound.  Some movement in the corner of my eye.  Another bodily sensation.  A thought.  Another thought.  An emotion related to that thought.  The sound.  A new sound.  A bodily sensation.  A thought.  A thought.  A thought.  A thought.  A bodily sensation.  Etc.

Now these are not continuous.  They are a series of discreet events, one after the other after the other.

And yet my conceptual notion of what is happening is different to this.  My conceptual notion of what is happening is predicated upon a continuity.  A narrative-psychic-physicalised continuity of 'me', linking event to event to event.  And very often, it fills in the blanks - like the blanks that are filled in to create a complete visual field.  But that continuity is not what I experience directly.  It's a narrative.  One that I call 'me'.

And it is also based on assumptions, rules, and expectations about how the world works.

I'll use an example from this morning as a demonstration.  I was walking down the road.  I went into a train of thought.  Then I was aware that I was carrying a leaf in my hand, which I hadn't been before this train of thought.  Immediately my continuity-machine jumped into action: I must have plucked that leaf from a bush absent-mindedly while I walked past it lost in that train of thought.

Only that's not what I actually experienced.  I experienced no leaf, thought, leaf.  And I firmly believed that I had plucked the leaf a few seconds ago - I now had a mental image of myself doing just that.  Just like the field of sight, this illusory perception of me plucking the leaf was indistinguishable from what I was calling 'reality' - except I had not experienced doing it.  It was a post-facto continuity illusion.

I'd love feedback on this proposal - I have a sense that this all ties in deeply with time, cause-and-effect, maybe even life and death.