John Brodix Merryman Jr.
2 min readAug 8, 2020

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I understand where he is coming from, but I don't think he goes about arguing for it very effectively.

People naturally associate clarity with truth and accuracy, but it is a reductionist point of view, as so much of reality is subtle, fleeting, nuanced and peripherally sensed. So it's like little creatures in the bushes; You go looking for them and they hide.

One aspect of our bias is vision, in that first as monkeys swinging through the branches, than as apes throwing sticks, we have bi-focal vision, that is very good at focusing on detail and judging distance. Consequently we have poor peripheral vision.

Personally I've spent my life raising domestic animals, primarily race horses and a fair number of cattle. As prey animals, they have eyes off to the side of the face, because they need to be very situationally aware. There isn't a lot of heavy duty calculations involved, because the food is growing underfoot and the primary concern is not becoming food. So it's all about senses, not proofs.

Modern humans, especially those making a living using their brains, are often not very physically and situationally aware. Also they deal in information, which has to be distinct, more digital, than analog.

Nature, on the other hand, is analog. The waves are not just nodes carrying the information of frequency and amplitude, but are also pressure and temperature, as they build and recede. Which is what our right brain emotions are about. Sensing that energy that is not clear cut information, but is fuzzy by nature.

Do you experience "floaters?" Those spots and fluctuations in the middle distance of your vision, that are not just thermal fluctuations in the air, but seem to have a life of their own, like insect ghosts?

I realized at a fairly early age they are other levels of consciousness. Everything from other people and animals bubbles of awareness intersecting on my own, to just an ambient sentience bubbling around. When I was a child, I remember laying on the porch, watching this ant, when it stopped and there was this little cone of awareness, waving around with its antennae. I encounter them frequently when I'm driving, as people are naturally focused on the space ahead of them and not overly self conscious about it.

I could go on, but I think an equally interesting discussion is the ways modern science has ignored its own biases and gone way over the deep end in some pretty fantastical theories.

Here is an essay where I try pulling apart a few of these concepts;

https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/the-confessions-of-a-cosmic-heretic-5cd4c044b8ea

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John Brodix Merryman Jr.
John Brodix Merryman Jr.

Written by John Brodix Merryman Jr.

Having an affair with life. It's complicated.

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