#human perception

We like to believe our eyes are cameras and our brains are recording devices, faithfully capturing the world around us. This comforting idea suggests that what we perceive is simply what’s there — objective, unfiltered reality delivered straight to our consciousness. Yet this assumption about human perception is not just wrong — it’s misleading. The truth is far more fascinating. Perception…

Obviously, personhood is quite an objective thing. Simply “the quality of being a person”. A human. Each human has their own personhood. This realization can lead to magnificent moments of sonder, which is simply the idea that each person is an individual, with lives as intricate as your own. 

Although personhood is quite an objective thing, the complexities that make up each individual’s personhood are very nuanced. This idea, or fact rather, makes up the idea of sonder. It’s important to differentiate sonder (the realization that each person has their own personhood) from the nuances of each person’s personhood. This idea is important because these nuances, complexities, and intricacies make up worldviews and perspectives. 

The perspectives formed as a byproduct of lived experience interpret the world and interpret what beauty is. In the 21st century, our culture is very comfortable with the idea that beauty may be subjective; the things that one person finds beautiful are the result of their unique perspective. This idea of the subjectivity of beauty is a relatively new phenomenon, when even 100 years ago harsh criticisms would be bestowed upon art such as Picasso’s The Blind Guitarist, in which the artist distorts the body of a man playing guitar. 

Numerous philosophers attempted to boil beauty into a formula. Pythagoras famously developed The Golden Ratio (1.618) which solidified the seemingly concrete link between mathematics and beauty, which was seen in symmetry and proportion. This goes back to the idea of aesthetics and conflating beauty with aesthetics. However, aesthetics do not account for lived experiences, complexities, and intricacies. 

The idea of aesthetics is quite objective. You would see a sunset as beautiful and a maggot as ugly. The things that humans find simply aesthetically pleasing go back to the link between mathematics and ‘beauty’. Symmetrical things, proportionate things. Things that make your eyes happy to look at. But beauty is more than aesthetics because your eye is not stripped of your perspective. It is almost impossible to look at something completely objectively without our lived experience influencing the way we view it, in other words bias. 

Bias has a negative connotation, for good reason. Bias can skew the news we read and distort the things we see. However, arguably, bias is one of the characteristics that make us human. The reason why artificial intelligence has bias is because the human data set it derives its output from is biased. Lived experience should influence the way you view the world. Are you even human if it doesn’t? 

It's funny right, like, inherently if you have two colour-accurate displays they look the same, if they don't one of them has fucked up. My previous display was a pretty accurate IPS. Watching some of my Good Demo Videos and like these look great but they look great on anything, they're Arri tech demos they've been scrutinzed and reshot and tweaked to within an inch of their lives.

What I did not count on was contrast. I'm looking at some of the photos I've taken in darker environments and realizing I have a really bad habit of crushing my dark tones in a way that really stands out when black is actually black. I was on a IPS panel before which has okay black levels all told but this is something else. Some of my undergrowth photos from Muir Woods look like I went ham with the contrast slider because the blacks are so deep, I'd be interested to pull some of my demo prints and compare them to this display side by side.

More accurate blacks is probably good for printing, black ink is really dark and that's part of why printed photos look a lot darker than computer screen photos even accounting for the fact that displays are self-illuminating, inks have higher contrast.

Like damn

”It’s a hard thing, achieving perspective — hard for the human animal, pinned as we each are to the dust-mote of spacetime we’ve been allotted, not one of us having chosen where or when to be born, not one of us — not even the most fortunate — destined to live for more than a blink of evolutionary time. It is no wonder, then, that our lens so easily contracts to a pinhole through which the fleeting frights and urgencies of the present stream in to fill the chamber of our complex consciousness with blinding totality.

 Taking the telescopic perspective helps. Trees, especially, help — for they remedy our loss of perspective as Earth’s own telescopes of time and mortality, each of them a perpetual death and yet potentially immortal, each a clockwork portal to the past, each “a little bit of the future.” 

-Wangari Maathai-

“As you scale down these nested finitudes, the question becomes a powerful sieve for priorities — because undergirding it is really the question of what, from among the myriad doable things, you would choose not to do in order to fill the scant allotment of time, be it the 8,760 hours of a year or a single hour, with the experiences that confer upon it maximum aliveness, that radiant vitality filling the basic biological struggle for survival with something more numinous.”

-The Marginalian -