The Blind Spot

There is one place in our field of vision where we are blind, due to the "Rube Goldberg" design of our eyes. Octopuses have better eyes (presumably "designed" by a more skilful God, but don't get me started). Even though there is a patch of our retina devoted to passing the optical nerve through the retina, we don't "see" the hole. Our brains paint it over with what "ought" to be there.

We are born with another huge blind spot. We have a full, 360 degree view of the world, in which we are free to explore and move around, but at the very centre is a hollow hole. We seem to be peering out of the hole but cannot see inside. We know that what is really inside this hole is 3 pounds of gooey meat that is somehow responsible for everything we see, but, just like the optic nerve that penetrates our retina, this bundle of nerves thoroughly hides its presence.

We are all like this, all looking out from hollow heads. It is incredibly difficult to speak of this inner void. Language is based on analogy and there is nothing "like" being conscious. All we can do is talk around it, circling it like a black hole whose mysterious interior is forever beyond what we can say about the world

This was Carl Jung's method. You can read all of his writings about the workings of the mind and come out with a feeling that something has been said, but really, he just wanders round and round the "black hole". Hofstader, in "I Am a Strange Loop", does exactly the same thing. Hofstader comes closer to Jung by being an articulate witness to the phenomenon of consciousness from a first person viewpoint. Even so, we must still await some brilliant experiment that allows us to see and feel how brains create the "hollow head" effect.

In my own experience, I have had hints that mindfulness meditation may provide such a glimpse. Zen maintains that I don't have thoughts and sensations, I am thoughts and sensations. It is one thing o accept this idea, it is another to experience it. This seems to lay he groundwork for the ultimate vision of myself as I am "really" embedded in the world.

Even so, it must be said that such an experience, while enlightening and fascinating, may not have any more practical impact that verifying the existence of my ocular blind spot. After all, my brain has evolved over millions of years to hide this detail of perception from me. For everyday purposes, I can probably get away with knowing I have a brain and that the "hollow head" illusion is just the way my brain operates.