YOU SEE, BUT YOU DO NOT OBSERVE...
The quintessential author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his famous Sherlock Holmes series, had his detective, Sherlock Holmes, state to his almost equally famous partner, Dr. Watson, “You see, but you don’t observe!” What were the two, author and protagonist, trying to convey?
Seeing per se is a purely receptive sensory event. To see a ball, is to sense it with one’s eyes. Observing, however, involves consciously knowing that it is a ball with all the ramifications of the experience. It isn’t necessarily “knowing,” as knowing per se means being able to extrapolate what one consciously extracts from an experience to another, typically, different experience. Having said all that, perhaps the best catchphrase for this past four years is Holmes famous sextuplet.
People today are being barraged by requests for their attention. We see perhaps more than any generation before, but in doing so, we have to shut a lot out for fear of frank overload. We see, often because we are obligated to, but we filter out the observation. Perhaps this is most true with traumatic events. Try for just five minutes to keep all the trauma going on in the world today in your mind. I can’t do it for even 20 seconds without stopping. The extent of trauma in this world is simply too great — to overwhelming.
But there is a downside to this protective mechanism, keeping us from falling into the dark mental abyss: what we see becomes subject to mental manipulation and we tend to revert to “lemming behavior.” If one lemming jumps off a cliff, the others seem compelled to follow. At some point one must stop and ask the question “Why?”
That’s the very foundation of SCI-FU (science-based futuring) and my recently released novel, THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor. Stop for just a moment, grab a copy, and enjoy seeing a trio of youths coming-of-age, question “Why?” and then observe the world they inherit.
The Edge of Madness
Why?
Seeing per se is a purely receptive sensory event. To see a ball, is to sense it with one’s eyes. Observing, however, involves consciously knowing that it is a ball with all the ramifications of the experience. It isn’t necessarily “knowing,” as knowing per se means being able to extrapolate what one consciously extracts from an experience to another, typically, different experience. Having said all that, perhaps the best catchphrase for this past four years is Holmes famous sextuplet.
People today are being barraged by requests for their attention. We see perhaps more than any generation before, but in doing so, we have to shut a lot out for fear of frank overload. We see, often because we are obligated to, but we filter out the observation. Perhaps this is most true with traumatic events. Try for just five minutes to keep all the trauma going on in the world today in your mind. I can’t do it for even 20 seconds without stopping. The extent of trauma in this world is simply too great — to overwhelming.
But there is a downside to this protective mechanism, keeping us from falling into the dark mental abyss: what we see becomes subject to mental manipulation and we tend to revert to “lemming behavior.” If one lemming jumps off a cliff, the others seem compelled to follow. At some point one must stop and ask the question “Why?”
That’s the very foundation of SCI-FU (science-based futuring) and my recently released novel, THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor. Stop for just a moment, grab a copy, and enjoy seeing a trio of youths coming-of-age, question “Why?” and then observe the world they inherit.
The Edge of Madness
Why?
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