What all this seems to imply is that, sitting in front of my book, I, like al-Haytham before me, do not merely perceive the letters and blank spaces of the words that make up the text. In order to extract a message from that system of black and white signs, I first apprehend the system in an apparently erratic manner, through fickle eyes, and then reconstruct the code of signs through a connecting chain of processing neurons in my brain — a chain that varies according to the nature of the text I’m reading — and imbue that text with something — emotion, physical sentience, intuition, knowledge,
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