It isn’t possible to produce an accurate map of a city while sitting in your living room with your eyes closed, thinking pleasant thoughts about what you wish the city was like. You have to go out, walk through the city, and write lines on paper that correspond to what you see. It happens, in miniature, every time you look down at your shoes to see if your shoelaces are untied. Photons arrive from the Sun, bounce off your shoelaces, strike your retina, are transduced into neural firing frequencies, and are reconstructed by your visual cortex into an activation pattern that is strongly
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