Seeing that we’re seeing without seeing what we’re seeing
by practicalspactical
When we see (to pick one sense out of many) we do not see what is seen but rather see what we see. That is, we do not see the object standing or the events unfolding before us, but rather we see our vision of this object or these events. Our vision is chemical, the intricate workings of soft & spongy clockwork (the eye is not just a gelatinous ball of goop), twisting and turning beneath the “light of other days” — old light, stale, shining down — and somehow this chemical vision produces within our heads the illusion of vision — we think we can see the world — but in truth, we live within our skulls.
Even so, we must accept there is most likely some truth to our visions, that these chemical apparitions summoning the outer world must bear some close correlation with the spatial objects beyond our actual perception — refined into something useful by the generations of competitive dying of which we are the heirs.1
1. Isn’t it strange that we’ve now short-circuited this process by not dying quite so quickly — what does this mean? That natural biological selection has slowed, and that our improvement now lies within our own hands and responsibility.
The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees 
“the eye it not just a gelatinous ball of good” being an anecdote told by my father about a colleague’s medical writing for a book about the eye. The sentence in question is the only thing this writer had.