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Comment by rficcaglia | Hacker News Reader

Try looking at a Monet painting very close (like leaning over those protective wire barriers at the museum until the guards shoo you away)...it’s a mess of gloppy paint. After awhile you see structure and you can start to build up an understanding of his method in the madness.

Now step back 30 feet...oh, it’s water lilies or a bridge or a willow tree.

The brain is very plastic indeed both in constructing things or interpreting them.

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Ok but how do you know which perspective/interpretation of things is the 'correct' one? Or are all correct and you just have to hold them all in your mind at the same time?

(This is a question I'm struggling with for real right now so if I could get some kind of answer to this it would ease a lot of my brain pressure. I never used to have this problem before I learned how to 'generate' new perspectives by 'thinking with words'. It always used to be just one perspective, just one identity.)

I think that's up to your "human" interpretation of the "correct" one. We can go even further down and say the painting is just a collection of atoms, or further up and say it's just a piece of the museum building it's contained in.

All of them are "true" and "correct", but which one is relevant? That's when you need to start to place things into context, and it wildly varies depending if you're an ant, a human being or a rock.

I don't know Hegel, if there is one thing I know it's that everyone starts talking about him by saying "he's obscure, even by deep-in-the-weeds philosophical standards". BUT I think a lot of his whole thing is to instead of trying to find a 'correct' 'one' you look at the tension between multiple interpretations.

Like Monet: splotches of paint resolve into water lilies but we're not seeing water lilies we're seeing various RGB luminance values from our optic nerves and our brain resolves them to a scene which we again break down into constituent parts, water stems, flowers... and rebuild into water lilies... which we again dissect looking for meaning.

The point then is to look at a perspective as just a point in a greater flux. The flux is the correct 'one' that's where the meaning is.

I'm sure Hegel would slap the taste out of my mouth for that analogy but he's dead and no one else seems to know what he meant either, so I feel safe.

>Ok but how do you know which perspective/interpretation of things is the 'correct' one?

Which one has predictive power?

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