seeing what you believe

my father shares the following from Layall Watson, Lifetide: The Biology of the Unconscious:

The human eye is limited to events that take place no faster than fifty times a second. This factor, which is known as its critical fusion frequency or CFF, is what determines how we see the world and how we react to what we consider to be objective reality. It is ultimately this which determines the level at which we are conscious.

To take a simple example, a sheet of writing paper has many possible realities. To me it is a featureless rectangle until I begin to scribble on its blank face. But a faster organism with a CFF of less than a thousandth of a second, though it would see my hand crawling painfully slowly, might even be able to pick up the movement of molecules in the paper itself. While a slower being, with a CFF of an hour, wouldn’t be aware of my hand at all, but would each hour on a good day see yet another page instantly and magically filled with a closely reasoned manuscript.

Imagine that instead of a camera filming us from a nearby star, we are being observed by an awesome organism with a CFF equivalent to one earth week. Assuming that it, like us, has divided time into convenient portions about fifty CFF’s long, one stellar second will roughly correspond to each earth year. And if it should in such a second happen to glance at us through some unimaginable telescope, this is what it would see: Earth’s surface would be a blur, because it would be spinning at over three hundred revolutions per second. It would not be spherical, but would look instead like a diffuse cylinder stretched into an ellipse around our sun. And although this sounds paradoxical—you can prove it to your own satisfaction by constructing a simple model—the surface of the earth, the area on which we live, is on the inside of this cylinder.

perhaps this explains why i've been feeling a bit spread out lately? i just see things slower than you. or, er, slower than humanity-at-large.

i can live with that.

slowly.