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May 2021 
 

. Zero Sensation  

 
Part One 
 

Take off all your clothes. 

When I say take 'em off, I mean in your mind. We know how to do that already, except this time it's yourself. I do not mean for you to visualize. Many of us are not familiar enough with ourselves to get it right. Just imagine adding the feeling of being undressed to the other feelings you're having right now like being warm or cold or hungry… unless you've tuned yourself out. Our minds can be too busy to remember that we're dressed. However, the sudden absence of a slight weight on the shoulders or the regular tickle of a collar would demand attention. 

Any normally clothed situation that you can imagine yourself in will seem different if you're naked. We can remember and cite the last time we were naked and probably the time before that. It is as if our place in reality has changed and is presenting sudden primal priorities like finding a robe or a towel. Raising nudity is a handy way to open a discussion about the ambient sensations of being a human. 

By zeroing in on these sensations, and imagining zeroing them out of our experience, we can consider what might be left that we could call the zero sensation. Is there any feeling that we would never want to tune out? One that never bothered us or caused anxiety or any feeling of captivity? When we want to get away from it all, which is the bit we want to take with us? Is there a state of zero sensation? It is reasonable to suspect that any answer offered here will be no. However, there are many grim ramifications in holding any opinion about it. They need to be fully uncovered. 

Getting back to nudity, it makes humans unique. What sort of climate are we designed to be exposed to? If you could choose anywhere on earth to live without clothes, would there be enough room for everybody? Obviously, there was until we started to dress-up. Few have pressed for a solid explanation. The standard explanation is that we migrated into cold climates that we were not born to endure. If that is so, it does not explain our modern habits. If our hi-tech climate-controlled homes could eliminate a physical or environmental need for clothes, would folks still wear them? What about a church or the mall filled with air that is ideal for humans as is? Why do folks go to the mall to buy special revealing clothes that remind them of nudity without the inconvenience of nudity? When did nudity first become a distinct sensation and for whom? Consider the traditional explanation… 

Religious folks say that fashion started with fig leaves because shame and not shivers was imposed upon us. I do not recommend religion but from a trioon perspective, the tales in Genesis are surprisingly inventive and deserve a little more intellectual courtesy than the average resentful atheist is willing to grant. The Eden tale deserves to be brought up if only because it is one of the earliest examples of anyone making a big deal out of nudity or describing it as a feeling. For those who, like myself, would rather accept that humans descended from a much earlier and much hairier sort of people known as hominids, all that is left to question is how much impact was felt by those who lived through the arrival of nudity in the form of diminishing hairiness. And, what impact if any it has on our current ambient sensations. The answers, if any, should be useful in nailing down the zero sensation. 

Did our burly blanket of pleasingly groom-able hair slowly fade until forgotten allowing us to adjust in unnoticed increments? Or did Nature cause it to happen fast enough to throw social skills that we honed over eons into chaos? Consider the possible complications if, by some natural circumstance, the change had happened relatively quickly. 

It has been posited that there was a long stretch of our evolutionary past when much of Africa was submerged and subdivided by water. During this alleged period, our ancestors spent so much time in the water that their hair thinned to nearly zero coverage. Even if considered only a theory, the notion is revealing. Similarly, the Bible may be telling us about the Barber of Eden. As primates, we developed our physical expressiveness or body-english and our sex cues to transmit effectively through a muffler of hair. Be it water levels or not, there was some sort of hair-razing and specie-wide experience, after which their descendents were all shouting their signals at each other. When the water receded, we were driven out of the Puddle of Eden. Shame could be our brains' way of recovering our hair or at least, the ambient feeling of hair. The social practice of grooming soon gave way to the Restraining Order. 

The point is, a state of au natural may not, in our case, be as natural as we au to assume. The ambient feeling of nudity or being submerged or being dressed may all involve ancient baggage and a muddle of unresolved identity issues. There is no need for this examination to further address this bundling of baggage beyond pointing out how complicated the task of rounding up our ambient sensations will be. The more we think about how and what we feel, the more feelings we will have to think about as part of the reason we think we are here. If we can spot them all, as in noticing ourselves feeling them ambient-ly, we can then use the knowledge and understanding of our sensations to deconstruct and expose what makes up our knowledge and understanding of ourselves. We can hope that what we think we are will be useful in exploring what we are and how we are it. 

Many folks have certain priorities that must be met before any conceptual construction of themselves can begin. Most of these priorities make any personal exploration useless because all the interesting questions are pre-answered. Questions like, who owns what? who's responsible? and who answers for which? If our knowledge of ourselves starts with having a soul, then we already have a recipient to whom all sensation is delivered and absorbed and consumed. The answer to the zero sensation would be a foregone conclusion. A soul can be the zero sensation because there would always be the sensation of having a soul when all other sensations ceased. What would be the point of a soul unless having one or being one offered some signal of your possession? A soul can be an irreducible sensation that consumes neither time nor space. It can easily fit through the cracks in any physical structure and, once no longer distracted by sensations of the physical world, a soul is free to sense the ambiance of the ethereal world or a rewarding afterlife or have another go at a different human life. It is a happy answer with clear consequences for any examination of ourselves. Hopeful soul-possessors are not alone in bringing test-tainting priorities to the examination. 

It is my observation that even those who reject the soul, including the most outspoken sciencie atheist types, still maintain the conceptual box that held the conceptual soul. It is an unnoticed expectation and a hurdle that could be as challenging to get over as the soul. The only way to point it out is by excluding everything else and revealing it as the need that need never be satisfied. Like the soul, it is a priority that will shape the examination for those who hold to it. It enables a soul even without a presumption of possessing one. The trioon scheme shows how it could not have any further or necessary purpose. Many Brand X schemes will make the same case but not with the hard structural layout provided by trioonity that makes the soul and its box plainly impossible to possess. 

Many will already observe that all this is playing footsie with the concept of a self. Having one of these is less of a commitment than a soul because a self isn't necessarily immortal or need to have sprung from a primordial source. Many find continuing to believe they have one is a useful part of their life even while accepting it as an illusion or projection or a shadow on a cave wall. If asked to consider what a zero sensation might be, many would figure that it was a more real and separate feeling from a sense of self. Long before the internet, roving gangs of No-Self-ers would hound and berate these well-intentioned folks for hours that none of us will ever see again. Any prevailing explanatory scheme will have to account for the illusion either by dismissing it out of hand or by describing what it is composed of and why some folks insist that it has to go away. 

This examination will proceed without priorities. Any hope for the soul or the self will have to be found at the end of the exam. I intend to avoid the pre-material altogether. I'm sure quarks and quantum fields play a role in our material existence but none of that will need to be considered to complete the exam. No attempt to explain how sensations arise will be made. Most of us have no idea at all how sensations happen but we know what they are like. That is the only context needed for this exam since the target is knowledge of a sensation that no one can both have and know what it is like. 

This exercise can start by focusing on ambient sensations that are a continuous feeling. When relaxed, few of us would say that we are feeling relaxed over and over again as the seconds tick by. No one would pitch a vacation plan as a jack-hammer of relaxation. We would say we are just as relaxed now as we were a minute ago. If we can exclude one by one any ongoing sensation of this and sensation of that, would it reveal a basic sensation that wasn't of anything except our own personal ambient identity?… a demonstration to and for and from ourselves… a quiet still-point that everything else can easily drown out? Never mind the mystical stuff… does physicality have an idle or minimum rev level? Even if only one single person volunteered for the experiment, the results could inform everybody. That is no problem because this is a conceptual exercise and we can use an imaginary volunteer. 

Our first task is to determine which of the volunteer's sensations can be eliminated by external efforts and which ones must rely on the volunteer's own efforts to ignore. Then we can imagine what those efforts must include until cutting to the core and seeing what's left of the test subject. We need a sensory-depriving environment. 

To provide a helpful start, the imaginary volunteer has been fed a nice omelet and placed in a dark and climate-controlled anechoic chamber that is contained in box ready to drop into free-fall from a weather balloon. The nudity issue will be compromised or averaged-out by dressing the subject in revealing bedroom attire. The only on-board source of stimulation is a tiny speaker through which suggestions can be whispered to the subject about what still needs to be zeroed out. 

A state of anxiety is high on the list. To eliminate the sensation of worry, the subject has just recently received a tax refund, a healthy check-up, a private eye's report documenting spousal faithfulness and a Presidential Pardon. To compensate for any extra pressure that might put on the subject to feel irrepressibly secure or happy, some moderately bad news was delivered. 

An undeniable part of how we know we are here is worry and dread and a whole spectrum of feelings that could be called ambient anticipation. Some of that is built into our senses. We can put ourselves in a silent space but we are still ready to hear. In total darkness, we remain ready to see. We have vessels of sensation on alert that report the silence and darkness. Having empty vessels of sensation never makes us question our existence. We say we don't know where we are and scramble to find out. This should be the next item for exclusion. Not looking forward will be the hardest part of the task. 

The task of excluding starts after observing some stark differences in our physical senses. A total absence of aroma does not set us scrambling to fill in the aromatic blankness. Taste, touch and smell are ready to respond to stimulation. Until such time that they do, there is no report of an empty sense. Vision and hearing have been selected for an extra alertness that excludes the other three. This was demonstrated early on inside the test chamber by our volunteer. 

When our test subject was loaded into the adult-sized bouncy-chair inside the chamber, the subject reported a need to acclimate to the darkness and silence but there was no mention of the scent-free atmosphere. Once the test got underway, some dampness in the bouncy-chair was reported but the loudest complaint was of being freaked out by the darkness and how the chamber swallowed the sound of screaming. After several minutes, the subject regained a grip on reality and began carrying out the task of zeroing it out. 

There are already a couple of observations we can make about the exam. There is no darkness inside the chamber. Nor is there any silence inside the chamber. If our vision is stimulated exclusively by light, how do we see darkness and with what? 

The short answer is that darkness is part of our vision. The correct answer is that darkness is any part of our field of view that is not informed by sensing any light. That need not be an absence of light. Our field of photon sensors work as a cooperative. In some circumstances, levels of light below a triggered threshold will be visually ignored and replaced in the field of view with darkness. That's worth mentioning because the field of view is supplied with darkness. 

The field of view is a seemingly geometrical presentation that relies on many accommodating distortions. When we observe the blind spot in our field of view, we can see that our sensation of a visual field of view is not entirely a reliable source of geometric information. That's fine because our vision has already harvested any useful geo-info.

Can you picture the test subject in the bouncy-chair? Can you picture the chamber falling from a sky? Can you picture the darkness inside the chamber? Can you picture your field of view as you're looking at things? Anyone who knows what a picture is or knows what the word picture refers to, should answer yes to all. Anyone would say that our ability to visualize and our vision are two different things. We can picture stuff. We can look at stuff. Can the two work together? What happens when we visualize what we are looking at? 

All that is being suggested is that there are two ways that we can apply our attention to our field of view. Our field of view can appear naked and un-pictured while we picture or visualize something else. If we picture what we are looking at, the picture matches our field of view. However, if compared to our naked vision, the picture is never more than a scanty veil of selected information in the visual field. It is as if our vision now appears in revealing bedroom attire. The picture reminds us of our view without being our view. It is a dressed-up reality pretending to be a naked reality. 

These are two distinct ways of harvesting our visual ability. There is the harvesting of what our brains must know in order to produce a visual field of view and there is what our brains can know or learn because we have a field of view. 

If I'm tracking a ball in flight in hopes of catching it, my brain is not going to examine my field of view to determine which way to step or move my arms or even where to point my eyes. Our brains use incoming light patterns for navigation, tracking with depth, muscular control and EYEBALL steering all without the aid of vision but rather within the process of vision. Why would our brains wait until we processed a composite visual sensation and then extracted info from it to track the ball? The aiming of OUR EYEBALLS, the weight of our posture and our estimate of the trajectory are already telling our arms and legs what to do. At the moment it is happening, the tracking of the ball is the visual sensation. Seeing it in the visual field may be entirely superfluous to the task. Some who report having no visual field at all can still perform some visual tasks like catching a ball. 

Even with a visual field, it is best left to our pre-visual-field processes to manage the catch. Training to be good at it requires muscle memory and ingrained responses that do not need to be told what to do while doing it. While the ball in flight is what is seen, it is best to be a spectator about that. Leave it to the process or, the part of you that was designed to handle it. Some would say leave it to your auto-pilot. Some describe submerging into the process and being, for a time, nothing more than the part that can handle the immediate task at hand. 

Using the term auto-pilot is a problem in that it also suggests a sort of soul-compartment if only inadvertently. It is an airplane metaphor, so what exactly is an auto-pilot in an airplane? It has many parts like sensors, actuators, pumps and data processing hubs and more. The point is, none of its parts are an auto-pilot. None of the parts, whatever the job, has any cognition that there is an airplane to sustain in flight. Even its controlling computer with its cognition of sensor signals, data coordinating and output commands, has no cognition of its task of keeping a plane in the air. The computer may also provide a coordinated information display that spells out precisely what it is doing but it has no way to learn from the display or draw any conclusions about what it shows. That there is an auto-pilot at work is a spectator's perspective. 

That makes the device itself a machine that performs auto-piloting and not an auto-pilot. The verb piloting is applicable but the noun pilot is not. Seeing it as a pilot can only come from another point of view beyond the machine itself. 

When we use the term auto-pilot to describe something we do like catching a fly-ball, the same logic should be applied. No part of our physicality is a ball-catcher. If the ball is caught, that is was is a spectator's perspective. Unlike the airplane, folks who engage in ball-catching report a broad range of sensations occurring during the activity. In our case, all those feelings can inform one report after the event (just ask them). Asking the airplane if it enjoyed the flight is silly. How can we make the airplane more like us? 

Imagine granting the airplane our notion of being alive. Every minute function or flap moment of the plane presents a feeling that could, after landing, inform a report about the flight. The second part (the report) does not seem possible for an airplane without a second imaginary granting. The first one is easy. Folks like to believe that inanimate objects experience localized feelings like a pounding fist or a soft caress. We can entertain the idea of an airplane having a sensation of rudder-ing in its rudder or a feeling of the breeze over its wings or of the sudden sting in its tires at touchdown. How about hunger-grumbles in its fuel tank? Or feeling bloated with cabin-pressure? No problem. It's entertaining and helps us cope with pesky objects but there is a limit to this playful grant. Any report about "how was the flight?" would have to come from a spectator inside the airplane. That could be imagined as an occupant-being riding along inside or some sort of mentality that lives in the cockpit but either of those are superfluous to being an airplane or carrying out the flight. With one exception… 

We've all seen airplanes depicted in cartoons. There are two approaches. A plane can be depicted as a lifeless machine by rendering it faithfully or, the plane can be a living character with an inner self by drawing a pair of EYEBALLS on it. This works for any machine. No matter how animated or active an object is, it is not a living character until it has eyes and maybe ears. Give it a nose, and it is just an object or a machine with a smell sensor. Most often, a cartoon nose's only purpose is as a beacon indicating where the cartoon eyes are. If a large slab of rock were given a tongue and a crevice-like mouth, the only quality of life we could grant it is that of a mindless plant that wants to eat me out of blind instinct. Give anything ears and it is listening. Give it eyes and it can see you. Eyes indicate ownership of a field of view and that somebody has a picture of what's going on. 

Cartoonists are fortunate in that they can play with our expectations and ingrained habits of recognition without having to explain them or defend them. Or point out the irony in how easily and generously we grant almost anything a sense of self except ourselves. Of course, cartoon characters and airplanes named after ladies are entirely fictional beings. It is a sure thing that any useful explanation of the sense of self will be explaining something that will still qualify as fully fictional. Why chase a fiction? Because it is a vital clue in this investigation. We cannot make dreams into reality but we can investigate the reality behind the dreams and then determine the value of the practice and its purpose. Why does the current science-inclined understanding treat the self like a developmental embarrassment? This examination will have to cover both those points to be considered complete. 

Some No-Self-ers might insist that anthropomorphizing cartoon objects is a gateway for children to anthropomorphize themselves. If having a self is like having a nasty habit, when does it start? 

Consider what we know we have… there is a full and comprehensive glean of ourselves and our environment that can manage our movements and actions. Our gleaning of reality is informed by all the senses and commands all that is command-able in a living body. That it is a living body is a spectator's perspective. The question is, is there any way in which the components of this gleaning can be aware of its overall purpose any more than an auto-pilot can know it is piloting? If the answer is no, how do we live with that? 

We are forced into a making a distinction while resisting any thought of a medium to have any distinctions in. Scientist like to refer to the lizard brain to evoke a picture of an ancient primal mind that was little more than an orchestrated system of responses driven by needs and steered by its senses. Knowing itself is not part of the layout. An inner self would serve no function that wasn't already performed just fine without it. This is a living system that does not report or testify. In trioonity, it is called the Hippo glean

Using glean instead of brain provides a better opportunity in the search for an acceptable medium of distinction. Hippo brain suggests establishing actual locations in brain real estate. This exam will not attempt to map the brain nor is it necessary to find the desired answers. The Hippo glean is a organized harvesting of sensory perception. It includes every sense that is taken in in service of the auto-piloting of a body that need not know it is there. Any thought at this point of a sub-entity called Mr. Hippo is not justified. Mr. Hippo is not the zero sensation that remains when all physical experience is zeroed out. Then where do our ambient sensations go? They must be going somewhere. Why else would we be trying to stop them? 

If the news of living is not somehow delivered to a single address, why do I think I'm here? Isn't science trying to convince me that I'm not? Then why am I here trying to be convinced that I am not? Where I am or Here must be where the Gift of Life is handed out to me, the thankful recipient. Such notions of here are a problem. Even if we're sure that here is within reality and not the ether-sphere, it remains a compartment to be occupied by that which knows it is here… in the compartment… which is also known to be here, by its occupant… in the compartment. We can figure that we have not yet learned how reality does this. It is a happy conclusion that satisfies why we would think we were here and serves a priority that, while not to have a soul, is still to have the box to put one in. There is no compartment. This exam is exploring a fiction. That is why we have one in progress. 

Back in free-fall (over a planet with a thousand miles of dense atmosphere), our test subject reports an unrelenting self-awareness that seems to simply submerge or retreat from the physical world as the targeted sensations are muted. Memories are everywhere and show themselves as if they were right in front of the subject as if there is a place the subject is seeing them from. With the soul-compartment out of the running, this will be hard to account for. Doing so will be vital to the experiment. The volunteer is instructed to try to focus on the emptiest memory of the internal memory bank. Remembering boredom or nasty and painful experiences might quell the urge to remember things. Or, at least, we can rule out that idea. The subject, specially chosen for having lived a remarkably uninteresting life, still reports a pesky sense of place that nothing lies in front of. 

Some daring conclusions can be drawn from the experiment so far. We have already learned something about sensory-deprived self-awareness. It has a front. Would a soul have a front? Our bodies have one and it is time to ask why we picked it. It's a minor point but we have to be thorough. 

The next time you're walking away from the water-closet, consider how you are re-enacting the water-shed moment in the evolution of animal life. All of us are retracing the steps of our ancient microbial ancestors. The most fundamental act of locomotion is moving away from disposed waste. Once established, our ability to move away became moving forward. We discovered that we had somewhere to go like hunting or dating. The mouth became a tool for hunting and combat. Our ability to sense light became a portal for looking ahead. Our ability to sense wiggles in the air pressure became listening with a sense of direction. This established our front as a coordinated looking-ahead system with a hard-wired sense of straight-forward. Many of us developed a head on a swiveling neck which granted a whole new perception to animals. Something over there can be in front of your body, while something over here can be in front of your face. 

Of course, our ancestors would not have been aware of these developments and any speculative descriptions of them come from a spectator's perspective. Based on what science says we are, we should be able to design an impossible task for ourselves. Anyone can try it before our imaginary subject is tested. 

Look around the room. Can you find three things in your field of view that start with the letter B? This will require a change in the piloting of YOUR EYEBALLS. Try to carry out the task without steering your eyes. Leave it to your auto-pilot that catches the ball in flight or reads or tells your hand how to move the mouse. That might be a problem. The requested info is not part of the glean that produces the field of view. Unless there is a large B hanging on the wall, YOUR EYEBALLS are going to need YOUR HELP. 

The solution is in plain view. It just needs to be pictured. If the view is familiar enough, you could find the B's with your eyes shut. Keeping them shut can help with picturing the unfamiliar. Picturing can yield info by description and info can conger pictures by describing them. While picturing these naked facts, let's not lose sight of what vision is. 

Imagine a being that was omni-locomotible. It can move and change direction without needing to turn its body. A chess-queen rendered as a lathe-turned lamp base is a good model. This queen has no face so it can advance in any direction without pointing itself first. Until it moves, forward and backward have no meaning. Front and back cannot describe the queen. If the queen moves in any direction, forward and left and right and behind will all apply while it is moving but not when it stops. A proper soul or inner self would be like the queen. When still, neither would have a front. I would expect a real ethereal soul to have nothing less than a 360 degree field of view. Thus, the queen of soul would see all but never face anything because the queen would have no face to face the world with. 

If tasked with catching a fly ball, the queen of soul should be able to utilize the same sort of auto-piloting described earlier. She should not need a unified experience to consume any more than we do in order to track, intercept and order a pawn to catch the ball. It might be easy to imagine the queen's 360 perspective but picturing it is trickier. It will be even trickier for the queen to identify three items in her field of view that start with the letter B. The queen of soul will need help too. 

There is info in the queen's field of view that can only be seen and reported from a spectator's perspective. The queen presents a challenge for spectation. Can you picture a 360 degree field of view? Circular views have been depicted as pictures but at the cost of a reliable geometry. It is the price of a spectator's perspective. A circular view cannot be in front of you. The queen will need an additional facility that can spectate one arc of the view with an acceptable and correctable degree of distortion in its geometry. The queen's new inner-swiveling cartoon-EYEBALLS can scan the field of view for objects and recall their names. Then, upon hearing the name and picturing the object or even just its name from a spectator's perspective, the queen can determine if the object or anything else that can be gleaned from the picture starts with a B. Still fielding for batting practice, the queen reports ball, background and ballistics. Unfortunately, we had to add inner cartoon EYEBALLS to the queen to make it possible. That should negate the results, which compromise this examination's promised lack of priorities and total fealty to science. 

Our test volunteer had no trouble with this part of the exam and quickly came up with blackness, bouncing and barf. Despite the lack of illumination, the subject is still picturing omelet-barf in free-fall after determining that it must be there. It is a daring act of speculation and one that threatens to undermine the whole exam. We are far from a zero sensation. If we have to imagine granting more cartoon EYEBALLS then we are looking in the wrong direction. Back at the ballpark, hordes of angry No-Self-ers surround the queen shouting "Off with her inner-head! Cartoon EYEBALLS are a cheat!" 

Meanwhile, it seems our imaginary test chamber has developed some faults. As a box, its aerodynamics are not the best. Despite the anechoic wall treatments, there are intermittent whistling and groaning sounds that can be plainly heard inside the compartment. Our test subject is asking if we're sure these sensations should be tuned out. Earlier, the subject reported that the heat shield was slowly being overwhelmed and that the temperature inside the test chamber was rising. The subject was reminded that the job at hand is to tune things out and these extra and unexpected provocations of feeling must be handled as extra challenges worthy of an extra bonus when we're done. The last report from the subject mentioned a growing sense of immediacy. 

There was no mentioning to the subject that the parachute assembly got snagged and tore off the container's roof (it is still hanging from the balloon) because there is no time for another ambient sensation even if it is a sense of immediacy. Any report from the test subject or understanding of ourselves must come before the container impacts with the surface below. 

End of Part One  

 

Part Two    

There is a growing sense of immediacy for both the exam and the test chamber. From a spectator's perspective, adding some cheap laughs to the same old sciencie explanation of our self-less selves does not disguise the inclination to impose constant implications of inconsistencies in the scientific viewpoint. All of these inconsistencies, ironies and impossibilities occur because we are insisting, unwittingly, that the sciencie view be built upon a presumption or priority. A hopeless science emerges when it starts with declarations of what must be so. From this spectator's perspective all efforts to cope with consciousness have led to instant insanity. 

If our physicality is presenting a singularity of experience to instantly be conscious of for one instant at a time, then there is only one way for it all to happen- instantly. On the other hand, if there is no ultimate consumer of all sensation ambient or otherwise, then physical processes do not need a further service that delivers those sensations in summation. Science says that there is no one to receive the delivery. If we experience now, doesn't that mean there still has to be a summary? It seems like a reasonable presumption to say that now is all we have or can ever know. How do we know that now is instantaneous? What are we thinking an instant is? 

If we think of instantaneous as a technical term describing the physical world, it is reasonable to say that an instant is no time at all as in, 0.000… 00 seconds. Zero is a useful value in math and for measuring time but zero is just a starting point and is of no value to the living. Reality, at least the part we are interested in, does not present itself instantaneously and we do not sense it instantaneously. We know that reality is really only matter and energy doing stuff at light speed but we were born to see fly-balls and not matter and energy. Our brain and nervous system can pass signals around at warp speed but most of the things we want to know about the world do not happen at the speed of light. 

The smallest grain of time we can know or imagine is our own inner awareness. It can seem like a dot moving on a timeline. We are our own experiential reference for what instantaneous means. If instantaneous means zero, than we expect our dot on the timeline to be infinitely small as well and represent an instantaneous consumption by an instantaneous sensibility. 

We can imagine a zero-coordinate dot in physical space while understanding that no object including ourselves can occupy zero space. A human occupies both space and time. Why not consider that the sensations of life cannot occur in zero time instead of assuming that they can and do? 

The suggested durations involved are not a transmission latency or like time-frames that stutter by one by one like frames of a motion picture. These options still demand the ultimate involvement of an awareness that has no duration at all. The trioon scheme starts with a different option- every sense and process carries on at its own useful pace which defines its duration and matches the breadth of the awareness (if any) that senses it. Other words like width and envelope come to mind. The point is, zero is just a starting point for a width of time so, the Hippo glean can be composed of a zillion un-unified and un-summarized widths of time, with many that are only microseconds wide. 

No single-soul can be served in this way. We would need a soul for every kind of feeling we have. We would need one afterlife of many just for feelings of dampness. Unless there is a desire to believe that we all possess some kind of ultimate unified consumer of knowing what is happening to us, like a soul or a transcendent astral-projectile, there is no good reason to keep adding the zero to ourselves. 

All we need to be ourselves is a duration in which everything we sense happens. Our sensations do not have to combine. They need only be coincident to coexist as our experience of the Hippo glean which, at around a width 15 to 25 milliseconds, is broad enough to engulf them. 

That should put into plain sight one of the foundational notions of the trioon scheme- durations replace instantanity. The instantaneous scheme is a muddle. To lay the muddle out crudely and with brevity… While we concede that we have an awareness, we are not aware of all our awarenesses, which includes an alleged surface awareness that is incomplete and isolated from our sub-awarenesses or un-awarenesses. Now… shove all that through a zero until a Unity of Consciousness comes out the other side. Science is telling us that last part is a fool's errand. The system we seek to know is already complete without it. 

This already complete system does not require an ultimate consumer of unified experience. That we seem to possess such a unity can only be a spectator's perspective for whom the Hippo glean appears to be happening to a recipient called Mr. Hippo (in the same way that talk of a Lizard Brain could suggest a Mr. Lizard). That is what it would look like to any observer but Mr. Hippo is an auto-pilot… a fiction applied to a combination of parts that are doing a single job. Mr. Hippo is the unconscious mind, which is also a fictional unification of parts that are, as the name suggests, not conscious. It is not a mind. It is a glean. Sensations are the tiny consciousnesses of the many assorted processes in a living body. The trioon scheme presumes that our awareness must have the same duration as what it is aware of. All our feelings come side by side and are never combined or squeezed into an instant. 

Humans need to reconsider the traditional picture of what goes on in our heads that has been traditionally held by everyone including professional brain-people and me. The one we all start with. The one that Nature wants us to believe. 

The traditional picture was successful in promoting innovative survival skills. It is an implicit bias that is integral to keeping the system working. It insists on a mock identity or illusory self. If any animal defies it, their survival will likely be compromised. Using science, humans have discovered that we cannot be what we want to believe we are. Many would say that humans need to correct this bias or at the least, cease believing it. If pursued intellectually, it can be rationally established that humans do not possess a soul or an inner pilot that wields the will power that we seem to be exercising nor do we have need for any cosmic ether-juice to achieve our cosmic destiny. That's fine. Where the pursuers go next is the issue of this exam. For many, the course ahead is to expose an intellectual embarrassment that should, logically, make anyone drop whatever belief or pretense they may hold to. That is either heroic or chutzpah. Either science is truly at odds with human experience or our implicit bias is still effective even in our intellectual pursuits. The no-self team is heading in the right direction but is not going far enough. 

It is not a question of whether there is a fiction involved. That is plain to see. The question is, where is the fiction? This exam could, for convenience, refer to our postulated 20 ms human as Mr. Hippo in the same casual way that we might talk about an auto-pilot flying a plane or name a car Josie. We know that it is all a fiction and an accommodation to how things look from a spectator's perspective. The plane is flying itself. A person is catching the ball. It is a courtesy from one fiction to another. 

Imagine an infinite regression of observers, each validated by its observer's observation. Can you picture it? Both the picture and the idea that we can have an inner spectator are fictions. That is old and humdrum news. The more interesting point is that we can picture fictions. This is not something that we should be intellectually embarrassed about. It should be the clue that leads to intellectually unwrapping both our bias and our sense of self. 

We can hear fictions too by recalling a song or rhyme from start to end. Like the picture of the homunculus chain, it is also a fiction. It is the phantom spectator again only with ears as well as eyes. 

Our vision and hearing are sources of strictly non-fiction perceptions. Our vision has told the truth and now the truth will be held for inspection. Sight has been harvested by the Hippo glean and the result, the field of view, remains available beyond twenty milliseconds. The duration of the field of view is longer (or wider) than the Hippo glean. The view is sustained for a spectator's inspection. 

If it wasn't, we would not know we could see. What we can knowingly see and picture is like the photo that has been to the chemist and back and has no further connection to the camera. The point of the photo and the view is not to be re-seen by a redundant vision. There is nothing redundant about the inspection. It is an entirely different sort of harvest than the hectic task of actual photon wrangling. 

The view can be pictured, sound can be followed and both can be inspected. The sensation of inspecting is conspicuous and stands apart from all other feelings of living because of its wider duration. The smallest grain of time it can know is larger than anything that happens in the Hippo glean. 

The Hippo glean is one of the three oon's of trioonity. An oon is three letters that look like spectacles and symbolize a glean of perception. The inspection is the second of three oon's. All five of our senses inform the Hippo glean. In our bloodline, two of the five were selected for a sort of further inspection. Since the two selected are sound and sight, the second oon is called the Cinema glean or cinematic perception. The Hippo glean and the Cinema glean do not need to unify, combine or fit through a zero or add up to consciousness. They are simply coincident. 

As a model of our mind, the scheme does not change the way we should look at our internal situation. The basic gist of the traditional model is followed. Consciousness is inspecting a situation in which it seems to be helplessly along for the ride with every event hopelessly determined by the time we can know about it and our own role is performed by processes deep within our physicality that we can never be conscious of due to some mysterious barrier. The two oon's or gleans, or bioonity in this example, can paint the same picture and has in part one. 

Our body is like a container hurling through reality and taking damage along the way. Inside, there is an imaginary test subject who is isolated from the direct experience of the container. Instead, a façade of darkness and quiet is offered. The subject, puzzled over what role could possibly be played in this situation, has nothing but a cascade of jumbled memories to perceive mixed with imagined scenarios of what might happen next. There has to be a way to tune out or omit all the illusory bullshit, the simplistic beliefs and emotional triggers and reveal the real purpose of our bizarre and seemingly impossible circumstance. It better be before our time runs out. 

The traditional take is referring to consciousness while the oon take is referring to perception. The trioon scheme would appear to depend on conflating the two terms. Or perhaps, the traditional view depends on over-inventing both of them. In trioonity, neither is the case. The point is to take consciousness as an extra and unaccountable business out of the picture by making it an unnecessary part of the explanation. No one is happy with the concept anymore not to mention its long history as a gateway to other addictive concepts like the soul or the self. There is a strong feeling that we need to eliminate the fictions in our lives. 

After we have zeroed out all the fictions one by one, only the truth of ourselves should remain. The critical question that keeps the no-self debate eternally limber is how we, the inquirers, could possibly still remain as part of the naked truth. When we reach a state of zero-fiction, it will come with a loss of ability to examine the result. Accepting that no, we can't and yes, we will is not a problem for the scheme. There is no need for embarrassment if we, as spectator's, can only picture the truth we have exposed. 

We can begin by putting ourselves in the same place as the test subject by finding a dark and silent space with a reasonably comfy chair. Get comfortable but don't tune anything out. Remain alert. Slug some coffee and feel free to worry and obsess. Encourage the inner chatter. Talk to it. I'm sure there are choices ahead that need to be debated. Think about them. Once we've limbered up, the test can follow. 

Turn your wakeful attention to the darkness and silence. Picture the darkness and listen to the silence (low background sounds won't impair the test). There is no long wait for enlightenment. A stretch of a few seconds should do. Even if fleeting, it is a moment of having minimized all the fictions leaving three ambient illusions that will not go away. All there is, is darkness, silence and you. They are sustained by your continued attention as if they are the default components of attention standing ready to see and hear and be as needed. We know that this is so far from the core truth of ourselves that we can only be dabbling in fictions. Our Cinema glean's attention is no zero sensation. Its only real description is as the 40 millisecond sensation of seen pictures and heard sounds. The sensation is tickled by our field of view and aural soundstage. Our continuous attention is, at any given instant, 25 to 50 ms wide. It is more than a visual and aural field. it is a shallow temporal field and has to be in order to do what it seems to do, like seeming to have nothing to do with our physicality. We experience our physicality via sensations of much shorter durations. Our experience is just parts joined by co-incidence. There is no unified being having them or any single all-encompassing act of consumption. 

Why then suggest that some kind of bi-polar consumption is going on? Bioonity isn't about consumption. It is about identifying either side of a gap. On one side we have a complex orchestration of experiences with no single consumer. There is no capacity for fiction. On the other side, there is a simple trio on a single stage where everything is a fiction except its consumption as experience. In other words, on one side we have a variety of short durations and no consciousness. On the other side we have a glean of a single longer duration that we find irresistible to call consciousness. It is from a spectator's perspective. The gap is not an ethereal mind-brain divide. It is distinction between long and short durations of time. 

The cinema glean is a perception of 40 milliseconds or ms. What does 40 ms look like? Don't move. There is a jumbo flat screen a few meters from the comfy chair. An instructional cartoon about self-flying airplanes is playing. The video is in a format called PAL which runs at 25 frames per second. That means the picture advances every 40 ms. From a fixed and comfy position, our conscious attention will be satisfied that the picture is continuous. The Cinema glean will accept the fiction of motion as easily as the cartoon planes. 

Once the Hippo glean discerns that the changing light patterns are not indicating physical events, their apparent motion will be ignored unless strongly triggered. Vision will do its job with no concerns about whether the frame rate makes motion convincing. When our attention is on the screen, the frames will be like successive instants of now because the Cinema glean cannot perceive an instant of now any smaller or shorter than the frame rate. Our attention will willingly stretch in duration to accommodate slower frame rates but not much past 50 ms (or <20 fps). It should also come to our attention that our attention uses fictional optics. Our field of view is not light in our brain. The Cinema glean does not involve INNER EYEBALLS. Optics do not apply. 

Our visual field of view comes from stereoscopic points of perspective. We use the distance between OUR EYEBALLS to detect parallax and calculate distance, movement and relative depth. Our retinas are a small field of light sensors that our vision treats as a single point of perspective. Light that arrives in a cone pattern to our eyes is sensed. It is a tiny fraction of the light that comes our way. Because we see a cone of light, near objects will be a greater proportion of the cone and more distant objects of the same size will be a smaller proportion of the cone. Objects will recede with distance and eventually disappear into a vanishing point. Almost. 

It is not a perfect point. It is a small vanishing field proportional to OUR EYEBALLS' small field of perspective. It determines the resolution of our ability to perceive space. Our resolution looks like infinity just like our attention feels like an instant. 

Our visual field of view is faithful in presenting a cone-based geometry as seen from our local point of perspective. If we look down a long hallway, we can discern the hallway is straight if it recedes or vanishes appropriately. The effect does not create a fiction even though reality does not actually recede with distance. If we picture the hallway and imagine ourselves at one end, reality can be represented without vanishing points. 

We can visualize a view that includes the effects of our visual cone but visualizing does not impose a further cone-perspective. It has a scanner bed's perspective as if things were seen by a retina equal in size to the field of view but there are no optics or beams of light involved. Imagining objects in a space is pictured from a spectator's perspective that is unbound from OUR EYEBALLS and the rules of light. It is us engaging in further spectation. 

The field of view is more than just a processed patterning of light. There is a substrate of information included in the field. The Hippo glean has already learned much about what is seen as we are seeing it. Objects are recognized and their names recalled. Associations and expectations are triggered. If we look at an old house that filled us with bad memories, it is as if the bad memories are varnished into the view of the house. As we see the the view, all the immediate, direct or one-step connections are made within the Hippo glean. Recollection and feelings are part of the view. Some things look familiar. As suggested earlier, the Cinema glean can apply its ability to represent reality to our field of view. If we picture or consciously attend our field of view, the picture has already been impacted or altered by our gut-reaction to what is seen. The result is a subliminal bias that affects what we see and hear at a so-called conscious level which in bioonity, means the Cinema glean. It is a way for us to learn from what we have seen that will shape our expectations and reactions more efficiently than any subliminal method. In a modern society, it is a means of priming people's expectations with deceptions in a way they cannot be conscious of. It also provides a chance to have cognition of the perception system we use to be conscious. That starts with considering that our experience of the Cinema glean stands alone and does not have to unify with physical experience or serve a common consumer. 

The Cinema glean is useful for considering what we are looking at or taking a closer look or identifying three things that start with the letter B. Our conscious experience must be good for something. It seems as much a bystander as a spectator. All the important stuff and things of consequence have already occurred in the Hippo glean. The Cinema glean is too late to do anything about it. What's the point? 

The point is in the other direction. Cinematic perception looks forward. There is lots of info that is already known in order to have a field of view to picture. There is more info that can only be known because there is a picture from which it can be harvested. Not embedded behind it as a bias but there to be found in plain sight. The Hippo glean has already spotted all the immediate connections between recognized objects and judged their consequences. That's all behind us some 20 ms ago. The Cinema glean was built to make up stories from less immediate connections and recognizing structures and scenarios made from many parts. It's a chance to draw a conclusion based on elements of the picture portrayed in a fictional future that are seen to lead up or add up to a consequence or an opportunity. Then, like a standing allegation against the future, that conclusion can take on more relationships and carry the fiction to a further conclusion. Or it can present a fork in the road, a split in the story that will be determined by a further clue that can now be anticipated. Our attention is engaged like a sleuth. We would pay money to see how it turns out. 

To demonstrate this for ourselves, there are thousands of test chambers available all named after the Cinema glean. There, experimenting has given way to a celebration of our capacity to perceive fictions in a shallow fictional future in front of us. 

To participate, we'll need the field of view and our stereophonic hearing. We will need to have the source of picture and sound in front of us. We will need to be physically comfortable enough to hold our head still as if it were mounted on a tripod. The screen will be seen from this fixed position via a cone of light to the viewer. The image on the screen may have its own camera-induced optical cone and vanishing characteristics that must be preferred over the optics of the actual room. Once our attention is on the screen, all is forgiven. We can accept a lack of color, distorted geometries, acrobatic perspectives and an altered speed of movement if it creates a scene that makes us want to look forward and discover what happens next. The exam already has a story that is unfolding. 

Meanwhile, the control complex is abuzz with lab-coated staffers working to salvage the imaginary experiment. Turbulence has caused a crack in the test container's wall. The planet's dense vapors are spraying into the chamber causing it to spin like a top. All of the subject's sensations have given way to a full blown panic. The last report from the subject mentioned a growing sense of immediacy. Requests for further details were not answered. Bells started to ring in the control room and green LED's were blinking. Meters were reading zero ambient sensations. The subject was now reduced to a single irreducible and unknowable state… an experience without a spectator. 

Why didn't we think of this earlier? At the start of the test, the imaginary support staff insisted that the subject get a grip so the work can begin. Panic has done the job. Being scared senseless has delivered the level of letting go they were looking for in the subject who is displaying only a primal urge to stay alive even if it is only to crash on the surface. Any human, imaginary or not, will, under enough stress, winnow down to nothing more than a desire to draw a next breath. The staff are horrified to realize how misconceived this experiment was as they witness how the last remaining expression contains no personal essence at all. There is nothing to differentiate or distinguish one soul from another. This may be the true self but it selflessly belongs to everybody. The subject is now reduced to any spectator's possession. 

The bells have stopped as the test subject has regained some level of wits. The subject's eyes have steadied and are aiming at a good guess of where the infra-red camera is placed. A whimpering voice is heard crackling from the control room speakers. "Please stop imagining me. Have mercy… " 

The techs scrambled over to the audio console. "Testing. Testing. Are you receiving? Can you report on the Grand Scheme of Things? Over…" 

The speaker crackled again. "In the Grand Scheme of Things, there are only two things that can happen to me next. I get one more breath, or zero… zip… none. That discovery, if the latter, is the Zero Sensation. Essence and distinction starts with the One More Sensation but real life is more than one breath at a time. Being a person requires having an imaginable future and the time to imagine it. Mine is almost over! Over!" 

An excited hub-bub was breaking out in the control room. The chief controller shushed the staff and turned back to the mic. "Please repeat. Did you claim to have a Zero Sensation? Is it over? Over." 

The subject could be seen on the infrared monitor speaking expressively directly to the camera. "It won't be over until you stop imagining me! I know this thing is going to crash. I can see my zero sensation. It's coming any second now. Don't imagine me as a splat! You can keep the money! Release me now!" 

The chief put on a reassuring tone. "Roger that. We concur that conditions are go for the final test. Please reach for a sealed envelope labeled 'what happens next' that is taped under the bouncy-chair and… stand by." 

End of part two. 

  

Part Three 

A state of panic can deny the Cinema glean of the time needed to operate. The Hippo glean has determined that only the immediate future matters and prioritized the Cinema glean into an off-state. It is a moment of pure unspectated physicality when we can be single-gleaned or, monoon.  

Our physicality is always interested in what happens next but there is a limit to what we can anticipate because the Hippo glean does not see a future. Next is just a dot of future… one space of next-ness. To the Cinema glean, next is a stretch of the future made up of several spaces of next-ness with an irresistible impetus to resolve them into a single soon-to-come present. We anticipate a slightly more distant future via the Cinema glean. 

We don't have a word for picturing our hearing but applying our cinematic attention to what we hear provides the same extended view of the future. This is revealed in our capacity for rhythm. 

To our brains, evenly spaced beats do not tell of a future other than when the next beat will be. An even pulse does not become a rhythm all by itself. Rhythmic structures are as fictional as stories. To the Cinema glean, rhythm is a forward-looking stretch of the future made up of several spaces of next-ness with an irresistible impetus to resolve them into a single soon-to-come present. We want two, three or four beats to resolve into the beat one of a new measure. We will pay money for fictional rhythms to follow. Anything with a regular pace like a dripping faucet will be granted imaginary rhythms with an inescapable illusion of beat one. 

Our conscious attention looks forward into a fictional future. Our conscious attention must not be seen as a noun. Looking forward must not be taken as a verb. The Cinema glean is an internal laboratory of consequences and possibilities of the seen and heard but is neither seen nor heard. The concepts of fiction, future, picture and song are all from cinematic perceptions. Even science and logic depend on having a forward-looking fictional space for assembling and testing a premise and making a conclusive beat one out of it. A fictional premise can be proven to be true but only by first being suspended in a fictional chamber of the future. We don't have a conscious free-hand in the Cinema glean but it can seem like we do. The glean follows strict rules of operation that we can be happy to think are at our own direction. 

The Cinematic glean's procedure is so conducive to every kind of thought or thinking we would ever want to have that it is easy to believe that we are free agents doing whatever we want in our heads. We can, as long as it is carried out by looking forward into a fictional future. 

With rhythms, resolving to beat one is the far end of the immediate future. Our thoughts look only so far ahead as to see the goal of putting the immediate perceptions together and being ready to carry on with the next measure of future. Keeping up means always looking toward the far end of the future. It is like seeing the far wall of the darkened room. Our perception of time includes a vanishing point beyond which the next stretch of perception awaits. With sentences, the small dot signifies a promise that the last word makes all the other words add up to something worthwhile. 

All this can make the Cinema glean sound like quite a party but also like a pointlessly selfish indulgence. The posited ~40 ms framework makes the glean an inconsequential cul-de-sac that is for entertainment purposes only. The sequence of the scheme plainly puts the cinematic cart after the hippomatic horse. How can our so-called conscious attention provide error correction or any critical feedback to how our bodies have already responded to and handled its external environment? What real contribution can the Cinema glean make to anything that happens next? 

Since this is a trioon scheme, there is still an unspecified third glean that might be expected to come to the rescue and provide a magic path backwards through time. It doesn't so the third oon can be left to another exam. The path cannot be through an imaginative re-digestion system that requires an astral plane or other etherious dimension to explain. This exam has done its best to reject those elements so far. 

Bioonity must be a complete and functioning system on its own since, in the scheme, it is posited that the third oon came late in our development and is the single ingredient that turned hominids into humanity. But first, a bioon system must have a means for the Cinema glean to contribute to our physical life. The scheme presumes that the process described is one way only. We do not re-see visualizations. 

If cinematic visualizations are so re-formatted that they cannot be seen or re-entered into the Hippo glean, how can they be useful? Plainly, they somehow are. One handy example involves a touchy subject. Specifically, a lad who needs to wank. Before anyone starts picturing anything, consider just the element we call fantasizing. Desperate lads everywhere who lack actual visual cues want to turn their brain into a dark and silent chamber with nothing but certain recalled memories recast in a fictional future. Somehow, this drives the process and gets the job done. 

That cannot be right. Desires are rooted in our physicality. It is our conscious attention that must be convinced that there is a need. A cooperative fiction can be visualized mainly to provide an illusion of single-mindedness. If over-stimulated, the lads can put the brakes on by fantasizing about baseball statistics. The Cinema glean is in some cases, superfluous to the job at hand. 

The drive to be visually stimulated is in the field of view strictly as subliminal components behind the darkness. That should not suggest encrypted pin-ups or any of the conscious trappings of erotica. Instead, consider the lads chasing after fly-balls. While a ball and mitt are in the field of view, it is raw visual info combined with other non-conscious processes that get the job done. Getting the other job done should be described the same way. All a lad has to do is satisfy certain subliminal triggers that pent-up desire has placed behind everything he looks at. All pattern recognition must pass through an extra circuit that asks, "Is this what I want?" The world is full of false alarms. 

When folks are hungry, everything is flash-inspected for visual cues of food-ness. This suggests that there is a whole world of subliminal visual recall within the Hippo glean that is nothing more than sub-structural cues and elements of un-fielded vision. What would a subliminally altered object in our field of view look like? Could we compare it to a subliminally un-altered perception? Who is going to tell us which is which? 

If we understand the optics involved, we can appreciate that our brains do their best to provide a reliable geometry to our field of view. Perceiving a sensational color spectrum provides us with a reliable discrimination of light frequencies which expands our ability to see relations and make associations. Likewise, we should appreciate that our brains are providing the best sublimated field of view it can muster based on our accumulated experience. Is it fair to call these fictions illusions? 

Vanishing points are fictions that tell us real info about spatial relations. Color is a fiction that tells us of real things in the world. Subliminal biases are fictions that tell us what to expect of things we face in the real world. These are accommodations to the getting of all our jobs done. The concept of fiction belongs to the Cinema glean. 

Things aren't really fictions unless they non-exist or fictate in a fictional workspace that cannot be found in present reality. We are biased to believe in its presence even though it has no material existence. There is no future in the present except as a basis for our attention and imagination. In the trioon scheme, each succeeding oon is a further investment in our certainty that there is a future. 

The Cinema glean sees only the future but not like a time-machine or fortune teller. We visualize stuff and follow to where it all leads. We know there is a conclusion ahead just as we know that if we follow a rhythm, it will lead to a beat one. It is biology's fundamental leap of faith. The Cinema glean is a look-out post for assembling multiple clues that indicate danger or opportunity. Once having done so, who does it report to and how? It cannot be by re-inventing a Unity of Consciousness. That would spoil everything. It has to be a simple forward path. 

The Cinema glean does not have to do some mental brainy quark-powered thing in arrowless time to let itself be known in the material world. It turns out that there is a path and this silly, make-believe exam has already covered it. The glean has been assigned to a certain department of muscular control. This suggestion shouldn't be too much of a stretch. Right now, it is the Cinema glean that is jaunting YOUR EYEBALLS across this text. That's muscular control. Later on, if necessary, it will guide or shepherd YOUR EYEBALLS to spotting three things that start with the letter B. All that the Cinema glean can do and all that we would ever need it to do, can be accomplished by having some targeted muscle control. 

There is one part of us to which that sought-after unity of self can apply. It is both material and fictional. It is another conceptual auto-pilot composed of real parts that come together in a way that can only be observed by a spectator. Its whole purpose is to be cinematically gleaned. In the auto-pilot analogy, it is the status display that informs a conclusion to something further that is beyond its own reach. It brings the two gleans of bioonity together in real time. It is easy to see in other people. We see our own only by reflection. Our Unity of Consciousness and Illusion of Self is plain to see in a mirror. How about that illusionary unity of face? 

Roll your eyes, then squint a bit and then tug on the sides of your mouth. Talk with your hands. It's all fiction. That is, it's your opportunity to write your own face. If a hirsute hominid jumped out from behind a tree and shouted "Boo!", your face would not be fictional. There would be an expression and it would express your natural and conditioned and therefore honest reaction. It is the expression formed within the Hippo glean and is composed of multiple impulses each with their own purpose. That it is an expression is a spectator's perspective. It is the read-out of an auto-pilot that can be externally observed. For a bit of whimsy, we can call it the look on Mr. Hippo's face. 

Why not? Our evolutionary ancestors have been reading each other's faces ever since the parts arrived. Other parts came along and became the Cinema glean perhaps partly to apply a dedicated attention to face reading that could make a single conclusion from a small assortment of observable elements of facial parts. This ability to read a face might have led to an ability to read the scene in front of us and discern danger or opportunity that isn't plain to see in any single clue. As our ancestors diverged, they developed Cinema gleans of differing durations with different limits on how many clues can make one conclusion. In the trioon scheme, the specific quantity can be called the clue limit though it has previously been called, for whimsical purposes now out-of-date, the chunk limit

For further whimsy, this exam can speculate, just for illumination purposes, that birds went with a long duration that handles many clues including plumage. That might be why they fly into windows and can easily solve puzzles that primate scientists think are baffling. Cats went with a short duration that handles only two clues. Cats reveal their smarts when things are going very fast and are blissfully stupid about anything requiring putting three or more clues together. That is one spectating primate's perspective. 

It wasn't so whimsical for our ancestors. Face reading was a vulnerability that usually expressed vulnerability. What if that same dedicated attention could develop a counter-measure? What would it look like? Roll your eyes, then squint a bit and then tug on the sides of your mouth. Or imagine doing that while imagining looking in a mirror. If Mr. Hippo's face is true then we are watching his face become a fiction. 

To say that Mr. Hippo knows he has a face and that it gives away his condition and intentions is not whimsy. It's just wrong. The Hippo glean leads to a facial posture. We learned to recognize that seeing a facial layout means there is another animal behind it. The world is full of false alarms. That is the Hippo glean's limit of self-cognition imposed by the scheme. In order for Mr. Hippo to know more than that, he would need a pair of CARTOON EYEBALLS. It is the only way to be a face or to know a face. As ironically indicated, the EYEBALLS come with a CARTOON. As a scientific term, it means an imagined fictional being with a continuous life and with some measure of dramatic willfulness. Since our conscious attention is often vaulted as the Here and Now, ours can, as a courtesy, be called Mr. Now. 

In reality the drama is limited to what Mr. Now can put on our face and express with our hands. That does not seem like much but it is all the control our so-called conscious attention has ever had. By steering and aiming our eyes and manipulating our true face, the Cinema glean can inform and persuade the Hippo glean and, more importantly, other animal's gleans in an entirely forward fashion. Obviously, this notion violates the notion of the User Illusion while still considerably cutting consciousness down in size. It turns the illusion of self into the illusion of zero while granting nearly the whole argument for it. 

Traditional notions of free will are still not sensible. However, if you choose one brand of beer over others and it seemed like you were in on it or at least saw it play out, bioonity says that's fine. There is a way it can be what it seems like but it isn't free will. Free will appears from a spectator's perspective but it's a fiction. Other animals are seen to put fictions on their face. It expresses a speculation that this is the future that will follow this present moment. Another face might say, "No, this is the future!" In the case of two dogs, it might lead to an arfument. In choosing a beer, it is only a matter of an ability to briefly hijack the aiming of OUR EYEBALLS. 

The temporally staggered layout of bioonity puts a certain category of muscular control into the 'hands' of our second glean which means after our so-called conscious attention. Normally, any muscle commands are either local or come from processes within the Hippo glean that are over and finished by the time we can consciously notice them. Again, not because they are sequential like cars in a train but because the glean that includes our attention is always longer in duration. Bioonity posits that, for some tasks, our normal muscle control hires a consultant and farms out supervision of our coordination. Specifically, when there is a need for an auto-pilot that is more than an illusion.  

Obviously, our body parts can work together in feats of amazing coordination that are better off without conscious attention. Some actions, like dashing up the stairs or escaping from tigers, are tasks we are designed for and we learn them as necessity and our motivations arise. Other tasks cannot be learned without first being seen or, forgive the term, fictionalized. The left hand does have to know what the right hand is doing at least until some muscle-memory is established. It is a fictional left hand in a virtual workspace in an imagined future where the hands have learned the task. Our cinematic perception is a slow and clumsy teacher with an incompatible sense of now. If the task involves timing, the teacher had better step back and let the pupil perform it solo. 

Bioonity identifies three tasks in which our so-called conscious attention is not a bystander and normal muscular control is supervised, if awkwardly, from the Cinema glean. They are, pointing our eyes, putting an expression on our face and coordinating our hands. That is how us animals harvest our fictional futures. In bioonity, this is not free will. No part of the process comes out of nowhere. The Cinema glean is just as bound by the rules of unfolding reality as anything else in the material world. To be bioon means carrying on with two gleans that are separate enough to uniquely unfold. The durations involved require the gleans to be operated separately while still existing in the same material reality or single brain. The Cinema glean's meager capacity to contribute brings its inevitabilities of fate into an animal's behavior and thus introduces an element of chaos/order to what would otherwise be the inevitabilities of the Hippo glean. The collision of our two gleans unfolds just as inevitably. The Cinema glean, in the form of our conscious attention, is a witness to its work but it is from a fictional future that can boast only about a freedom to be fictitious. The point of this exam is that this should be valued as highly as a bird (or a pilot) values flight. 

Meanwhile, the lights have come on in the fog-filled test chamber revealing a large video screen on the far wall in front of the subject who is still clutching the envelope pulled from under the chair. The voice of mission control blared into the subject's ear. 

"We still have time to see this through since we switched to imagining a much smaller planet below you. Please open the envelope now." The subject pulled out a round mirror with a handle. "Can you see yourself in the mirror? Over." 

The subject squinted at it. "Just barely. The mirror is too small. All I can see in it is this upper protruding orb shape where my eyes are planted. Is that good enough? Over." 

"That's affirmative. You are on target. Look into the mirror again and tell me if you can spot three things that start with the letter F. Over." The control room fell silent. After a pause, the subject's crackling voice came through. 

"I cannot fathom what you're asking." 

Cheering erupting among the staff, a handful of whom had unfurled a banner that said MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Once again, the chief called for shush-ness. "Shhhh! We're almost done. Start the recognition test before the subject regains subjectivity!" 

Two rows of letters appeared on the screen in the test chamber in front of the subject. 

A H I M O T U V W X Y  

B C D E F G J K L N P Q R S Z 

The controller then instructed the subject. "Please look straight at the screen.  Can you tell us which row of letters you are more comfortable looking at? Take your limited time. Over." 

The subject answered promptly. "The bottom row. They haven't spotted me yet." 

"And the top row? How do you feel about those? Over." 

"They're okay now. I'm using the mirror as a shield. All they can see is their own reflection. What's next? Can this be over? Over." 

The rows of letters on the screen vanished and a large single letter appeared… 

    B 

The chief resumed. "This is your last task. Answer promptly before the ground arrives. Can you name three things in your field of view that start with the letter B? Over, and quickly, please." 

The subject peered through the swirling vapors. "I don't know what you mean. The thing on the screen is kind of cartoony looking and turned sideways but it has to be either boobs or balls or maybe a butt. Over." 

Back in the control room, the subject could be heard giggling amidst the crackling. Green indicators flashed and a siren sounded. Panel readouts flashed ABSOLUTE ZERO ACHIEVED. The chief drew a deep breath. "Our instruments have confirmed your zero sensation. The ego has vanished. Is this a giant leap for mankind? By putting you into this fictional chamber, tell us what, at the core, have we imagined? There are only second's left! Over!" 

The only sound from the speaker was more giggling and a quiet voice. "Heh heh… boobs or balls or maybe a butt… " 

The speaker went silent as the chamber impacted on the rocky surface. It was assumed that a lack of imagination was instantaneous. A much longer time was spent analyzing the final response. 

End of part three 

  

Epilogue 

Imagine if everyone in town was walking around picturing each other naked and covered with hair. Why not? There was a time long ago when that was how we appeared to each other. Back then, did we secretly picture each other hairless? Would that be like birds picturing each other without feathers? That is a silly idea. That is what other animals say about nudity. 

How did we get to a state where our natural state is not to be seen? Was it modesty or the weather? From this exam we can conclude that it was at least both but also something else that became more important than either. The clues have been covered. Our face and hands are already covered by our capacity for fiction. Nudity was a problem for all our non-fiction parts over which we have no conscious control. We had to share our personality with our unconscious mind. Garments changed the balance of power. 

Our earliest history is a tale of how the Cinema glean came to dominate our lives. Being dressed up was an opportunity to be completely fictional. We could write the role that our own face and hands would play as if they were a part of what our clothing socially symbolized. "Who's a bystander? My so-called conscious attention stands before you. When I see my reflection, it stands before me, too. If I wasn't conscious in here, why would I be dressed like this? When I look in the mirror, I want to see three things… a face, a fiction and a future."  

We wanted to see those three F's all around us so we learned to fictionalize our environment with geometry and planning. Straight lanes and square corners dressed up the town. It was a fictional oasis from the nudity of undeveloped bare earth. Looking fantastic was just as important as good drainage. Having a cool fictional future for all to see was and is a source of pride for its authors and custodians. This kicked off an ongoing struggle between the wild and the ordered that played out in us as a contest for dominance between gleans. We could be the cinematically-aided survivalist or we could be the trained city-resident aided by a tamed body. Each social group had to find their equilibrium between savage and sophisticate. Bioonity shows where the two ends of the scale really are. 

When we are afraid for our present and our next breath, we might come face to face with the One More Sensation. Then, the fictions behind our costume and career and our badge and our ID card will vanish from our sight. Panic can switch the Cinema glean off. When we are afraid for our future, even if physically comfy, we will stand with our fictions with the same loyalty as our next breath. We might bravely state our willingness to face the consequences. We will hold to a fictional future where we are not panicked or afraid. In action, we may see nothing but fiction as reality vanishes from our view. It is a different sort of panic that is better called insanity. A reasonable life should seek a moderate middle-ground between reality and fiction. It will show on our face and town facades. We will look reasonable to each other. 

The contest is not between truth and falsehood. Our fictions include more than faeries stories. Tested truths started as speculation in the same cinematic ficto-factory as the faeries. Our fictions may test-out to be true because we know how to test them. Science can put truth behind our costume or office or big plan but we have only our capacity for fiction with which to sustain a continuity of established truth and pass it on. Even when we are juggling solid truth as a certified professional, it is still a leap of faith that everything in our field of view, from which we are sincerely fictating, is sincerely objective and without bias or subliminal tweakery. False biases can be ingrained just as easily as useful ones. Our only means of quashing them is by first making a leap of fiction that there is a better truth to learn. Our leap is forty milliseconds. 

Our fantastic science-based fictional future was hard-won but not by cinematic perception alone. All our Cinema glean's stunning victories had help from a powerful shepherd that developed in humans as yet another and further glean that pushed our fictional futures to nearly infinity and deserves to be called an oon of its own. Its relatively recent arrival implies that all the bugs may not be worked out yet. It doesn't kick in until some little ways into our life. For some, becoming trioon can be a jarring addition to the human psyche. Others take to it like water. 

How we grow into it, and it into us, is the foundation of the struggle between political groups and classes that lurks behind a façade of ethnicity or religion. Us humans are trioon and we left our bioon cousins in the naked dust. Their capacity for fiction could never dominate their physicality like ours can. That is probably a good thing. 

Was there any point to zeroing out every sensation except for whatever singular fundamental core existence we can reduce ourselves to? Only to show that there is a little timeline to being alive and that we can find a singular core existence on either end of it. Unfortunately, those cores contain only common clay or nonsense. Our options in pure single-core existence are panic and insanity. 

A well intentioned priest, believing that humans are something they are not, would tell a desperate lad that to wank is wrong and an act of moral failure. He would say the sensation needs to be zeroed out in favor of a more spiritual life. Fiction needs to dominate reality. Science says that this is a fiction that does not test-out. Therefore, the priestly logic would conclude that science is a part of the reality that must be dominated by fiction. 

A well intentioned scientist, believing that humans are something they are not, would tell a self-conscious lad that the self is an illusion and denying it of self-denial is an act of intellectual cowardice. He or she might say that illusory experience needs to be zeroed out, at least periodically, in favor of more reality. 

Both of these positions emerge from zero-based models with no timeline. Bioonity and the trioon scheme are based on a timeline with no zeroes. Living timelines are a wild idea but no wilder an idea than living zeroes. Opinions like these mean zip to science except as fictional futures to examine and see which fiction is a better mirror of reality. 

If only we had some reasonable idea of what we are that did not insist that anyone was doing anything wrong with parts that we are better off without, we might have a better chance of understanding how we got here and what our future might be. 

 
next- The Webb is Unravelling