2013-01-17 at

Various traditions of knowledge

When reading texts from outside the tradition of post-Enlightenment Standard Theory, one ought to test every proposition with the scientific method in as much as that is possible.

I was advising an acquaintance that eye-strain, from reading or viewing emissive displays (CRTs, backlit LCDs ,etc.), is just the phenomenon of stressed eye muscles. The kinesthesia of those muscles can be retrained, so that eye-strain is reduced, in general. This is practiced in meditation, and martial arts, and analytically we would say that it is the business of teaching people to pay more attention to their peripheral vision, and to be less "binocular," in the way that they think about what they see.

The field of data that the eyes capture is a superset of the field of data that the visual cortex process, abstracts, and passes to other parts of the brain, and ultimately to our faculty of reasoning in semantic form. This pathway can be hacked, but it requires close attention by the person who is being hacked, to do the hacking. (At least, to-date, in history... haha... we do not have much in the way of remote hacking for humans, yet, though of course, that has long been a point of military and other research.)

Anyway, reminded of all these fun psychosomatic studies, I dug up the books on qigong, kungfu, taichi, and Chinese traditional food cures which I had collected, but not yet read. Most of my reading in this area has, in the past, focused on analytically figuring out what "meditators," are doing inside their heads, and on the rather straightforward points of breath technique.

Test everything. Measure everything. Logic must prevail, but the substrate of logic remains the world of evidence before us. We are far from crunching all the data that we have, let alone done with farming all interesting data.

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