How We See What We See
My conscious mind rarely announces its inner workings. It’s prone to shifts, curious selections, and leans as if of its own accord, long before I believe I’m “thinking”. Quiet, still moments often reveal this: the way a faint hum from a nearby room suddenly feels significant, as if signalling something beneath the ordinary, or how clouds seem like distant mountains, then a dog’s head, then a winged fish before my eyes.
For some time now, I’ve found myself noticing this pre-cognitive choreography everywhere—but especially in the smallest moments. There is a pattern and logic to perception that operates underneath the surface of things, as if something chooses on our behalf. I’ve learned that we do not so much decide what matters as inherit it. The mind’s ongoing, unbidden negotiation between signal and noise; an unconscious, unfolding calibration.
What we see, hear, and touch is the world filtered through layers of memory, bias, bodily state, fear, longing, and the quiet sediment of our earliest and ancestral experiences. This machinery, when it’s working well, guides us towards the meaningful and steers us away from absurdity. When it fails, we drift into what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke bluntly names “bullshitting ourselves”: a state of ignoring constraints, distorting the terrain, and mistaking desire for truth.
To begin any honest inquiry into the stories we live by, we must start with the humble acknowledgement that our perception is already half-written before we are born. And that the first act of clarity is noticing how we come to notice anything at all.
Myth as Cognitive Technology
Long before philosophy and science taught us to reason and measure, human awareness lived inside cultural stories. Not as entertainment, but as tools for organising perception, regulating emotion, and transmitting what mattered across generations that had no written language. Myth-making was never just storytelling; it was a system for compressing complexity into forms the nervous system could understand.
The Greek myths exemplify this. Heracles, Jason, Medea, Orpheus—these are not simply characters in an old literary tradition. Orpheus descending into the underworld, forbidden to look back, failing at the final moment—this isn’t melodrama. It’s a pattern carved into cultural memory: the way premature certainty destroys transformation, how the grasping mind ruins what patience might preserve.
The Odyssey teaches attention through different qualities of awareness—when to fight, when to hide, when to listen. These stories are expressions of patterned behaviour: rituals of attention, warnings encoded in symbols, maps of transformation framed in the language of animal instinct and divine intervention. Some of the earliest attempts to answer the question that cognitive science reframes today: How do humans discern what matters?
Plato’s Geometry of Seeing
Plato understood, with startling contemporary clarity, that perception is structured—that the mind’s relationship to the world is an active geometry, arranging shadows and surfaces into something that can be lived. Reading The Republic alongside cognitive science, one sees his proto-model of information processing: a ladder of awareness, centuries ahead of its vocabulary.
At the lowest rung: shadows on cave walls. Undifferentiated sensation before attention sharpens it into meaning. Above that: objects, the perceptual field organising itself, the mind beginning to say “this belongs together; this does not.” Salience crystallises. Higher still: the mathematical, the patterned—recognising that beneath particulars lie consistencies, that experiences relate through hidden structures. And finally: the Good, which functions less as moral doctrine than as a meta-principle of relevance itself, the overarching frame determining why anything becomes meaningful at all.
What Plato called ascending toward the Good, we might now describe as refining our capacity to detect what matters. Incidentally, Frank Zappa once defined music as “organised sounds within a picture frame”. An apt artistic analogue.
The Moment of Realisation
Last spring, I spent three months circling a decision I already knew I had to make. I kept re-examining it, seeking angles, waiting for a certainty that never came.
One morning, walking along the coastline, I watched a fisherman cast an improbably long arc of line into the air—a gesture that seemed to hang, suspended longer than expected, before finally touching water. And in that suspension, something in me turned. The decision arrived as recognition: the moment my mind quietly concluded what my heart had already long understood.
The Greeks had a word for this: kairos—the opportune moment, the aperture where action becomes possible. More than good timing, it’s the felt sense that the world has aligned with one’s internal readiness. A turning. The click. That instant when awareness rises to the surface and demands response.
Modern neuroscience speaks of this in terms of prediction error, salience cascades, and value-weighted decision-making. But these technical descriptions, useful though they are, do not account for the lived sensation we feel when something is no longer optional. When a path, once obscured, reveals itself with the clarity of inevitability. This ancient notion of kairos is the moment the mind stops negotiating with itself.
The Tender Machine
If there is a thread running through all of this—relevance realisation, mythic patterning, Plato’s geometry of perception, the Kairotic moment—it is that the mind is far more delicate, and far more ancient, than we often admit to ourselves. We are not neutral observers moving rationally through a transparent world. We are organisms shaped by inheritance, sensation, memory, and the slow accretion of stories.
The mind behaves less like a computer and more like a tender machine—sensitive to patterns, perpetually reorganising itself, attuned to meaning through small shifts and long-formed intuitions. Our clarity comes from a refinement of attention.
Composing music, and increasingly writing, has made this more visible to me. Good writing—the kind that articulates close to reality—requires a kind of perceptual honesty. A willingness to observe the motions of thought without immediately turning them into conclusions. It demands attention and deliberate attunement.
We often imagine clarity as a triumph of will, but it is more often a consequence of realising that something in us has already turned toward the meaningful, and that our task is to follow that turning with integrity. There is a humility and quiet acceptance in knowing that our deepest insights emerge under conditions of attention, patience, and sincerity.
We are fragile in our susceptibility to distortion, yet astonishingly capable in our ability to recognise truth when it finally reveals itself. We are conditioned, yet open. Determined, yet responsive. Bound by biology, yet oriented toward meaning.
Indeed, clarity is neither discovered nor manufactured, but unveiled.