Reflections II

In this post, I labeled a box, for want of better - 'Analysis.'  This is the mysterious place of consciousness in an individual.  It is functionally equivalent to the function of the command - to invent or find ways to handle what can't be handled out of experience*.  I want to try thinking of it as 'reflection.'

A reflection is a wholly derivative being, all about some real object.  And reflection is a process through which a reflection is produced.  The problem I had with 'Analysis' is that my experience of analysing is that you try this and that, thinking about this end and that end of the problem until, by nibbling with argument or by crushing in the jaws of some powerful instrument such as mathematics, the problem is 100% handle-able.

Reflection is emptier and simpler. What we call psychological reflection is turning objects of attention over, abstracting them by reading them into different backgrounds - in engineering, we might look at the same problem for computer modeling, for mathematical analysis, for analysis by analogy, for argument from physical experimentation, for argument from experience.  In thinking about a political issue, we might think of individual needs, societal needs, party-strategy needs, press responses, or even ethics.  As we do so, applying familiar practices and treating the problem as if it were familiar, different parts of the picture come into focus.

Hopefully, one familiar frame turns out to render the problem case recognizable.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a reflecting telescope.  When it's mirror was inaccurately shaped, the telescope couldn't focus.  The images lacked the necessary resolution.  Resolution emerges from nothing more than reflection.

* I think I will change 'recognizing' to 'handling'.  It is more Heideggerian, and also more true - there is always some level of recognition which can have a handle put on it, which can be classified.  So the elements of experience are between 0% and 100% handled, and the handle is present to consciousness. 100% handled is the default behaviour.