Vision & Doing Math

Processes of seeing; seeking; and understanding

It is not a time I do not remember well, but it’s a time that probably altered my life.

I cannot tell you when I developed measles, but I was pretty young and within the era of memory. For instance I know I was at my grandfather’s house, but not the house in Fairmount, where my mother and I lived with my grandparents the first years of my life while my father was in Okinawa, then Korea, briefly before mustering out in ‘51. I’m pretty sure my father was not there.

I remember the doctor coming to my grandparents house and I remember him looking at me while I was sitting on the round footstool my grandparents had for an eternity, wearing my white shirt connected by red suspenders to my black pants and my polka dotted bow tie. I remember that because I fussed at him because (it must have been a Sunday) when he wanted to remove that bow tie.

I would always dress up on Sundays for most of the rest of my life, and no matter what else I might do, play football, mow the lawn, work on the car (I’m not a mechanic, but I could change a light bulb,or the fluids, and Sunday was a good day to clean the car and wash the outside), or go to work, Sunday was my dress-up day. It had nothing to do with going to church. It was just my dress-up day, the day of the week I set aside to dress up that probably began way earlier and somehow became a lifetime ritual.

But I’ve seen a picture of me in that outfit and I was only around eighteen months old and I don’t remember anything from that early, so how can I possibly remember wearing that outfit on the day the doctor came and declared I had contacted measles?

Childhood memory expert, Dr. Carole Peterson believes people do have memories before they have memories. That is she thinks her research has shown that when adults reflect back on their childhood certain episodes they recall having happened within their memory, when cross-referenced with parents, actually happened prior to when the person believes their memories began. Obviously sometimes others will tell a person about a memory that might become a memory. But Dr. Peterson thinks that sometimes the memory will “shock” the parents because they don’t remember ever discussing it with the child and don’t understand how the child (grown) could remember events before they (the parents) thought the child was even aware of their surroundings.

So I believe this might have been the case. I remember the doctor saying I had to be kept in a darkened room. And boy was I. For 7,133,642 years I was isolated in that room. They even turned out the house lights before they opened the door to bring me food.

No, of course I wasn’t in the room that long. After remembering the doctor and his removing my bow tie and suspenders, I mostly just remember the utter darkness and the complete loneliness of being isolated. A moment itself can become an eternity and why isolation punishments are so tortuous. The number above, 7,133,642, that’s what Alexander Selkirk was reported to have first replied to his rescuers when asked how long he had been alone on the island when he was found. It was really only around seven years. And I probably didn’t have the measles for more than a week or two.

I, again, cannot really state when I began to develop optic neuritis, and I don’t know if it was ever really connected to my measles. But by the time I started school I was wearing dark glasses due to sensitivity to sunlight and severe pain if my eyes were left uncovered. Optic neuritis can also diminish color vision but I always thought my color vision was normal until my physical when I enlisted in the military. I knew I had to restrict driving during sunset and sunrise when light was shining directly on traffic lights because I could not see the position of the light, but I assumed I did normally see the red and green lights, it took a bit of demonstrating to me that I didn’t see the red and green lights, I only saw the position of the light and imagined the color because I knew it was supposed to red or green.

The demonstration that was utilized was that the tester held a red paper and a green paper in each hand and asked me which was which. No problem. Then he gave me a stack of cards, some green and some red and told me to separate them into two piles of green and red cards. I thought he had cheated because I couldn’t do it.

So he took me to a large table with squared blocks of different colors. No problem. I could see all the different colors of blocks. I thought. Remove the green blocks. No the ones you removed are not all green.

Well I can see shades of color that contrast with each other, but closely aligned colors placed next to each other, I can’t identify which is which. That just so happens to include placing red and green shades right next to each other, but I will be able to tell them apart at a distance from each other.

Of course, at least in the United States, color blindness is no barrier to driving because the brain can compensate. You will believe you are seeing the red and green, but the driver is only seeing the position if he is color blind. So the brain compensates for the deficiency by making one believe he is distinguishing colors.

Now optic neuritis can create color vision deficiencies and it can be caused by measles. I did have visual sensitivities to direct sunlight and I was color-blind. But optic neuritis can also lead to multiple sclerosis and I never developed that. But it was only four years ago was I diagnosed with optic neuritis. It is sensible to make the assumption that I had had mild optic neuritis that probably worsened over the years. At least I think it’s sensible.

But my ophthalmologist said not necessarily,but possibly. And RFK Jr. probably would say it was from the measles vaccine, but that’s not very sensible since there was no measles vaccine when I contacted measles. Nevertheless,he apparently did say optic neuritis could be a consequence to Pacific Islanders when trying to stop them from getting their measles vaccines. Sorry, Jr., I think it’s the other way around. Unless of course viruses were created so pharmaceutical companies could make money off vaccines….and I’ve been told that as well.

I was a very poor math student. You might say I can’t solve math problems and you would be accurate. But I can read complex math formulas as long as I know what the symbols are standing for. I just can’t work out the equations myself.

I knew I was not going to college after high school, nevertheless, I thought maybe someday…so I took the SAT. On the verbal section my father suggested I should have gotten a higher score just for putting my name on the paper. (I did, obviously they sent me the results.)

But no one seemed to pay any attention to the fact that my math score was 800. I completed the math tests in mere minutes and didn’t use the scrap section at all. I guessed at all the answers since I couldn’t work out the answers. At least that’s what I suppose you would call it.

But it was slightly more than a guess, it was an estimate. If you present me with a math problem I can come very close to being right unless I attempt to “do” the math and then I’ll probably be wrong. In school I had to determine the correct answer so I had to figure out how to get the answer.

On the SAT that wasn’t required, it was multiple choice. Now for someone who can only calculate the process to determine which choice is correct, the differing answers are similar enough they need to follow the process and arrive at the right (expected) answer. Since I don’t know the process and only know how to approximate the mathematical answer, given a choice between options of say 0.1 and 0.2, my estimation seems to have been correct enough to get an 800 but my verbal score,given the same options,I become stumped because if there is even the slightest probability that any answer could be correct, no answer seemed to be right.

My book, Thoughts & Essays on Developing Personalities spends a great deal of time trying to reflect on contemporary understandings of how the brain operates; and when it begins to learn, and there is a near unanimous consent that by age four, the child (minus deformities to the brain) has developed how he views several concepts.

One,how he views himself.

Two how he views how others view himself.

Three, how he views others relate to his self.

Four, how he views others will view himself and how he must therefore respond.

So the approach the child will take to learning in school is determined on how he has determined will be the most productive to himself. If teacher says A, and father has said B, then the child,determining on his developed concepts of teacher and father will believe A and do well in school, or not accept A and do poorly. If father is going to beat the living daylights out of him if he believes A instead of B, the self developed will be very unlikely to do well in school. But what if father is going to beat the living daylights out of him if he doesn’t believe A, then the child might shift to believing A, he might shift to believing he will be beaten if he does not believe A because that’s what he is expected to believe, but that expectation has led to being beaten and he still might fear not father’s beating as much ass he might fear social rejection or social ridicule for not believing A.

Now there are many other variables that will determine the child’s academic progression. The point is that it is not “the smartness” of the child, we all have the same basic capacity to learn…in other words, we learn by the same method, but our brains determine by the age of four what information we will permit us to process, at least child development studies nearly unanimously support this process at this time.

That is not generally the way we like to view how our brains function, but it nevertheless is how they function. Every child, barring physical incapacity acquires language between eighteen and thirty months, by which time they can speak syntactically and vocabularily equivalent to their teachers (primary caregivers).

It is not that we cannot or will not learn more, or differently; or that we cannot be successfully mentored to move into different mental behaviors.

But the most important time for a child to learn how he will learn is as he his observing and developing the conceptions of himself and his environment. He is learning what is acceptable for him learn and how he approaches what he will be taught.

So by this process we also begin to learn what we will observe when we see. I certainly knew I couldn’t see in the sunlight, but I was twenty-three before I leaned I could only detect shading differences and not color. No two people will ever see any vision exactly the same because in early childhood the brain develops an inner sightedness of what the person needs to see. And there are greater visual distinctions between what our visual capacities are. Taking these factors in consideration it is proposed (not sufficiently proven) that whenever we “look” we take any nearly,or more than, 1000 times more bits than we “see.” What we are talking about here is not aesthetics or opinion because those senses develop from the visions that our brain shows us.

And what we are beginning to get overwhelming evidence of is that brains are not a necessary appendage to “think”, or be aware of our surroundings. Viruses,supposedly unalive, are capable of massive techniques of camouflage and need to be inordinately aware of their environment. The entire concept of life is undergoing transformation, although no one really is quite capable of replacing it yet. But some are beginning to suggest that chemically-speaking the process of life is not just a process of biological functioning.

Understanding the processes of something is important,of course, but there is another level to human learning that is often forgotten and that as one acquires knowledge of one subject, it becomes irrelevant if unassimilated into all of the others. There is an interconnected to all of the processes, math is an abstractive process that can connect them, but as Russell’s famous paradox illustrates, math itself is a process and only looked at through the mathematical process cannot connect itself to itself.

Which brings us to the conclusion once again, that for the human species, we cannot individually become aware of enough and we need each other to survive.

And the most important thing we need to learn, as humans, in order to survive,is that as individuals we are intellectually inferior, and only by collectively sharing our understanding can we succeed.

It is not that we need to agree, we need to seek commonalities in our disagreements. It is not cause and effect but multiple causes and effects (see Hume); it is not right v. wrong (good v. bad) it is recognizing what is harmful and correcting it. That doesn’t make everything good, but we can through sharing continually attempt to correct the wrong.

But to do that we need to absolve ourselves from the idea that we are individually unblinded and can see everything,and we need to seek not single solutions to the problems we encounter but focus our learning on estimating the outcome based on assimilating our knowledges of materiality and quantum relativeness with our knowledges of evolutionary and (pre)historical realms and the relationships that all knowledges pose towards comprehension.

It’s not that I am proposing some mystic Oneness, but a very practical interconnectedness of everything as a way of thinking.

If we want to view history as only about leaders and not about how leaders are toppled or succeed we view it unassimilatedly. But if we want to view both minus the evolutionary and genetic developments that led to history, history become a fiction book, a novel of the past. But if we want to view the evolutionary development absent the universal development and particle methodology of that development, then we are separating how things exist from what we presume is sensually occurring and our senses–the intake to our brains–will lead us to unassimilated emptiness because thoughts and learning develop by what we learn to direct our observations towards.

So if we discover majorons really exist, and some are now suggesting their discovery beyond the hypothetical, we will be able to relate that to each other and estimate we could potentially become dark matter if we overwhelm the imbalances in our culture until we learn to become totally opposite to ourselves?

We may not be in a matrix, but we are in an existence that contains our existence within in. We need to learn we can’t write the book but existence could very easily write us out of the book.

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

-lennon/mccartney

Addendum: Why I didn’t Learn How to do math

I do not remember learning to read, but I remember that I had a set of flashcards and I studied those cards until I knew my multiplication tables to the fifteens before starting school. My earliest teachers did think I was a mathematical “genius”, of course I was not, I had just memorized all the answers that will be presented to a child in first or second grade.

And as the adding became a little more difficult we begin to be taught how to “carry the leftovers” to the next column. In second grade we had a test with math problems and we were supposed to write the carried numbers at the top of each column. I will never forget one problem that became the problem of contention.

117 +

49.

The answer was 166 and I knew it from looking at the numbers and I wrote the answer quite sure I was correct. But I did not add 7+9 to get 16 and then write the carried one to the next column and then add the carried one to make 1+1+4=6.

The teacher was walking about the room and observing and I guess she saw I was staring around the room with my pencil down so she walked around behind my desk and looked at my paper.

“How did you get your answer?” pointing to the aforementioned problem and my sum.

“I added it,” I replied.

“How did you add it?”

“By adding it,” seemed obvious to me you added by adding.

“But how did you add it, I won't know you added it unless you show me how you added it.” “How can I show you when I already added inside my mind, I can’t show you inside my mind, can I?”

“No, you can’t, so you have to show me on the paper so I know you didn’t cheat and copy someone else’s answer.”

“But I don’t know how to do that, I only know how to add it in my mind.” “Well then I’m giving you an F, because I think you cheated and I will give you F’s until you can learn to show me how you added up the sums.”

“I didn’t cheat!” I yelled.

“Then prove to me you didn’t.”

“ I can’t do that!” I choked out, starting to cry, and then I guess I wadded up the math paper and threw it across the room. I was also terrified, I had already had to repeat first grade because I wanted to read Moby Dick instead of Dick& Jane. Of course that’s not why I had been held back,I was held back for talking back to teachers (problem with authority), but in my stupidity I thought the teachers were stupid making me read Dick and Jane.

The teacher grabbed me by the collar of my shirt after I had thrown the paper, “We’re going to the principal’s office.”

And she marched me out of the room holding on to my shirt, and I was full scale bawling in petrification that I was going to jail or something.

We had gone to Taiwan, and there were not any classroom fans or air conditioning and the windows and doors of the classrooms were generally left open. My mother was the third grade teacher, her classroom directly across the hall and she saw the teacher dragging her little boy crying out into the hallway (or sort of hallway, the passage between the classrooms was unroofed.

She stepped into the hallway,“What’s going on?”

“He’s being troublesome and I am taking him to the principal.” So my mother followed us into the principal’s office.

The teacher told the principal she thought I had cheated on the math test because when she had asked me how I got my answer I couldn’t show her. Somewhere in there I think I must have screamed out, “I didn’t cheat.”

But my mother told the principal I wouldn’t have cheated because I was really good in math. I remember the teacher saying no second grader could know the answers to the problems on the test.

My mother chimed in again, “Ken what’s thirteen times fifteen?”

“One-ninety five.”

“Impressive,” the principal said.

My teacher then took a stab at me, “What’s one-hundred thirty seven plus sixty four?”

“Two hundred one.”

“I don’t think he cheated, the principal said.

Well I didn’t have to be accused of cheating again. I was promoted to my mother’s class and put back with my own age group.

And I remained very good and very quick at doing simple math…but buy fourth grade we had to add long sums of numbers which I couldn’t add them only in my head.

My mother was wrong. The principal was wrong. The teacher was right and I never learned how the process works to get the exact mathematical answer.

I know Einstein’s formula for calculating general relatively. I’ve seen it and it seems simple when it is observed. But if I had to calculate it, well, you know what? I would have to cheat.

Too much of education is cheating. We generally give students a single source and from that source the answers will come. And then when they are older and they listen to one news channel; or they come to believe a conspiracy or pseudo-scientific theory; or someone tells them migrants will take their jobs; do you expect them to check anything else out? It’s really pretty simple, if learning is about the answer, you cannot say they are wrong if your answers don’t match.

Learning, and our educational system needs to be presenting students with a methodology or process of how to learn and not answers they must learn.