"seeing is forgetting the name of the thing"


~ Paul Valery said, "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing that one sees." In other, less poetic words: when we really see something, we don't convert the image into symbols, tokens, words in a language; instead, we accept the direct impression of the thing itself on our visual cortex. It's like tasting a fruit, smelling a rose, kissing a friend --- imminent contact with reality --- rather than reading a description of the event and reconstructing it in the imagination.




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