Roy Scranton in The Baffler:
TAKE A GOOD LOOK at yourself in the mirror. Really go look. Observe closely the skin over the cheekbones, the chin, the lips, the cunning little teeth. See the ears and nose, the smooth forehead, the hair and eyebrows. Admire what an intelligent beast you are!
Consider those intelligent beast eyes looking back at you: the tear ducts and the sclera, the delicate fringe of lash, the striated iris’s ring around the empty pupil, that aperture through which the light reflecting off the mirror enters, striking the retina, to be transformed into the image of yourself you’re now watching, an illusion your brain has put together from nerve impulses, a representation of reality unfolding, with a slight delay, after reality itself. If your brain is working within the usual parameters and you haven’t recently taken any psychoactive drugs, though, you won’t generally perceive any temporal gap. How could you? It is your perception itself that lags. You are not looking at “yourself,” not really, but rather at a construct rendered in your mind. For most practical purposes, however, this epistemological gap between reality and perception is only a problem for scientists and philosophers. You know you exist, and unless you’re high, that’s usually good enough.
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