Taomeow

No. This picture is really a test, I didn't make it up, and when it is shown in a more formal setting it is always known to the tested party that it is a test, and this knowledge doesn't affect the outcome.

Cow now?.. Too late

And now the real test begins!! For those who responded earlier: please tell us (if you can/feel like it) what it is that you found out about yourself when seeing THIS picture YOUR way!

I remember a story -- I think it was on the local news, a long time ago and in an altogether different location -- so, this woman was about to make breakfast and was standing in her kitchen with the frying pan in her hands, trying to decide -- scrambled or sunny side up? -- and a meteor pierced through the roof of her house and fell into her frying pan. I wonder how she interpreted the message. I'd be scratching my head for sure.

unfiltered

I would rejoice, but I am not sure we get to pick all that much in excess of what a toothpick gets to pick from between the teeth after dinner.

Definitely on the dinner menu.

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” -- Thomas Jefferson

Still gone, despite trying to undo what one woman did in 1917. Alexandra Kollontai, the Russian mother of Finnish independence.

Berlin

Yup, any fish scaled down to Finnish can confirm -- Russian all gone. Since 1917.

What I meant wasn't exactly about habitual preferences, more about necessities as a vicious circle -- once you decide something is necessary and engage in it, this engagement may change you in a way that might make it necessary to keep on keeping on. People understand this kind of relationship with addictive substances better than with the rest of what we do just because we somehow wound up dependent on doing that, but actually it's a much broader category, and I suspect thinking (a particular kind of thinking in any event --see some distinctions below) may fall into that category. I used to read a lot of books on cognitive neuroscience, and what I've been able to discern (corroborated by various other sources too) is a distinct pattern of two types of thinking happening in the human brain -- yes, at some fundamental levels, only two. One of which, let's call it the functional thinking mode, is normal, and the other, let's call it the defensive thinking mode, is not. The functional mode has a distinct pathway along which a thought is formed: it originates in the body, whether from an internal stimulus or an external one interacting with the body, goes via the nerves into the spinal cord, thence the brain stem, the lower brain, the midbrain and finally the neocortex, activating everything in its path. When it reaches the neocortex, two things can happen. Either the body has already reacted, whereupon the functional thought, having informed the neocortex of the reaction that has taken place, terminates there, the excitation along its path quiets down and there's no long-term trace left. The thought hasn't changed the physiology of the organism it has visited -- rather, it adjusted it to the moment and reverted to homeostasis once the moment has passed. Or, if the body needs the brain to decide what to do before reacting, the thought, having reached the neocortex, gives it the input from all the lower regions it has passed, gets its instructions and turns around to retrace that path -- from the neocortex via midbrain (which contributes emotions) to the lower brain and the brain stem (which adjust the basic functions of aliveness like the heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, thermoregulation, etc.) and through the innervating "tree" back to the body, which now acts as instructed by that returning thought, based on the consensus reached along its path by all parties to the decision. Once the body has acted on that decision, again, all traces of the thought having been there and having caused temporary changes to the functioning of the whole disappear and the organism reverts to its default state. The situation has been resolved, everything is ready for the next change in reality itself, the reality as experienced by the body. Which will be handled in a similar manner by the next thought that will be in accordance with the new situation. That's how animals think; that's how we used to think too, and have been trying to relearn to think by all kinds of "esoteric" methods (even though we don't know that it is that natural functional-thinking mode that we're really after, rather than the non-thinking we mistakenly think we're after). The second, defensive thinking mode, which constitutes the bulk of what is going on in the neocortex of a modern human (regardless of whether the thoughts in his head are smart or stupid), is anatomically and physiologically different. This one is the target of all our practices and their bane. It's not "trying to dam a river with water" that's going on there. The river is the first, functional thinking mode. The defensive thinking unfolding in the neocortex, beginning and ending in the neocortex and leaving "grooves" of either persistent self-excitation or persistent damping-down of the signal from the lower regions, actually changes the anatomy of one's brain toward self-perpetuating activity or suppression of activity which is severed from all input of the type I described for the functional thinking mode. So it's not the river, that neocortical thinking, it's debris from countless shipwrecks floating on top of the river. Back and forth and back again, getting stuck, colliding, busy sorting it out between themselves and unaware of the river. They form loops, traps of sorts, where more garbage gets stuck and piles up. Antonio Damasio called them the as-if loops -- because their activity which begins and ends in the neocortex imitates the reality loops between the body and the brain -- imitates emotions where there's no real ones (the real ones originate in the body and get processed in the midbrain, remember?), imitates subjective health perceptions or unhealth disasters where there's no real ones (the real ones would be mediated by the lower brain and the brain stem, remember?), creates a world of unreality in the upper brain hopelessly severed from the reality of the lower brain regions and the body. THAT kind of thinking is what must stop in order to regain our humanity, but that's a pipe dream for most which even more people don't even know they ought to start dreaming. And without regaining our humanity there's no "more advanced" anything I don't think. You don't get a spiritual Ph.D. as a reward for flunking spiritual kindergarten. And that's where we're at right now if you ask a cat who has been relearning the way she thinks with a whiskers' breadth of success, no more.

Are thoughts necessary? I think (well, of course) it's a little like... OK, here's an example. Our county is reopening pedicure salons tomorrow which have been closed under quarantine orders since mid-March. Some of my female friends rejoiced -- it is absolutely necessary for them to get a pedicure ASAP they say, they'll be at the doors of the salons first thing in the morning, can't wait!! Well, I've never had a pedicure in my life, I believe my toenails look perfectly fine in their natural state and I don't feel it's absolutely necessary to do anything to them "professionally." But those women have been using nail polish and what-not on them for decades, so now their natural state is scary to look at (due to decades of no breathing and breeding the resulting fungi). So, they need professional pedicure because they've been using professional pedicure. I think it's like that with thinking too.

kompromat

@Iliketurtles Thanks for giving it your attention. I was just kidding when I told zeros that he passed, no one is going to "fail." There's nothing one is supposed to figure out here. People see what they see, and that's what they report on. The explanation will follow in a day or two.

Don't worry, you passed.

I share the vision of the foot with you, but in my case it is not just an unaccounted-for foot. It belongs to a soldier wearing a uniform and a cap, sitting on the bank of the river, his head turned toward the observer, his face distorted by an expression of mocking glee or obnoxious laughter. He's sitting on a low wooden bench for two, the seats separated from each other with an arm rest. The second seat (closer to the observer) is unoccupied and there's a bottle or a flask standing on it. The soldier's cruelty-tinged glee is in reference to the bombing that is taking place across the river -- something has just exploded there -- behold the billowing black smoke expanding from the object in the center to the upper left. There's a road bridge (or railroad bridge) farther in the distance, right of center, and I think the soldier perceives the first explosion across the river as the indicator that the bridge is about to be destroyed by air bombing, which is what makes him rejoice because it must be his side that's about to bomb the bridge. If I were him, I'd take cover to be in a safer spot from possible friendly fire, but he doesn't seem to be the kind of guy who cares. I hope he survives the war -- if he's on the right side of it of course. But since it's a test and I am not revealing what it's about yet, in hopes that more people might chime in before I do, what Taomeow saw before she knew it was a test of something is not that important. And once I knew, then there was something else. But if I tell you what it is, you (and everyone else) won't be able to unsee it. So I'll tell later.

"Seeking daily decrease," as some taoists recommend, we can go down from one string to no strings attached But then there's the compromise between the "too much" of ten thousand strings and "not enough" of no strings: two strings of erhu!

An oldie. Some assert it's three thousand years old. Voyager 1 took it into deep space in 1977.

Not the taoist tradition, this. New age/hipster tradition.

I was just reminded of that Bradbury short story, "A Sound of Thunder." What a visionary! Remember how it was all connected -- the butterfly-sized change to the timeline that changed two things -- the spelling of words and the outcome of the world-changing presidential elections!

Thank you, @silent thunder . What a heartwarming childhood memory. Like you, I was a spelling savant -- I am capable of misspelling a word in English but not in Russian, which I taught myself to read at the age of 3, having spent about 10 minutes on figuring out how, just because something was not right with the rhythm of a children's poem about a horse my dad was reading to me. I expressed doubt that he's reading the correct line. He got annoyed, put down the book and said, if you don't think I'm reading it right, read it yourself. And left. Ten minutes later, I got it figured out, no big deal. (Wish I could do crazy shit like that now... but now I'm a mortal again. For now.) This early acquisition breeds kinesthetic spellers. For a kinesthetic speller, how a word is written is a muscle memory, not a memory in the head -- and misspelling a word in my native tongue is as impossible for me as, e.g., taking the kitchen knife to cut some tomatoes for the salad and stabbing myself in the stomach instead just because I can't tell the difference. So of course I trust your Berenstein memory. For me it's not one of "my" ME, I never read it. And Mandela himself is not a prominent enough memory for me either. But I have enough of the shared ones and a few personal ones... e.g. a friend of mine had a memory of something that happened to me (something major and not just a one time event but a whole series of events, with many details, that would take months or even years to unfold) which actually never happened. At first I thought she was joking, then I thought she got me mixed up with someone else to whom all those things happened. She was adamant it did happen to me -- not a doubt in her mind, there was no convincing her otherwise! She insisted, moreover, that she remembered in great detail many discussions she had with me about it -- which of course never happened either because that thing she asserted we discussed never happened. It was long before any ME talk, so I started suspecting that it was something along those lines only much later, only in hindsight. And my friend was not only far from nuts, she's actually a psychiatrist and a professor of psychiatry. At the time she was telling me that incredible fable about MY life, she scared me into thinking psychiatric disorders might be contagious and she contracted amnestic confabulatory disorder from one of her patients. But now I think the explanation can only be way farther out than that.