Bee's observations are well taken; a major part of the whole problem is understanding the degree to which the delicate web of signals and cells in the CNS can generate and/or modulate perception. There are so many examples of false or distorted reality being estabslihed in individual minds when conditions of stress, fatigue, rush, or just general dull-wittedness are involved that it is difficult to sort out in any reliable way.

In each moment of perception there is certainly a confluence of factors going on. INdividuals have different chronic levels of ability to perceive; acute conditions in the environment at the moment are a wild set of variables; individual associations of precent perception with past perceptions are a completely wild variable. The confluence of individual state, individual past, CNS state, biochemical details of the moment, and historic fallibility make it easy to conclude that the pottage of electrical and chemical impulses is the whole thing.

But even in Bee's example the question that is begged, like the elephant in the living room that no-one talks about, is who it is that does the filtering she mentions, the interpretation. Interpretation to and by whom? Because the final repository of perceptions and impulses, accurate or distorted, is a viewer.

The potentialities of that viewer to override the CNS and the automatic pattenr linking of the brain is possibly the biggest question of the 21st century, but it will not be answered until some understanding develops as to its nature.

To assume that the viewer is just more of the same mishmash of electro-chemical patterns in the nervous system strikes me as a woefully premature assumption, very similar to the belief in the flat earth that was held for centuries by some people who were deprived of a sailors insight and who based their conclusion on an inadequate set of data.

From my view it is because of the unreliability of this confluence of dynamic elements in any instant's perceptions that we have to respect the individual's description of what they have seen even while reserving the distinction between those observations and what we are here calling empirical reality. Empirical reality by its natur eis going to be a small subset of those things that have been and can be perceived. For one thing, there is no empirical reality that can survey the scope and dimensions of the imagination or capcity for vision, but it is these abilities which have brought baout every major cghange in our culture.

To dismiss this realm of the viewpoint as merely an extension of the mechanical is therefore dangerous. The risk it entails is cutting human beings off from their own powers iof vision and imagination.
SO although empiricism is a vital tool in continuing to sort out the mysteries of ther material continuum and isolate those phenomena and models which actually do describe the common parts, it is probably a bad choice to try to therefore insist that the world of individual perception should have forced down its throat a molecular/electronic explanation.

At the same time it is an equally bad choice to decide to force down the throat of individual viewpoints who do operate in the bands of vision and inagination any metaphysical construction of forms or entities which they do not, themselves, elect. To do so is just as surely to undermine the sovereignty of the creative soul as it would be to hypnotize him/her into believing he was just an electro-chemical servo mechanism without fire, hope, vision or any future beyond entropic decay.

THere are many ways to trash a human soul, and pushing religion down his throat is one; pushing materialism down his throat is another.

There are a few ways to strengthen him, and one is increasing his power of self-determination over data, explanation, and understanding.

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