the synchronic vision

conversation as conversion

...with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

—William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”

In traditional analog television sets, the visual image is generated by a single point of light. The process is called “raster scanning.” The term comes from the Latin word for “rake” and refers to the linear pattern that the point traverses to travel across the screen. From a single scanning point, the raster scan on cathode ray tubes can produce the impression of a steady visual image despite that only one point is being illuminated at any given time. 

Due to “phosphor persistence,” a given frame lingers in consciousness such that the appearance of the next one encroaches contemporaneously on the experience of the former. The phenomenon is also known as the “persistence of vision,” or sometimes palinopsia. The latter, from the Greek palin, “again” and opsia, “seeing,” usually designates a pathological persistence or recurrence of a visual image after the initial stimulus for that image has been removed. Hence, the terms above describe non-pathological palinopsia. The duration of the lingering visual image following the removal of the stimulus can be defined as the “flicker fusion threshold” or “flicker fusion rate.” Below this duration, an intermittent stimulus will appear continuous as one stimulus “fuses” into the successive one. Animated motion picture relies on this phenomenon to generate the appearance of motion through successive still frames. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “beta movement.” In other words, a sufficiently high frame rate of still images yields the impression of a moving one.

A raster scan relies on the same phenomena regarding flicker fusion thresholds and persistence of vision as motion picture though in a slightly different application. As indicated above, the visual image is generated by a single point of illumination that races in a rake-like pattern across the analogy display. Despite that more than a single “pixel”¹ is never being drawn in any given time, by the time the whole screen has been traversed, the illumination of the initial pixel has not entirely faded. If its brightness has diminished beyond a given degree, this will be perceived as the familiar “flicker” of older television sets. 

Anyway, we perform a deed that is analogous to the raster scan when we engage in bona fide dialogue, in which, out of a shared wish for understanding, all interlocutors willingly offer up their respective standpoints on the altar of truth. Conversation, in this way, can be a method of conversion—a “turning toward” truth. As we think through diverse elements of a given topic or phenomenon, each new thought persists in intellectual vision for a certain, perhaps indeterminate, duration. The diachronic and apparently piecemeal traverse of pertinent elements of the topic or phenomenon achieves a consummation in which it transcends itself precisely at the point that we overcome the cognitive “flicker fusion rate” of our desultory thinking process. At once, the wholeness of the thing is made synchronically manifest to the eye of the mind. As Pindar observed, “In heaven, learning is seeing; on earth, it is remembering.” The dichotomies of ratio & intellectus, or dianoia & nous have been employed by prior thinkers to designate this state-change in cognition. Theoria, it could be also be called, when the mind attains to the panoramic vision of things, which is altogether different than mere theorizing.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Pexels.com

1. The term is, strictly speaking, incorrect since an analog display does not contain specific spatial designations in the manner that a digital one does.