Back in the early days,\u00a0when\u00a0the internet was trying to define itself, different web pages sometimes looked different\u00a0on different brands of computer, depending on which browser was being used.<\/p>\n
The pages would be “rendered” (drawn) differently, depending on algorithms\u00a0used by both the sending and receiving machine.<\/p>\n
For grins and giggles, let’s pretend that each “me” of us is a user, and what we think of as “what’s real” is simply the way our browsers (brains) render the input\u00a0we receive from others machines that, in turn, have\u00a0to render their inputs, and often\u00a0do so imperfectly.<\/p>\n
What’s drawn depends as much, or even more, on the receiving machine’s algorithm as it does on the dots and dashes\u00a0transmitted by the sending machine. We all are building and changing our algorithms daily. Most of us, anyway. I know a few who haven’t changed much since the 70s, but that’s another topic.<\/p>\n
I bring this up because it’s important to think about why we think the way we do, and to understand that we can hold fast to our “rendering” of reality without much certainty that it is “objectively” true.<\/p>\n
In fact, there ain’t no such thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in the early days,\u00a0when\u00a0the internet was trying to define itself, different web pages sometimes looked different\u00a0on different brands of computer, depending on which browser was being used.<\/p>\n
The pages would be “rendered” (drawn) differently, depending on algorithms\u00a0used by both the sending and receiving machine.<\/p>\n
For grins and giggles, let’s pretend that each “me” of us is a user, and what we think of as “what’s real” is simply the way our browsers (brains) render the input\u00a0we receive from others machines that, in turn, have\u00a0to render their inputs, and often\u00a0do so imperfectly.<\/p>\n
What’s drawn depends as much, or even more, \u2026 Read more\u2026