What is this? What is this thing that you’re looking at right now? Words and images? Yes, but no, and you know that, of course, but you don’t think about it.
They’re electrochemical pulses in someone’s brain (that someone being me, whoever or whatever that is). They are paths in the cortex, carved like riverbeds but fluid like the river, and, with enough of experience, labeled, e.g., “orchids,” “mustard,” “freedom,” “childhood.” Theses pulses trigger other pulses that move unthinking fingers on the QWERTY. A program turns the key-taps into binary code; the code tells new pulses how to move through logic gates, and what emerges are tiny unthinking pricks of light; picture elements — a/k/a “pixels:” red, green, blue — huddling together by the thousands on a screen.
Satisfied with the arrangement, more arrangements are made underneath the keys, more ones and zeros and ifs and thens,, so that the arrangement miraculously appears — not just on my screen, but any screen that chooses to show it — exactly as it was when it was born.
But the work is not done. For without a receiver, this particular menagerie of color and thought and code has all the impact of a flashlight shining at the moon. So thank you, dear viewer. Thank you for being the receiver, for letting these little beacons of light settle on the cones and rods of your retina, allowing them to trigger new electrochemical pulses inside your brain, where somehow, somewhere, they ultimately get to you, whatever that is. Mustard, freedom. childhood.