When Galileo first saw the rings of Saturn through his telescope, he thought they were ears and made three pictures according to his perception. Of course, with a bad telescope they may seem so, even with a better one if we do not know in advance what we are looking at, and nothing “a priori” pushes us to think that there may be rings around a planet. In fact, these are not rings like the ones we put on our fingers, but rather pieces of matter (ranging from centimeters to 10 meters in length) that orbit the equatorial plane of the planet, and that from a certain distance can be described, in a vague way, as rings. Every time we perceive an object, we complete its form with information that we have in our memory and our experience, an experience that is poorly adapted to too short or too long time intervals, to too large or too small spaces. Our realm is the medium dimensions (life-related) and the approximations, or to be more precise, the limited world of hum...
On the symbolic constructions of human identity.