1.2. Why should we care? Transparency as a requisite for conscious experience.

But why should we care about clarity? Well, for conscious beings, transparency is what allows them to be in contact with something. Your own ideas, feelings or impulses must be clear to you, they must get to your consciousness, otherwise there would be no "you", there would be no conscious experience for its objects would not arrive - consciousness would only exist as a non-actualized possibility, an emptiness surrounded by an impenetrable opacity. You and me are in the world (even if it is an inner world) because we communicate with it, or at least with an infinitesimal part of it: we perceive something, we respond to it. All this needs (besides the light of consciousness) some minimum degree of transparency both for perceiving and for acting, between the subject and the object there must be a passing-thru. The more transparency there is the more we will be here, the more we will be in contact, the more we will be present, aware, understanding, feeling and living. Obviously, every object of our consciousness must be transparent to us to be part of our world. Without any kind of transparency we would be blocked out from the world, we would have no ability to receive or to give, we would be like in a coma, in total darkness.

On the other hand, total transparency of perception, understanding and in the ability to act, would be like some have imagined God's powers: all knowing, all detecting, all powerful... not a single event, in every scale and in every dimension, would occur that would pass unnoticed, not a single will would pass unfulfilled. Obviously, human beings, are unimaginably far away from such total transparency, our windows of perception are very limited due to constrains in our bodies (sense organs and cognitive powers) and in our interests. But however restricted our interests may be, we must care about transparency as long as we care for anything at all. Even if we wanted to commit suicide we would have to be clear on ways to achieve it! Only utter contempt towards every kind of existence / experience would be compatible with disregarding clarity in all its forms. (The movie Cast Away suggests such a state of mind when Tom Hanks, lost at sea, looses "Wilson".)

We should notice that if we go a step further and imagine everything to be perfectly transparent in every way, not only the medium that allows subject and object to communicate, but the objects themselves, then what would we see? Apparently we would have to say «nothing», because everything we see with our senses has a shape, it interferes, it opposes our senses or instruments, it is by "kicking back", by interfering with its environment that we can identify it and characterize it. We live in a world of actions and reactions. But if everything was absolutely transparent our senses would not be able to interact with any particular thing, they would not "kick back", no frontiers could be delineated, nothing would respond to our actions. It seems we would be blind, this time not from being confined by opaqueness, but from being lost in infinity. Only the conjugation of clear media and opaque objects can provide a world of objects to our senses.