John, You said: ---------- Unless you are seriously proposing that you (or anyone) can move FA al the way out to the sense organ (the bankrupt theory of correspondence in traditiion epistemological discussion) what are you suggesting by statements like, "...and they just let you see 'what's happening'" and "...you get to see what comes before 'First Attention'.." ---------- It may not be possible to move FA all the way to the sense organ, but that said, the phenonomena of FA, or at least the "line where First Attention is drawn" is certainly extremely malleable. When I first read Whispering, one of the books I obtained from the references was the excellent "Visual Intelligence", by Donald Hoffman. In the book, Hoffman describes some of the algorithms we seem to use to construct our visual perceptions of the world, and he uses a variety of visual illusions to illustrate these. I spent some time playing with these with regards to trying to discover the boundary between my pre-FA visual system processing, and what may be manipulated by post-FA processing. To give you some idea of how this works, consider the famililar figure of lines drawn on a flat paper surface, which your visual system interprets as a 3 dimensional cube (in the literature this is a Necker Cube). It is well known that if you look at one of these for long enough, most people will notice that the orientation of the cube seems to flip back and forth, as there is ambiguity with respect to a real cube. This illustrates some of the rules by which your visual system interprets it's basic input to construct what you see. What I did was to take the illusions presented, and attempt to discover if I could "backup" my perceptions (backup FA) into that place before the interpretation took place which resulted in the illusion. For the Necker Cube example, just answer the question, "Can you see the Necker Cube as flat, 2 dimensional lines on paper, rather than a 3D cube?". After some effort I found myself able to do that. I did this with a number of the illustrations in Hoffman's book, and found some relatively easy to do once I had done the initial work, some fiendishly difficult, but possible to do for short periods of time, and some I have not been able to, and am always "caught" by the illusion. This indicates to me that in fact, you can sometimes:    "... get to see what comes before 'First Attention'.."    Or possibly you can't because "By Definition", FA is the first experience you can attend to, in which case my experimentation would indicate that you can see what came before the 'First Attention" boundary in some other context, or some at other time... i.e. the boundary is fluid. Regards, - Charlie