That's a good point. Previously i would have said a beautiful sunset (or breast) is an example of perfection - but as you say it's only a human concept of what beauty or perfection is.

Haha! Particularly the breast part. But I have found perception and understanding to be fluid, very fluid. I'll give you an example. When my father-in-law was sick with Alzheimer's and needed 24-hour care, my mother-in-law arranged for and hired a live-in caregiver from Indonesia, something that in Taiwan is very affordable (less than 1K/month). My MIL, being paranoid as she is and worried that the caregiver would catch the eye of not only her husband, who was bedridden, but also me as we were then living with them to help with the care, hired the ugliest, most homely caregiver she could find. I must say, the woman was not pretty in the classic or modern sense. I sort of felt sorry for her when we first met.

But after living with her under the same roof for, what, a couple years? Something like that. I observed what a wonderful, strong, good person she was. In other words, I saw the beauty on the inside. In time, she literally looked beautiful to me, not in the lusty, "wow, she's hot" sense, but in a much more meaningful way. I could see how a man could fall in love with her. For me, that was a good experience, observing the change in my own perception with regards to another person. It was good because it demonstrated something I already knew philosophically but that I didn't experience often, that our perception is biased and often very wrong.

How about 'understanding'? We have an imperfect understanding of potentially everything as we discussed, so is perfect understanding even possible theoretically? Or in the case of art, that connection you mention is a kind of understanding, a connection to a concept or an essence (is concept and essence the same thing?)- can we ever achieve a state of full understanding? Not in terms of understanding every single detail but rather an abstract communication - essence to essence?

Good question. I don't know. I don't think so though. Maybe myth and art come as close as we can. If we are capable of perfect, clear understanding, it would be a passing moment, not something sustainable because we are constantly changing. So I don't think I will ever have anywhere near perfect understanding of anything. But I do think instances happen when we do understand. Imagine people in Ukraine right now, hiding in the subway. I suspect they have pretty close to perfect understanding, at moments, when they look into each other's eyes. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe their fear or hunger makes that very difficult.

I've often thought everything we need to know about existence is in the creation myths - for example, Adam and Eve. The tree of knowledge, harmony, then the Error (Fall), which, in turn, produced life through it's 'genie out of the bottle' dynamic, with all the threads escaping but paradoxically wanting to reconnect with their essence.

Is that 'tree of knowledge' real? If we are a computer simulation, that suggests we were created according to a computer concept, in which case we have some kind of connection back to that concept. Can we tap into that?

Maybe myth is the closest we can come! With regards to the simulation, let me throw this out. Maybe we're an imagination. Maybe we're imagining all this on some level. Or, maybe simulation and imagination have been mixed, so that some entity evolved enough to be able to create a simulation run by imagination.

Or maybe we're experiencing some actual organic imagination. That doesn't fly in the face of science. Our world literally is largely created by our imagination. Your fences first appeared in your mind, right? As have all your carvings and other work.