Discovery begins with a shift in perception — someone willing to see differently what others take as real. From Galileo turning his lens outward to Descartes turning it inward, to scientists now asking whether mind itself is the field where everything appears — every breakthrough starts the same way: by testing a new way of seeing.

Could technology support awakening? From AI prompts to AR mirrors to VR lucid-dreams, tools might rehearse perception as interface, not fact. Yet technology remains scaffolding. The real experiment is always perception itself.

Perception is not decoration — it is the practice itself. Traditions from Vedānta to Zen teach that awakening begins with vision: from world as cause to mind as cause, from separation to interlinked selfhood. This annotation explores why perception-shifts matter most in a consciousness-first experiment.

Stoicism trains resilience; Idealism proposes that reality is mind-made. Together, they form a creative scaffold: Stoic Idealism. This annotation explores how the posture of virtue and the hypothesis of consciousness-first reality can be combined as a testable experiment, not a doctrine.