Sense and Sense Ability
For all of us who may find that we now have a surplus of time on our hands it is critical that we use it wisely. I do not take this obligation lightly and so for my part I have been wondering why my ears, eyes, nose and mouth are all on my face and not distributed elsewhere around my body. Surely it would be more useful to have at least one of my eyes on a fingertip so I can easily look behind me or around corners? How is it possible that such a mutation has not developed and survived given its obvious evolutionary advantages? The answer would seem to be simply a lack of time.
As humans we are still only in the early stages of our Darwinian development. A mere few hundred thousand years as an apparently sapient being and less than three million as a any kind of homo — erectus, habilis, or australopithecus. Not nearly enough time for our sense organs to migrate away from the brain that they serve for presumably that is why they are arranged as they are, so they can easily and quickly report back to mission control what they sense in the world around us.
What does the brain do with that information when it arrives? Well, in this case I am afraid we are more like a bat than I would care to think. Really, I thought we had got past all that cave stuff many homos ago but the brutal reality is that we use our sensory input the same way a bat might use the returning echoes to avoid the walls of its lair or to gobble up an insect nearby. In our case though, rather than construct a route to travel along or a menu for dinner we use the returning echoes of our senses to construct who we think we are.
For it is our view of our relationship to our environment that defines us. This is not always the common view, perhaps understandably as among us only the exceptional resident of Gotham has any desire to be likened to a bat. Instead, given our nature as egocentric apes we prefer to think that we have a well formed ‘I’ that then interacts with the world, shaping our environment rather than being shaped by it. We see ourselves as the flower rising from the seed and making the garden beautiful or useful rather than noticing that our size, our shape, our colour and our time of arrival and of departure are all determined by the soil, the wind, rain and sun.
This Me centred version of the universe was surely behind our elated response to the great discovery of the human gene, the code within us that would explain all. Omniscience lurked in our very cells, Richard Dawkins explained, decrying the need for something greater beyond us. The first word of the phrase Selfish Gene was meant to describe how the fundamental components of our biological selves behaved when in fact that title simply encoded our own obsequious obsession with ourselves. An obsession that was soon to be inconveniently truthed by the study of epigenetics and the knowledge that even the chromosomal stone tablets of our destiny solemnly engraved with our DNA were subject to amendment by the fickleness of everything we heard, felt, saw touched, tasted, smelt or thought. Our genome might be a map of where we might be able to go but it is our perception of our environment that we turn to for directions as we proceed along life’s path.
The trick here is in the words as it is not just the environment on its own that determines the expression of our genes, but our perception of it. This might seem like a petty distinction, but it is far from so. Within it lies worlds.
So when I see ugliness and you see beauty in a rock, when I experience fear but you delight in the coming storm clouds, it is not the rock or the storm that fires the neurons and diverts the blood flow in my brain. It is that same brain’s act of perception of these events that counts, not just the events themselves. Can such subjectivity be real? Well, we have all had, perhaps, the experience of hearing another’s recall of an occasion where we were also present and thinking ‘Were we really at the same event? Wow’ and then, of course, ‘how could they have got it so wrong!’.
Our environment pings back to us our own bias and predilections, our own preconceived ideas of what the world is like and how it operates. Talk about self-isolation in a bubble! The bubble of our own mind. But all is not lost, we can come down from our self-imposed Alert Level 4 and like the bat we can make use of this rebounding information.
By taking a step back and becoming the observer of our perception of the world we can use what we see to construct a more accurate picture of who we think we really are. By observing how I interact with others and the world around me I will get real information as to who I am. The returning signals tell me, perhaps, that where you see in a stone the grace of solidity and form I see an ugly, unyielding obstruction; that looking up skywards I see the potency for destruction and mayhem in the darkening sky when you see the freshness and rejuvenation of the coming rain.
The clouds do not define me or you but by watching myself watching them I can more clearly perceive the outline of who I really am. I may see and project myself as a positive and sunny individual, and convince myself that others see me as such, but the truth lies in my private perception of the sky and the rock rather than my constructed story of me. Observing my reaction to rock and sky perhaps I am not such a Pollyanna after all and a more honest perception is that I actually believe the world to be a place of obstruction and destruction; a place where things cannot be done and even if done become subject to decay.
So having seen myself more honestly through my own observation of my worldly interactions I am then faced with a choice. Do I update my story of who I am, my personal fan fiction, or do I keep the fantasy intact? This is the change point, the moment in time when I have the opportunity to alter the trajectory of my life to actually be the better person that I fantasise I already am. It is a clash of stories, a poetry slam where I compete against myself.
Should my honest perception , the insight gained from self observation, prevail then it may be that the poorer tale has won, that I am now accepting a version of myself that is less inflated than the one I prefer to carry around. But the comparison is not fair for one is made of mist and the other of gold. It is only by knowing the truth of myself that I can begin to effect real change, to leave behind the pain and insecurities presently embedded in my being and constantly reflected in the mirror world around me if I care to look. Like for the Evil Queen the mirror tells the truth. I may not be the most beautiful of all but if I choose to acknowledge that, for now, I live with Grumpy and Bashful and other unpleasant and unwanted traits then I have a genuine chance to leave them behind, to finally free myself and to be one who lives happily ever after.
