Nose-deep in murky waters

The thrill that we experience when riding a roller coaster does not have to do with the heights (there are many buildings taller than that), the ups and downs or even the speed (any high-speed train is much faster than a roller coaster without eliciting even a spark of excitement). The amusement comes from the sensation of apparent danger: the wind on our face, the weightlessness at the beginning of the first drop, the shaking and the rattling are all signs that trigger our survival instinct and tell us to get out of there as fast as you can, while the logic mind keeps reassuring us that thousands of people ride the attraction everyday without a single incident. Cartoonist Nathan W. Pyle illustrated the idea in this hilarious cartoon.

In a certain way, that is the base of any kind of play: exposing ourselves to a life-like situation to see how we deal with it even if know that the stakes are not the real one. In fact, if you are too aware of the safeties, the play loses some of its authenticity. Let us take for example the board game Monopoly, where the players are supposed to take the role of heartless real-state moguls who buy properties and earn rent from their tenants. If the rent (or the penalties) you have to pay are higher than your own income, you will eventually ran out of money and are forced to give up. In this case, being too aware of the ludic nature of the contest means that you might be inclined to "condone" some payments so as to allow the match to go on, but this de-naturalizes the game. On the other hand, if you take the game to the letter you might drive yourself in situation like the one I had when I was eight or nine years old: in a streak of good luck I managed to bankrupt my father, and his admission of defeat broke my heart so badly that I spent the next half hour crying my eyes out.

Photo: Bugeater

This kind of "safe play" can be extrapolated to the less thrilling but nonetheless stimulating task of diving into intellectually complex texts, which still abound on the internet in spite of the unavoidable trend to vulgarization that comes with the open-house policy. The title sounds appealing, the introduction sets the bar pretty high and you are face with the decision of taking up the challenge (risking wasting the time and a bitter defeat) or pass on the difficult piece (and missing the opportunity to encounter ideas and examples that could be enlightening). Being curious by nature, but having limited time and mental resources I have had all the possible outcomes: there are many articles that I simply have to pass if I am not in a condition to digest them; some others are attractive enough that they become under my scrutiny, but I end up having to retreat because the waters are just too deep; the final group, the most thrilling, comprises those where my competence is to some extent under question and, through persistence and targeted investigation, turn up to provide some kind of epiphany.

This morning I ran into a text that piqued my interest but seem to be borderline. It talked about consciousness, perception and awareness, concepts all of them which have always sparked my imagination. However, the author is a declared idealist, a philosophical line of thought with which I do not agree, so I feared that the content of the article might not be very inspiring to me. But in then I decided to take up the challenge, prepared myself for the worst, hoped for the best and waded into the depths of the text, which could only be crossed with a lot of attention and in careful, little steps.

The part that of the text that I agree with, which is also the majority of it, describes how every awareness or perception is a combination of a few conscious elements taken from a relative small set (perhaps one hundred), and that these elements repeat themselves from occasion to occasion and even across individuals in the same way that carbon atoms repeat themselves across all living creatures. Some of these elements are purely perceptive, such as colors, tastes, orientations. Some are more elaborate such as shapes and amounts, intentions, languages. The top tier is composed by synthesis factors with give rise to the concepts of the self, the world (everything except the self) and the judgements (the relationships between the self and the world). I have to admit that it took me two readings to grasp the entirety of the meaning, but in the end I felt quite confident of the result and happy to have dared to dig it out.

There was however, one part that I did not agree with: the author suggests that the ideas we generate are the only way we can exist (this is the idealism part) and therefore these notions define, in the end, ways of being. Although I am aware that every perception we have of the reality is mediated by our own selves, I am more of the idea that everything has a material essence independent of the observer. Of course this begs the question of how to integrate the materialism with the factors of consciousness and I would argue that these are different emergent properties of the human brain. The fact that most humans are capable of understanding the concept of numbers only means that all their brains are equally complex and therefore share the same emergent property of counting. In fact, most primates and even crows can count even if their brains do not share on all the conscience factors that humans share.

Reading the article so far I have just realized that I might be making it just as murky as the original one, and perhaps even deterring the not-so-committed from reading all the way to the end. If that is the case, I apologize, but the experience has been interesting enough that I wanted to register it here to give you all a chance of sharing into it. Because, in the end, everyone can indulge from time to time in a minute (or an hour) of nose-deep wading into the thick waters of the understanding. Have a nice evening.