Series: 

Essay 8b: 

Synopsis:

Self

Making Sense

A living being naturally makes sense of things; he sees their essence (as relevant to him)

This is part 2 of 4 in Real-to-Real.

 

Sauron’s Eye never stops moving.  A living being is curious within his ken: he sees things in the buzz of perception and makes sense of those things.  He pays attention to what’s interesting to him; he values them good, bad or irrelevant, he feels attraction or repulsion to them, and he acts on them.  In one motion, he gives meaning to reality.

 

Why?  Because a living being is alive and he wants to stay that way.  A living being must survive and reproduce in the real world, therefore, evolution requires that a living being make sense of the real world.  Consider, for example, Mr. Amoeba swimming around in my intestines.  In one motion, he must see and understand; he must separate the relevant from the irrelevant, the good from the bad, then he must take action (food here, predator there).  Or consider Mr. Wildebeest.  He must understand the essential nature of lion immediately upon sight or smell, and it would be a grave miscalculation for him to snuggle up on the couch with lion to watch Friends.  For the most part, I expect that Messrs. Amoeba and Wildebeest are hardwired to make sense of their world. 

 

I’m wired to make sense of things, too.  I see and I know: I see the sky, and under the sky a hill, and on the hill a tree, and under the tree, a person, then his face, and I know what they are.  It’s so natural to us living beings that we don’t notice it, until it goes wrong.  That’s why the parasite, T.gondii, is so famous.  To reproduce, the parasite must get into a cat’s gut.  So the parasite first finds a mouse, gets in the mouse’s brain, then causes mouse to no longer know what a cat is.  Mouse falls in love with cat.  Mouse goes running right to cat and ends up in cat’s stomach (bringing the parasite with him).  Parasite wins the game of evolution because he saw mouse and understood his nature, while mouse loses because he saw cat and didn’t understand.

 

We make sense of the world, and it seems so easy for us, but try making a computer do it.  A computer has cameras to see with, for sure, but it doesn’t care to look at anything because it doesn’t want anything, and even when its programmers make it look at something, the computer can’t understand it.  Programmers spend their life’s energy writing image recognition software that uses brute force to look at trillions of pixels in search of statistically significant correlations, and if the correlations line up, the computer outputs "face," but the computer can’t see a face.  A child sees a face in an instant, as do the programmers when making sense of the computer’s output.

 

Every living being makes sense of what’s relevant to him in his own special way.  Mr. Amoeba sees food in my intestines and swims to it; I feel a bad taco and I tell my wife all about the food truck.  I tell her a story.  Why do we people tell stories about everything?  Because we have imagination, intellect, and language, and for us, stories make sense of reality, even when we’re telling stories about the silliness of other people’s stories.  It’s like in the X-Files when Agent Mulder believed the story about the Great Mutato, an alleged monster in a small Midwestern town.  In fact, the Great Mutato was an elephant-man with a crush on Cher.  Agent Scully asked Mulder, “Is there anything that you don't believe in, Mulder?” 

 

We living beings reflexively make sense of whatever is in Sauron’s Eye and we know not how.  We just do it and we can’t stop doing it.  Without noticing, I make sense of that nutty driver who keeps switching lanes, or a stranger’s dog (friend or foe?), or the dream I just woke up from... and Mr. Amoeba makes sense of my guts.  Herein the miracle.  Every living being goes into the world, and somehow, naturally, makes sense of it, and this is an act of creation, not merely the correlating or stripping of pixels. 

 

To make sense of something is to see its essence.  In the blooming buzz of reality, a living being sees an essential nature, an Aristotelian form, a gist, a gestalt, a pattern.  All these words are just synonyms, though, and they don’t explain the essence of essence.  This is essence:

Essence is like a caricature.  A caricature has a lot fewer pixels than the real thing, hence a computer can't correlate it, but when a caricature is true, we people know it in an instant.  We know that it captures an essence.  Likewise, imitation.  To imitate another person is to channel an essence of that person, and we see it all the time.  I once saw a drag queen become Diana Ross even though there was no physical resemblance.  I once saw a little Indian kid become Allen Iverson doing the crossover dribble.  The little kid clearly wasn’t Allen Iverson, but his movement captured the essence of the Iverson crossover.

 

Caricature and imitation are alive; they move.  Remember that Aquinas said life is movement.  Here’s my thesis: all living beings naturally see essence, each in his own way, and it happens when, in a flash, we make sense of something.  We see a thing move and we just know.  How can I enhance my seeing of essence?  My high school art teacher, Mr. Harmon (may he rest in peace) said, don’t look too hard at it.  Mr. Harmon told us to look in-between things.  He said, don’t fixate on the things, rather, draw the spaces.  Mr. Harmon wanted us to see the movement that connects things.  Essence is alive and it moves.

 

Next essay: Essence is real and I’ll prove it to you.