Reality
Lee Emmerich Jamison
Yesterday I wrote of a world led with prejudice and the danger of being outside the dominant mindset. This is an important issue because of a simple fact, crucial to understanding how politics and culture are shaped.
Nobody, well, no human being, lives in the "real" world.
As I noted in "Dichomaton" last week, Time Magazine's special issue on the mind referenced the ways our senses fool us into a faith in the completeness of our picture of the world. One experiment in was particularly interesting. A subject focused on looking at a point and, while they maintained that focus, another person held up a hand within their peripheral field of view. In numerous well controlled experiments it has been shown few people can accurately determine the number of fingers the second person displays outside of a fairly narrow cone of focus.
One word used to describe this sensory effect is "granularity". I like the term "discontinuity". Our sense of the world is that our experience is continuous. We don't, for example, see the holes in our field of view caused by the absence of light sensing cells where the optic nerve leaves the eye. Our brains cover that over, borrowing information from one eye to deal with what the other misses. If the other eye is closed or not operational the brain simply fills in with a best guess. We remain oblivious to the sensory vacuum. To magnify this point ask yourself whether you sense visual blackness behind you. The answer will be 'no'. You have no visual sense of that area at all.
It appears crucial to human consciousness that we feel our world to be continuous. That goes double for our sense of self. The one-ness of self that extends from mind to fingers and toes is universal among humans. From the example of someone like physicist Stephen Hawking, however, we can see that all the appendages, and the supposed connectedness they grant us to the rest of the world, are not necessary for one to have a sense of self.
Hawking's contact with the outside world, which once included a capacity to use his extremities, now is limited almost entirely to his capacity to control his eyes. With that he is able to command a computer communication device. In spite of that severe limitation on his capacity to express the workings of his mind he maintains a clear sense of self and a remarkable ability to process and generate ideas. Stephen Hawking "lives" between his ears.
We, too, live between our ears. All of us, regardless of how well the nervous system on which our brains depend for information and expression works, really live and function in a dark enclosure with a volume of between 1300 and 1500 cubic centimeters. The mushy mass that is us can process no information directly. This has been shown in tens of thousands of neurosurgeries wherein the patients were kept conscious to assist in locating problems, but felt no pain or other discomfort. Instead all the information that forms our PICTURE of the world comes to us via the electrochemical sparks of a web of nerve fibers.
This is, to borrow a term from computer graphics, a highly pixelated process. Our knowledge of the outside world literally comes in sparks. Our brains process the sparks in the light of long experience and present to our consciousness an interpretation of seamless reality. If there are glaring holes in that reality we find those holes deeply disconcerting. Our answer to such vertiginous awareness is to fill in the blanks, to establish a story line that either makes, or at least inserts, sense. Thus are we allowed to maintain the seeming continuity of our world.
How does this affect politics?, some of you P.J.s (political junkies) may be yelling about now. This is one of the roles of what we call mythology. Because we are evolved as highly social creatures this process of interpretation for the filling in of blanks is very malleable. In spite of our sense of a complete and continuous reality the real world is mostly not knowing. Scientific knowledge, for example, (only a small part of our suite of ways of knowing) doubles about every five years. The world in which I was born knew less than one percent of what today's world knows, but we didn't sense a world that was 99 percent blank. Nor has discovery finally reached beyond the fog of ignorance. A lot of blank remains. There is a great hunger for easy mythological fill. Before it is anything else politics is the art of manipulating the shape of a culture's unifying myths.
What is your purpose in life? What does it mean that some are rich and some poor? What do we take for granted in the concept of "poverty"? What is money? Is political power necessarily purifying whereas commercial power is necessarily corrupting? Point by point in these and a thousand other questions politics plays a role in establishing a unifying mythological continuity. Times like ours illuminate this process because so many reject the preferred mythology of the elites of society. By seeing the contrasts between competing world views we can begin to perceive the outlines of the blank spaces those world views address differently. Then we can question not only the failings of our opponents' world view, but also our own.
Somehow, every act of a human being begins with a single nerve cell firing. Whether that act is delivering food or committing a murder largely depends of how a mind is prepared to respond to the impulses arriving from nerves entering a small dark enclosure. That potentiation is part of a seeming continuity of experience heavily influenced by our communication of myth to, and among, each other.
Politics, whether driven from the top down by elitists, from the bottom up by populists, or by some moderated compromise of the two, is critical to the mythological forces shaping our sense of corporate continuity. And myth is how we make of many people one seemingly continuous reality.
