Spinning Yarns

Reach for an apple. There is a fleeting moment, nearly imperceptible, between the instant your mind has the apple in its hand and actual contact between your fingers and its smooth, cool skin. In all things, it seems, we must first commit our minds to the shape of some future universe, and only then will it come to pass, either by virtue of our actions or despite them.

And though barely perceptible, that bare instant might as well be an eternity. Once chosen, the narrow span between imagination and truth is akin to a bowstring, flung forward inexorably like some small fragment of destiny. At the moment your fingers release that string, your mind is has already seen the possibilities spread out before it, chosen the most desirable; all that remains is for the Universe to catch up.

Except, of course, that nothing is really inexorable, in a world as dynamic as the one we inhabit. Just as an archer can turn toward a new target before the arrow leaves the bow, so too can our minds be drawn along, constantly adapting and responding to changes in the world we’re trying to shape. So it is that the simple sequence of dreaming to doing to being is not quite so simple as it might otherwise seem — at the very least, there is more than one imagination at work.

One person, standing on the sidewalk and staring up at a random point in the sky, may entice a few passers by to glance up, out of curiosity, if nothing else. But add another one or two people looking at the same random point (more or less), and it becomes almost irresistible — and in fact, the more people you add, the more people will look, until it seems as though behaviour can be directed almost entirely by the inertia of curiosity. But that’s nothing compared to what one person can do with a glance or a pointed finger. Walking past a flock of pigeons, bobbing and cooing on the ground, I flick my hand open as though chasing a bee off my lunch, and in a sudden explosion of feathers and sound, the whole flock will scatter away from my radiating fingers, as if they’d been spraying laser light. Extend your hand to shake someone’s hand, even someone who dislikes you, and watch them move to accept it before they consciously realize it. Pointing, you can direct a whole crowd’s attention; hold and move your body just so, and you can change the pattern of how someone is driving on a road you want to cross.

All of these things seem to work by hooking into that gap between expectation and reality, between the establishment of truth in the mind and its reification in the world, and using it to communicate. In some sense, it’s as if our minds and our awareness actually extend out past the physical boundaries of our bodies, in a way that is almost as tangible as real touch. After all, if someone can move you by manipulating that gap, it’s as if they control you — not you directly, but the space surrounding you. As such, our usual scientific intuition about the nature of our selves, isolated and separate except at points of physical contact, may well be wrong. John Donne’s famous Meditation perhaps put it best:

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated [...] As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: [...]. No man is an island, entire of itself [...] any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Filed by Michael at 12:58 under Philosophical
Comments Off