Raindrops at the Airport
Waiting to be called for boarding, I looked out the window: it was raining quite heavily. Water shone on the tarmac, punctuated by a myriad impacts of raindrops, which were forming circles of different and varying diameters, based, presumably, on the size of each individual raindrop. As far as I am aware, these are overall distributed randomly. At first sight, in any case, I could not perceive any pattern or regularity in the rapid succession of raindrops hitting the existing layer of water on this particularly flat surface.
But I tend to spend time in abstract thought, or daydreaming, or imagination, and if my surroundings make no further demands on my attention, after a while my eyes tend to unfocus. It is a common phenomenon of decreased visual accommodation, maybe particularly frequent in people with ADHD or autism. Since it often happens to me, I have learnt to pay attention to it, that is, to observe what occurs in my visual field without refocusing my gaze. In this case, what was striking was: the raindrops seemed to form a pattern. Among all the impacts, which I continued to perceive, three of them seemed to draw a triangle, that is, to fall every time in the same places, not with the largest impact but a quantitatively significant one nonetheless, at regular intervals, in such a way that isolated the shape of a triangle within the continuing multiplicity.
Still assuming that raindrops fall in a random pattern, it was then my brain which was isolating a pattern within the chaos, probably twisting reality just enough for that purpose. Human brains are quite well trained to do this: simplify a chaotic reality into shapes that can be computationally processed for practical purposes. Here, when I was paying attention, the lack of practical purpose for me in there being or not a pattern in the falling raindrops, associated with my scientific knowledge or belief that this was not the case, kept that pattern-making process below the level of my consciousness, as being unuseful: I was not seeing a pattern. With my attention diverted, indirectly considering the visual field, my brain continued its low-level processing and, by a small interstice in the synthesis of consciouness, I was able to observe it: how a pattern had appeared. This suggested that some of what I consciously perceive as patterns may be complete constructions of my perceptual and perception-processing systems, and that I may not generally be able to distinguish those from actual patterns present in the physical world. Some patterns that I see are there, some are not there.
What was even more striking: of these three, two raindrops would often fall at a very short interval from each other, and that seemed to create a movement, from one to the other, as if instead of separate raindrops falling from above, it was the impact circle that moved, along one of the sides of the triangle, at a very fast speed. I have since read something similar in the “beta phenomenon”, first identified by Wertheimer in 1912: if shown two dots in two different places in very quick succession, we will “see” the dot moving from one place to the next, including seeing it in a middle position where no dot actually ever was. In a more humorous fashion, I have a very fast dog of the whippet breed, and once a lady, after commenting on his beautiful coat, exclaimed “oh, but you have two of them!”, because Odin had run so fast in a circle behind her and back on the other side, it made more sense that there be two dogs instead of just one that ran so, so fast (mind-blowingly fast!).
In these examples, someone’s brain either creates a relation of causality where there is none, or because the actual one is “unbelievable”, imagines two beings where there is only one. Why do I say “causality” instead of “movement”? Well, one can consider movement as the most basic form of causality (departure of object from point A causes arrival of object at point B); one can also consider causality as a concept constructed from the observed phenomenon of movement (object arrives at B after departing from A and traveling for a time t). If two things happen one after the other in time, it is probably because one caused the other, we think. (Cause and effect as an artificial subset of reality.)
Patterns that are not there are not much less there than those who are. Rain drops can be perceived as forming a triangle, by a brain in a certain state, because that brain has a tendency to create causal relations out of everything, which it processes (and we perceive as “happening”) in succession (to itself, succession as defined by its own sequential way of processing input).
Because our perception presents things to us one after the other, our brain postulates relationships of cause and effect. These may be confirmed or not in later processing, but those that are not exist almost as much as those that do.
Perception and Reality
Some patterns are there, some are not there. That some are not there doesn’t mean that none are there. Nonetheless, the reality of a pattern is still predicated on my mode of perception; that others agree, that it can be measured, only mean that we have this mode of perception in common, and a measuring instrument that we created for it, to condition our agreement to an external, conventional, criterion.
So this light on the construction crane that blinks once, then twice, then once, then twice, is really there, but saying that does not mean more or less than the fact that I am here, with a mind that has notions of numbers and succession, able to interpret a visual phenomenon under the form of this pattern. There are phenomena and I can count: so I will interpret this phenomenon by a count of it. Surely the phenomenon possesses a countable attribute for me to count; but that does not mean that I can believe thus to possess its definition. It may have, probably has, many other aspects that other perceptual agents find convenient to them. So when I say : “it blinks once, then twice, and so on”, I only mean : “I can count a visual stimulus from there once, then twice, and so on.” That is, unfortunately, all that I can perceive. Far from defining the object, this remark exhausts my ability to perceive it.
When I talk about the world, I am still talking about myself. When I describe the world, I describe its shadow (on the cave wall, have at it) through a very specifically shaped sieve: it tells me that there is a world, but the shape of what I see tells me about the sieve.
Love and Hormones
When I hold my baby in my arms, I feel pleasure within myself and tenderness toward her. The rate of the hormone oxytocin in my bloodstream is increased. Which of these two phenomena is the cause, which the effect?
Pleasure and tenderness are feelings, phenomena which I experience physically and emotionally, of which I am conscious, and which “make sense” to me in terms of definitions and relationships within a personal history. (She is “my” child, I “love” her, etc.)
Increased oxytocin is a physiological phenomenon, unconscious and yet measurable, which is commonly conceived of as “producing” an “effect” of pleasure and tenderness.
But what produces the producer? What raises my oxytocin? The fact that I am holding my baby, whom I love. Preceded by the fact that I decided to hold my baby, be it in response to her call or out of my own appetite for cuddle.
Moreover, even though the oxytocin “makes me” feel good, and incites me to continue holding my baby, I can put her down in her cot if I decide to, if I need or want to do something else. So I am not mechanically destined to continue responding uniformly to physiology. But if I decide to continue holding my baby, my body will produce more oxytocin.
It seems that behavioral (conscious decisions) and physiological (varying hormone levels) phenomena continuously feed off each other, infinitely being each other’s cause and consequence, which makes them ultimately a single phenomenon progressing in time, rather than two phenomena linked by a causal relation, a view which appears only by artificially stopping time and distinguishing scopes according to our mode of observation.
Therefore, we could say that pleasure and tenderness are “associated with”, rather than “caused by”, an increased level of oxytocin in the bloodstream.
Instead of trying to determine causal relations between our physiology and our behaviors, it seems more accurate to consider our condition as “incarnation”, a continuously bidimensional existence, the ultimate logic of which or direction (whether or not I will hold my baby or not, keep holding her longer or not) cannot be reduced to either of these two (artificially distinguished) dimensions.