The Limitations Of The Human Senses

Evolution has structured us humans so that we of all species can not only thrive in any environment on our planet, but through our inventiveness we will probably be able to thrive on other planets in the future. In order to do so, we have analysed, measured and constructed our world and accordingly developed tools and instruments with which to master it. However, what if that analysis and measurement was at heart in error? Hamstrung by its own perceptive apparatus, its first assumptions? 

There are plenty of things beyond our sensory apparatus. Wavelengths of light beyond the visible spectrum, which we only make visible through x-raying, ultraviolet and infrared devices. There are also sound frequencies beyond our hearing, such as those dogs can hear but we can't. Scientists deal in sub-atomic particles and quantum mechanics which is posited entirely on probability; the latest of these is the hunt for the Higgs Boson which theory has posited must exist long before we have been able to discover it in actuality. At the other end of the scale, from the infinitesimally small to the planetary sized, current theories have the universe existing in around eleven or twelve dimensions in order for the cosmological equations to work. Yet the human brain is constituted to function only in three (height, width, depth). Trying to conceive in four dimensions is difficult enough let alone in eleven! Our brains work brilliantly for the scale we operate in our world. It struggles when the scale is either shrunk or inflated beyond that. The scientific theory may advance our understanding, but our hard-wiring means we are limited in utilising such understanding in coping with our everyday world. 

And that should be the clue into the state of things. Perceiving in three dimensions, within the visible spectrum of light and the wavelengths of audible sounds, works for the human race. It works so well we have mastered our planet and created all sorts of tools to advance our abilities, even to get us into space. BUT, we are equally trapped by this same way of operating that has got us this far. Machines can 'see' the invisible wavelengths for us and indeed we use this to great effect with our medical imaging machines to penetrate the opacity of the human body to locate threats deep within, through Positron Emission Tomography, Computerised Axial Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Ultrasound, Dynamic Spatial Reconstructors... But these are images and versions of our bodies. Mediated through instruments. They are not directly perceived through our own bodies.

Even if we had X-Ray vision ourselves, so that we could see into other's bodies and solid objects, the way our visual system works is one of cutting corners. There are so many visual stimulations in our everyday environment, that when our eyes are scanning ahead of us they are only 'seeing' a mere 10-15% of what is actually there. The other 85% is stuff it filters as unremarkable, stuff that accords to the brain's templates of what a street scene should look like, or what the view across farming land should represent. That is the brain has pre-constructed what we are seeing and the eye is only scanning for deviations from the normal anticipated view. Because from an evolutionary point of view, ancient man would have been looking for threats in the environment and that's what has been passed down to us. We look for difference, for the unexpected. The everyday and normal is taken as read. The laying down of these templates of 'reality' happen during the child's development as it learns not only how the world works, but how the world 'is'. And so the cycle spins on, as this takes place in a mere three dimensions as the world view is acquired from those teaching the child.

But what if the world really isn't like that? That it only appears thus, because that is the most convenient ways for our brains to perceive it thus, conveyed over millennia of evolution? Take measurement for example, a key concept in our mastery of the planet that has enabled us very successfully to fly to the moon, Jupiter and beyond. Yet the history of measurement, the drive for unimpeachable accuracy, is back to front. We have measurements first, then we try and define and centralise them. One of the earliest measurements used by man, peppering the Old Testament, is the cubit. That is the length of the human forearm. But your forearm is not the same length as my forearm. Could cause trouble in land disputes when trying to mark out boundaries... Or take the humble metre, finally defined in the late eighteenth century as the distance between two marks on a brick made of a metal alloy that was resistant to expansion for temperature variations. What could be more materially defined than a lump of metal? And yet the definition of a metre was further refined, first by a measurement of radioactive decay of an isotope of caesium and more recently a fraction of distance travelled by light because light has a constant velocity. All this time we've merrily been using humble metres and centimetres and millimetres, blissfully unaware that we were probably not actually measuring a true metre. Measure first, then define retrospectively. Just as a side note, the large hadron collider searching for the Higgs Boson essentially works by slamming particles against one another to break them apart into ever smaller ones. While the cubit and other similar measurements such as the pole, perch and the rod which were actual rods pressed against the earth to measure it, well all this is a rather male way of partitioning the world and its matter isn't it?

In my latest novel, "The Dreams In The Key Of G", I have a character who challenges this way of portioning up the world as she declares war on the SI system of units. What would be the upshot if we were no longer able to measure things? It would be a most different world that is for sure. As it is quite possible anyway, since our senses, our processing brains and the output from them including how we measure things, has probably become outmoded by the present level of technology we have attained. When our children start learning things about the world, it becomes solidified in the brains as 'reality'. But in doing so, those neurons close off other possible pathways for the brain to compute and calculate and process its stimulatory output from without. It is quite possible this is a fundamental disservice we do not only to our children, but to the species itself. Worth thinking about perhaps... 

Published by Dead Ink Books 26/07/2018

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

The Future History Of Demythology - Flash Fiction

Avant-garde is time bound. Hidebound. In our age of rapid technological change and shrinking attention spans, the avant-garde are the nostalgics. The left-behind, derrière-garde guardians of the remembered past, (forlornly) demanding concentration and application..

Body Politic was a metaphor that came into use through a fifteenth century understanding of medical anatomy. With the human genome and the structure and function of DNA becoming known, new metaphors present themselves which we currently remain insensible to.

Consciousness will not reveal itself from human genomics (see B). For how can we objectively observe fully in the round something in which we already stand within? Anticipating our consciousness to demurely deconstruct itself for us, as us. Consciousness forever as the dark side of the moon.

Decidedly deciduous deicide, yet dread of death and the dangled deal with a desperately conjectural afterlife, denotes the divine obtains still.

Ethics derived etymologically from a group or cultural disposition or mien and then back engineered to apply as obligations for each individual member of that group or culture. Only in this atomised age, singular group cultural identities evanesce. All morals and moral behaviour are relative. Ethics have become superannuated, duty obsolete and there is nothing binding us together, be it natural or moral law. 

Freedom: if you are reading this of your own free will, then you have a reasonable degree of freedom. If you disagree with even a single proposition here, then you are enslaved by your programming. If you agree with every single tenet here, then you are enslaved until you break free of what they counter. What lies on the other side once you have burst through? Who can say as it is unexplored terrain. Probably a whole new set of super-subtile myths to enslave you afresh. 

Game Theory is applied to many aspects of life, positing that when humans calculate that cooperating with one another, it best redounds to their mutual interest. The deterrent argument follows this flawed logic, since as David Hume explained through his white swans, a single appearance of a black swan on the pond erases the proof of your senses for the entirety preceding that occasion; that is, the nuclear deterrent argument only has to be disproved from holding once and we are all finished for eternity anyway.

History is the Butterfly Theory in effect. Yes it constantly repeats itself (since its actors are all humans given to repetitive behaviours), but the starting conditions are different each time so that the outcome will not be the same as previously. Once upon a time and only once indeed…

I is not in the word ‘team’ (more’s the pity) but it is in ‘time’, which is ironic seeing as after a brief span, the I drops out permanently. I is not only in the word ‘identity’ but actually leads it; but what is the point of spending as lifetime establishing an identity, only to have mortality erase it permanently? I also leads the word ‘intimacy’, yet this proves nothing. 

Je t’aime… Je m’aime (consider that phonetically) more like it. For we are but a clump of sensory information receptors, who have hit upon the evolutionary decision (randomly of course) that they are best served by aggregating and maintaining a unified outlook of the whole. But they are still in control of this consciousness rather than the other way around (see C).

K, Josef was guilty and he knew it, Kafka knew it, Max Brod knew it and now you dear reader know it. 

Language is not fit for purpose. Conceals as much as it communicates. Slippage and seepage. Ellipsis and elision.   

Myth is pernicious since it dresses up ignorance (of cause and effect in the natural world) in supernatural pretence in order to justify the exigencies of the local institutional and power relations among humans. Though science has provided better approximations of cause and effect to strip away the supernatural and replace it with ‘reason’, science itself is a myth-based body of knowledge (see S).  Myth, like ethics (see E), is man-made and therefore self-imposed and should only be demanding of voluntary adherence.

Nouns are Plato’s Ideal Forms in linguistic form. That is, they don’t actually exist either. Objects classified as one noun or other are approximations and simulacra. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” et al.

Once upon a time (see H).

Pangram of “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” only holds for the temporary duration of the ban on fox hunting perhaps, when the fox knows it has legal protections from the dog. An example of the viral algorithm infecting language,with periodicy, permutation and prosaicness.

Quantum Mechanics are scientists hedging their bets. Mathematically proven probability. Probably.  

Reality is a construction of the human mind. The notion of an objective reality is merely a human consensus. The templates of what we take for reality are imprinted in our brains and our senses only scan for deviations referenced against the template in order to prompt our responsive action. Our reality templates are premised on our three-dimensional perceptions, yet scientists posit 11 or 12 dimensions of existence (see S).

Science bears more of an elegant, logically consistent canon than religious beliefs, but it is no less a credo. Whatever the equations prove, our limited perceptional apparatus means we can only conceive in three dimensions, four at a stretch, yet current theories are up at around 11 or 12 dimensions of existence (see R). 

Tripartite human brain, reptilian, mammalian and human, does not represent unalloyed progress and upgrade. Greater processing power yes, but we have barely progressed from reptilian filial infanticide, to mammalian killing of a rival’s offspring, to human kind’s targeting of any and every one of its own species (see G).

Uroborus is perhaps of all mythic symbols the one that resonates most. However, take your pick of the myriad of symbolic representations it proffers: Circle of Life; creative renewal; duality, synthesis and integration; immortality; eternal immutability; perfection; kundalini energy; hermetically closed systems; feedback loops; the philosopher’s stone; the singularity from which all existence stems. Go pick the bones out of that little lot. 

Vicious circle applies to not only language (words defined in terms of other words), but to this very exercise itself, (many of these definitions refer the reader on to other definitions listed here). There is no inertial frame for logic, nor language (see C,L). 

W; literally double ‘u’, itself already the elongated sound of twin oo’s. Tautologically redundant as an outcome of an alphabet whose characters and their sound bear no relationship to the meaning of the words they delineate (See L). 

Nu Skin - flash story

The amino acid readers had levelled the playing field for love. You saw someone you fancied in the arms of another man. At a glance you can see you do not match up to her physical type. So you merely whip out your reader and scan the paramour’s DNA. His reaction would inevitably be conflicted. Flattered that you recognised him as a superior looking man worthy of emulation. Moderately perturbed that you were about to challenge him. The reader’s particle field serving as a gauntlet being slapped across the love rival’s cheek. For, after a single night having your DNA reconfigured under the auspices of the machine, the next morning there you were a perfect physical replica of the beau. Then it was solely down to charisma and personality to swing the women’s choice between her two identical specimens.  

Yet it wasn’t quite so simple. The body might have changed overnight, but the psyche had to permit itself time to get used to it. In the same way that first time you shaved your new face and its unfamiliarity would trip you up time and again and lead you to slice your visage to ribbons, you also had to project your new features appropriately. You could not carry yourself the same way as you had with your former body. You had to ease into your gait, figure out the space it inhabited, how it moved and gestured. Too precipitant and you would sink any chance you had with your object of desire, since your mismatched clumsiness with your own self would paint you as inherently undesirable. For all the instant  transformation, the shrewd suitor still had to play the long game of love.