Stick-esque, or a Poke in the Eye
There is, or rather was, a stick I used to see every day along the bike path as I headed home. Until a summer rainstorm led the creek to finally wash it away. It was stuck in the ground - literally a stick in the mud. More of a branch really about six or seven feet long, a foot around, projecting out of the ground at a very shallow angle. Rising to only two feet or so above the ground at the end of its run. It also tapered along its length so that end-on it gave the appearance of being of uniform width when coming upon it. This was the problem; the stick was parallel to the creek, parallel to the bike path so that I always came upon it head on, every day on the way home for a year. And every day for a year when I came up to it I was momentarily sure I was looking at an animal, a small dog, a fox, a beaver, or a groundhog. Certainly something small and of mammalian nature. There were of course twenty-four or more hours between each occurrence and inevitably my mind was elsewhere, but still it required effort every time to fight down the initial apprehension that I was looking at something alive. There was always something about it that seemed to be shimmering intelligently in some way.
Earlier this week I read an article that reminded me of this set of incidences: A Real Science of Mind - NYTimes.com. The author, Tyler Burge, dubious of the notion that MRI pictures of brain states - brain activity states - show us actual processes of human consciousness and emotion. A resoundingly over-baked claim he thinks. He instead offers generative and perceptual psychology for insights into these questions. Perceptual psychology, as nearly as I can understand it is a mathematical rigorous window into a "representational accuracy" depiction of a being-needs-state correlation. The path to consciousness lay in life forms mapping the outside into the inside. Here the senses, vision, are paramount. He gives the example of Euclidian depth perception and convergence. Burge, following Descartes states: The distance between the eyes in many animals is constant. Suppose that distance to be innately coded in the visual system. Stereoscopic vision's ability to give us distance information depends on part of the brains existing to wring out a bit of geometry. Perhaps one reason why nature produces so many "faces" particularly in mammals the same way, with the same proportions to the sensory organ groupings. Especially the distance between the eyes. He goes on to talk about Contour Groupings. This is the role of outline, color and texture boundaries to Object and pattern recognition.
I wrote once before here on Atomized Jr. on the behavior of squirrels. Musing on their inability to make up their minds which way to run when crossing a road and encountering a car -- or a bicycle in my case. At the time I concluded that squirrel brains only had the ability to make good timing and vector decisions about moving objects when they moved at roughly that of a falling body under the acceleration of gravity. Things they judged to be animate I think they put in a different category (different part of the brain) altogether. When things come at a squirrel at a different rate of motion than gravity, I think it simply makes no sense to them. They don't know what to make of it, how to react to it. It is as if they encountered a fourth dimensional object.
What was going on between me and that stick was something similar. It was something in its spatial dislocation that it gave the appearance of being a unitary squat thing subsumed in a single even contour, while its top and bottom haves were actually many feet apart. This led me, in my perception of it to conclude that it was moving. And if moving then alive. Eventually I worked out that this was not some new top part of my brain ruminating on this problem and working out that solution, but a very old inclusion linked to hard-wired processes deep in the brains evolution. My familiar was an optical illusion but not one I had any defense for. The apprehension always hit me conclusively, even after months when I knew what I was looking at. It was always hard, if only for a brief moment, to shake the feeling and see the stick. Even as I remember it now, I find I don't recall it inanimately.
11:36:22 PM  ;;
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