Smiley-face =). Double horizontal line, curved vertical. Life is good.
Our ability to see faces in everything is called 'Paraidolia'.
A sub-category of the larger phenomena called 'apophenia', the creation of meaning where there is none, like in all of our cognitive fallacies.
Consider this: Orange moving in the brush: Flowers swaying in the wind? Or deadly tiger? The cost of being afraid of a flower is lower than the cost of acidentally standing and admiring a prowling tiger.
Life doesn't deal with certainty and calculations, but with chance and intuition: It must always interpret the experience, it must gamble so to speak.
The mind only decieve us, insofar as we would consider ourselves robbed, when paying for our groceries.
It's part of the deal -- And not just in dealing with our experience, but in fact, our very Perception is interpretation, metaphor -- in the most foundational sense:
Metaphor means to carry over; and that’s exactly what our senses do: They carry over the objective world into consciousness.
Light is not green, or red, or any color for that matter, it's a wave or particle with certain wave-length vibrations in the air are not sound and you don't actually feel hardness: It's just feeling in your finger, try it: you will only ever feel your finger!
The senses are metaphors for the objective reality.
And what else? Do you feel it? Do you sense it? The precense of Emmanuel Kant?
He whispers: "Synthetic a priori". "Space and time are not part of your senses, but the condition for your experience.
This idea was always obscure to me: but it is of course because vision in itself is just colors: Yet we experience them in time and space.
A reality that recently became clear to me during my affair with painting: You can actually learn to see things as colors: So that light and darkness merely is another color, and that the 3D reality can be collapsed into the 2D plane of the paper.
Interpretation or metaphor are thus the very ground of our experienced and lived reality. Our senses are metaphors and our senses is even structured by the metaphors or interpretation of space and time.
And past our metaphor-dependent perceptions, metaphors are also responsible for how we experience the world, and how we interpret our senses.
Is nature, for example, a harmonious order as seen by the stoics? Is it danger and home to monsters and ungodly creatues as seen by the mideavel peasant, or perhaps the modern dilemma? A resource to be harvested or a beautiful part of the world to be worshipped. . .
Simplifications aside, my point is, that we never experience the truth of anything in the objective sense, but must add meaning to our experience, whether we take meaning that we inherit through our culture, or go out and search for and establish the meaning ourselves.
Nietzsche once said: "what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.”
The reality we experience has always been in a tug of war, between philosophies, religions, the state, the community, sales-men, and politicians, etcetera: Every world-view wants itself seen reflected in the validating mirror of the other.
And God bless. They are all better than no or some primal interpretation: We need a place a stand -- especially if we want to jump!
"There are only interpretations" Nietzsche also said
As discussed, the metaphors we live by determines what we see.
Consider this: "The world is a stage!” It makes us see the 'stage-ness' of the world: We understand that there is an element of performance in life, we have to play certain roles, and we experience our life as being spectated at times, much of our world is evenstaged by us: Our cities, roads, culture are the background in which the play is played out. Of course, Shakespeare might have interpreted that metaphor theological as well.
What I want to throw my spotlight on -- no pun intented -- is how our intepretations of the world also change us. For me to call the world a stage also makes me an actor.
This relationship is sometimes called the "Agent-Arena relationship". It shows how we are deeply connected with the environment -- the arena -- and how the environment is connected to us -- the agent
And when they get out of touch with each other, we feel a deep sense of meaninglessness, even absurdity.
In fact, the so called meaning crisis, that we experience, especially in the west, could be explained by the mismatch between our identity and our environment, as revealed through our common language. . . But that's for a future video.
Alright metaphors are important... but we have all experienced good and bad metaphors, so... What makes a good metaphor?
It is something that makes us see new aspects of a thing. A metaphor makes a kind of double movement: It takes us away from the object it describes, makes us leave our old descriptions and associations, and then gives us new ones.
"The world is a stage" is good, for it makes us see it anew, with new associations, hidden aspects of the world, that we never considered, that are nevertheless valuable.
A bad metaphor would be: "A bee is a wasp" -- We don't get the necessary distance from the bee in order to see or understand the bee any differently.
We can also make a bad metaphor in the other direction: "Pain is a table" -- The distance is too great. I mean sure, pain is hard, i guess, and maybe the pain of our overburdened job is the foundation of the dinner, but overall we don't experience this as a good metaphor: We don't know what to do with such a connection. We feel lost. It just doesn't click, as we say.
By extention: Scientific language are really just bad metaphors, in the "bee is a wasp"-sense.
Imagine yourself drunk on joy, wicked happy, and of the most tender of heart wanting to write a poem about the magnificence of life, and you mistankenly asked Science: "O, Science, so deeply versed in the mysteries of life and the universe, in thou name we circumnavigated the the seven seas, send men to outer space! O science, o' tell me: What is life?”
Life is a quality that distinguishes matter that has biological processes, from matter that does not.
In fact Wittgenstein argued, that all mathematics are just tautology: The worst metaphors.
But notice! And this is the fascinating part: Metaphors work by way of collapsing, a kind of reduction of the thing it describes, that nevertheless opens it up for a new way of seeing it. . . It's a portal!
Look: "The world is a stage" -- No, the world is not just a stage it's much more than a stage -- and yet it opens up a new perspective of the world.
We just have to take the portal, and see what new world opens up -- It's world creation, magic, if you'd like. The world as such is too big for us: We get myopic at trying to look at it face-value -- We need to stand on the stage to look at the world.
We don't become more wise by never taking a portal, by never committing to a view or interpretation (like Kierkegaard's bourgeois, who lives life completely uncritically)
We can only get further and deeper into life by affirming a view, taking a stance, for inside each portal, we discover new portals! new portals we would never have found, unless we took the portal.
How much philosophy, just to make an example, has not been concieved by virtue of an iron-chain commitment to Christianity: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, (to only name some of the big ones), all the medieval thinkers, that were forced to see the world in a new light, in order to save their beloved christianity. — Or science’s commitment to seeing everything as cause and effect.
And so it is: We must crawl through the opening, Cross to the other side, we must seek clarity in the dark; for it is only the fool, who finds wisdom. The one who takes the chance of going through. The one who sacrifices his old world! The one, who limits and commits himself to a way, for creation only follows limitation, as fortune favors the bold — The committed.
We must continually sacrifice our integrated world view, to create a grander and richer world. We must become the fool again and again.
"To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself" -- Søren Kierkegaard
In the effort to not be decieved, we are nevertheless completely decieved.
Mythologically, it has been expressed in various ways: There is a pervasive theme especially in cosmogenic stories: Where the world as we know it rests upon a sacrifice: In norse mythology Ymir is sacrifized, in mesopotamian myth it is Tiamat, who suffers a similar fate. Adam and Eve must also bite the sour apple, and sacrifice paradise for new knowledge. The whole archetype of "leaving home" could be viewed in the same light.
Our interpretations and the metaphors we use creates new meaning horizons, that is: new ways to experience life and the world! There is much, that we can't see from where we stand. So we must venture out.
Man cannot discover new oceans, unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore”
— André Gide
We have to be wrong and foolhardy, "The fool is the precursor to the savior" as Jung said.
It's easy to think of meaning as something just cerebral, like when we think of the moral of the story or 2 + x = 6, means x = 4. But meaning is really about connection as such, and is not something we independently create.
It is thrown at us, or perhaps we are thrown into it, the moment we are born, and it will continually wash over us till the day we die -- And it is something so deeply mysterious:
in a sense it is the twin of life, that has grown up with life itself: Water only has its meaning in relation to us, to life: We sail upon it, we drink it, we drown in it, meaning requires limitation, a point of view, or in another way: Connection requires boundaries and difference: Like a good metaphor.
So it is with the rest: Experience your connection with the tree, or the vast sky, the emotional goodbye, death, but also appreciate how differently they can be experienced through our interpretations and skill:
The tree appears so different for the man, who sees it as a resource and the biologist, who sees the tree as an object of study; or the artists who creates her art of trees.
With these considerations , Aristotele will inevitably come to join us for a walk - together with his notion of potentiality and actuality: The tree has potential for many things, but a form, or eidos as he called it, must be added to it: to actualize the potential: We must make it the form of a boat, a house, or a chair, etc.
The same can be said of our experience of the world: There are foundational features, but the degree to which we can alter them are vast and incredible! Both Terrific and horrific: How many ways has death not been interpreted and experienced through religion and philosophy, the same can be said of society, of art, of family and of friends, the body, the soul, the earth, and the stars! Those willing to venture are blessed.
And so to return to the start: apophenia is really a form of apophenia itself: The meaning of the tiger in the brush is very real, even though, it turned out to just be orange flowers. It was the meaning, the connection, between uncertainty, life and death and our limited existence -- To say the meaning was not there, is really to add a meaning to the meaning that we experienced, that was not there.
Like saying the meaning that we experience from reading a great book or watching a great film, are not really there: It's just ink on a paper or pixels on a screen.
Of course apophenia and paraidolia itself are concepts, that came out of an interpretation of the world: That of the objective world: Where colons can't be eyes, and the tiger is either in the brush or it's not -- Uncertainty, the hallmark of life is here eliminated from the equation.
The same view that can't let the life of Schrödinger's cat be in suspense, but must collapse it: It has to be either dead of alive.
I want to dive into uncertainty, to let his cat be suspended between life and death, like we are ourselves. I want to jump into the potential of our existence -- its many forms, -- not just aesthetically so to speak, but also to find the truth in it: Heidegger's notion of 'Aletheia', Truth as something unveiled, as something we can only ever see an aspect of at a time, and must go around and explore from many angles to know. Similar to Heraclitus maxim: "Those, who loves wisdom, must investigate many things".
Let’s do the peregrination, let’s visit all the 4 corners of the earth!
Stay happy, stay decieved =)