Cowardice
[Begin grandiose metaphor]
When we are born, we are in the middle of a flat and featureless terrain of experience that spans infinitely in all directions. And everything is shrouded in a darkness except for a few lights: astrological bodies--unfailing pinpoints of starlight--and the temporary glimmers of...what? Glowing bugs? Spontaneous swamp gas combustions? It doesn't matter. Bear with me.
We wander around and explore that terrain as we age, chasing after those fascinating lights, afraid of being left alone in the darkness. We learn to mediate our experience by learning schemata--ways to group raw percepts into significant units, causal knowledge about how those meaningful units interact, expectations about how our experience will play out in the future.
As we chase after these lights and learn these schemata, it's amazing, but...the earth under us rises. Our understanding causes hills to grow underneath our hands and feet as we crawl around. Those hills grow into mountains, and, in a completely bogus pseudoscientific move, we get closer to the heavenly lights, and their light shines on our well-tread mountain paths--this is the world we know!
I am, by old habit, a cyclic pacer. When an idea or story hits me, my mind and body will begin to gain angular momentum. I roll around the same thoughts over and over again, maybe developing them with each turn, maybe shaping them as if in a lathe, but going around and around and around. As as my thoughts do this, my legs start marching in a broad circle, faster and faster.
This last bit I mean literally. There have been many times in my life when I've done this for two or three hours on end. Now, awkwardly, back to the metaphor:
So here I am, having walked in a circle for twenty years, with the ground rising beneath my regular footsteps. And I am on an impossible plateau: a column of solid stone shooting out of the earth in the shape of my regular path. I am burned by the stars directly overhead. I am the ludicrous stylite, sitting on my pole.
Sometimes, when I am near the edge, I look down onto the rest of the Earth, and see all those places that I did not walk miles below me. Less than halfway down it gets shrouded in darkness. The wind blows sometimes, and I feel myself getting carried away, off the pillar. I scramble at its edge, claw the hard earth, dig in my nails, flatten myself against it until it passes.
These are the graceless moments of my cowardice. When I can't leap from where I stand. What good would it do? Below, I know nothing, It's not only that I risk being in the unknown--of facing new experience. It is that I don't have a schema to mitigate that experience. I would be buffeted by waves of uncontrollable qualia. Vulnerable as a child.
What good would it do? I can still see those bright, glimmering lights below! What were they? I can make guesses. And when a flurry of them blows up the edge of my mountain, by accident, like a terribly confused snowflake, I am so tempted to reach out and make a snatch at it. But I stop myself, or maybe I have chained myself down. Because I am afraid of such a terrible fall
[End grandiose metaphor]
I really need to write this final cog sci paper....
When we are born, we are in the middle of a flat and featureless terrain of experience that spans infinitely in all directions. And everything is shrouded in a darkness except for a few lights: astrological bodies--unfailing pinpoints of starlight--and the temporary glimmers of...what? Glowing bugs? Spontaneous swamp gas combustions? It doesn't matter. Bear with me.
We wander around and explore that terrain as we age, chasing after those fascinating lights, afraid of being left alone in the darkness. We learn to mediate our experience by learning schemata--ways to group raw percepts into significant units, causal knowledge about how those meaningful units interact, expectations about how our experience will play out in the future.
As we chase after these lights and learn these schemata, it's amazing, but...the earth under us rises. Our understanding causes hills to grow underneath our hands and feet as we crawl around. Those hills grow into mountains, and, in a completely bogus pseudoscientific move, we get closer to the heavenly lights, and their light shines on our well-tread mountain paths--this is the world we know!
I am, by old habit, a cyclic pacer. When an idea or story hits me, my mind and body will begin to gain angular momentum. I roll around the same thoughts over and over again, maybe developing them with each turn, maybe shaping them as if in a lathe, but going around and around and around. As as my thoughts do this, my legs start marching in a broad circle, faster and faster.
This last bit I mean literally. There have been many times in my life when I've done this for two or three hours on end. Now, awkwardly, back to the metaphor:
So here I am, having walked in a circle for twenty years, with the ground rising beneath my regular footsteps. And I am on an impossible plateau: a column of solid stone shooting out of the earth in the shape of my regular path. I am burned by the stars directly overhead. I am the ludicrous stylite, sitting on my pole.
Sometimes, when I am near the edge, I look down onto the rest of the Earth, and see all those places that I did not walk miles below me. Less than halfway down it gets shrouded in darkness. The wind blows sometimes, and I feel myself getting carried away, off the pillar. I scramble at its edge, claw the hard earth, dig in my nails, flatten myself against it until it passes.
These are the graceless moments of my cowardice. When I can't leap from where I stand. What good would it do? Below, I know nothing, It's not only that I risk being in the unknown--of facing new experience. It is that I don't have a schema to mitigate that experience. I would be buffeted by waves of uncontrollable qualia. Vulnerable as a child.
What good would it do? I can still see those bright, glimmering lights below! What were they? I can make guesses. And when a flurry of them blows up the edge of my mountain, by accident, like a terribly confused snowflake, I am so tempted to reach out and make a snatch at it. But I stop myself, or maybe I have chained myself down. Because I am afraid of such a terrible fall
[End grandiose metaphor]
I really need to write this final cog sci paper....