Decisions, Perceptions, Sensations

Who are you, really? I mean really, deep down?

When Scottish philosopher David Hume introspected in search of a self, he reported that all he found was a “bundle of perceptions.” He seemed to be disappointed, but I believe he was on to something; he was just looking in the wrong direction. Of course you are not going to be able to perceive the self, no matter how you try. The perceiver does not perceive itself, yet it can infer itself by acknowledging that it is none of these perceptions, and yet does perceive.

Should Descartes have said, “I perceive therefore I am”?

You are sitting in your car in a parking lot. A driver attempts to pull into the space next to you, but his car hits your car.

“Hey!” you yell to your friend next to you. “That guy ran right into me!”

But he didn’t. His car hit your car, but he did not hit you.

A kindergartner spills paint on your shoe. “Careful!” you warn. “You’re getting paint on me!”

But she is not—not on you anyway.

Are our possessions part of us? What does it mean to own something? My pencil is a pencil that is associated with me, to the extent that everyone involved agrees that I get to decide what happens to that pencil.

In the case of my body, I don’t need consensus. Just the facts about how persons and bodies work with each other make body ownership pretty clear. When a person is not the one to control her body, either a crime or a peculiar illness has occurred.

Let’s change point of view. If this is my body, then what am I? I am not the body. I am somehow in the body, carried by the body, running the body. Sensory messages come to me from my eyes, my ears, my skin—I am not my sense organs. I can feel hot or cold, happy or sad, comfortable or in pain, but I am not those sensations; I feel them. I am the one who perceives.

Here’s something spooky. If you do something, i.e. if your body performs some particular movement, can we say that you are not only the perceiver, you are also the agent? It certainly feels that way, but consider this experiment. People were wired up for brain activity and told to make a very sudden, spontaneous decision to push a button, with no premeditation. They thought they did, but the brain scan said otherwise. Their brains had made the decision for them well before they acted, well before they thought they were making their decision.

I used to be very good at slapping flies (still am, I guess). I would hover my hand over a fly and move as close as I could until she stopped washing her hands. Then I would enter a meditative state, relax my mind and arm, and try to send the fly the telepathic message that everything was just fine--when SLAP down would come my hand before she knew what hit her.

What a disappointment to learn that during that last second when I imagined I was meditating and not planning a slap, my brain was firing away in preparation!

Decision-making is a brain sensation. The awake part of us is riding around in a body that sensations tell us is our own, feeling pain, seeing blue, and getting the sense (believing) that we are making decisions and performing actions.

I am going to try to remember that about myself as often as I can all day today.

Or perhaps I should say: I observe the brain sensation that I have the intention of observing the mind remembering itself all day today.

Angela’s Nap

I started this drawing of my nineteen-year-old daughter Angela last weekend. As you can see, I was groping a bit. Each of those lines was drawn carefully, even if later abandoned. I am sure there are many who would scold me for showing this very vulnerable exploration on the blog now, before any of my finished work—first impressions and all, you know—but it makes my point more dramatically than the paintings or a finished drawing might.

This drawing is unfinished for a simple reason: Angela rolled over. But it accomplishes, very bravely for a drawing if I may say so, expression of the idea behind much of my work: we have a propensity to make sense out of what we see, even on the basis of the sketchiest information. We see dragons and cows in the sky; we see faces in wallpaper stains, grotesque figures in tree trunks, and the Virgin Mary in half-eaten pieces of toast. We’re happy about that, we accept it; but we barely appreciate the full implications of our extra-reality perceptions, and it’s really all about us.

Take a look at my little drawing, if you don’t mind. That left eye, for me, is absolutely Angela. Others, by the way, may disagree and that’s all right. What is important is that somebody, anybody, looks at some graphite scribbles on white paper and has that recognition sensation—Angela! If you don’t see Angela there in that eye, certainly you have had the experience of recognizing a person in a drawing. Even if you have never seen a drawing of a family member or friend, you have seen drawings of famous people in magazines or online and recognized them.

If you look closely enough at my rendering of Angela’s left eye, it will not look like an eye at all. Look closely and you will see scribbles. Look closely enough at a high definition photograph, even, and the image will collapse into patches of meaningless color. On the computer pictures turn out to be made of little squares. Artists have been aware of the dissolution of recognizable image into color patches—or the resolution of brushstrokes into image—for a long time.

I’m not telling you anything new, but I want you to think how we take this for granted. Even the loosest of Impressionists was making it easy for us to perceive brushstrokes as object. It amazes me that under even the most adverse conditions we turn things into recognizable images. Animals don’t do that. Most animals, anyway, do not see figures in drawings or photographs or piles of hay. So I just want to settle into a state of wonder about us for a while.

Look back at the drawing of Angela. The left eye was easy to recognize. The arms and hands are a little more challenging, but we still see arms and hands, even though I have not erased the lines I rejected. The hair looks nothing like hair—but don’t you see hair? The remaining facial features are not really there—those are just light notes to myself about placement—and yet we see the other eye, the nose, the mouth. We may not like what we see (I don’t!), because if those were accurately drawn they would be misshapen, but we do see features, and because one part of the drawing looks to be somewhat accurate, we fear these other features might be also.  And then look at the long wiggly lines away from the face and hands. You “see” a solid figure, clothes, a sofa in spite of the dearth of detail.

A lot of artists and teachers go to a lot of trouble to enhance an illusion in a painting, and others speak about destroying it. Please understand that I am emphasizing neither, that I want to marvel at the perceptual process, and that, to me, the most interesting experience I hope to provide my viewer is wonder in her own perception.