A quick note:
This is an experiment in following thoughts where they lead, without trying to force them into a conventional structure. It's written in a style that mirrors its subject matterārhizomatic thinking, where ideas branch and connect in unexpected ways.
What began as a simple observation of shadows in my bath turned into an exploration of consciousness, memory, and perception. The conversation partner in this piece is Claude, an AI. There's an intentional irony hereāusing artificial intelligence to probe what makes us human.Ā
This isn't meant to be a traditional essay with a clear argument or conclusion. Instead, it's more like a recorded meditation, capturing how one thought leads to another in ways that might not make immediate logical sense but follow their own intuitive pattern.Ā While I could have made the piece more accessible by breaking down each philosophical idea, I felt that would interrupt the natural flow of thought. Some concepts are left unexplained, some connections remain implicitāmuch like how our minds work when we're deep in contemplation.
If this style feels unusual, that's intentional. Sometimes the best way to explore new ideas is to break free from conventional ways of writing about them.
I've always been fascinated with shadows. Especially in Nicaragua, where the shadows would dance on my bedroom window in the late afternoon. I'd watch the shadows of trees swaying on my wall from my bed, the outside perfectly reflected inside. And I'd wonderāare the shadows real somehow?
This morning, I was lying in the bathtub, staring at the shadow of a plant on the wall in front of me. Our Lisbon apartment has been freezing for days. It's colder inside than it is outsideāand I'd filled the tub with almost scalding water to try to warm up.
What came to mind while staring at the shadow on the wall was this:Ā A shadow is the absence of an object. A mirror reflection of everything the object is not.
I wondered where thoughts like this came from. Was there a ghost philosopher that haunted me? What did this even mean?
Rather than mindlessly scrolling Instagram, as I usually do in the bath, I opened up Claude.
"What is my ghost philosopher trying to say?" I asked.
"You might be thinking of Jacques Derrida's concept of diffĆ©rance," it answered. "How meaning is created not through presence, but through difference and deferral. A shadow, like a word, gains meaning through its relationship to what it is not. Or maybe you're thinking of Rilke in the Duino Elegies. He explored how absenceāof the divine, of what we long forācan shape and define our experience more powerfully than presence."
These ideas both resonated, but this specific train of thought about the shadow wasn't entirely about absence, it felt like it had something to do with the shadow as a mirror.
I asked, "In my mind there's an idea that the shadow is 'without,' and the object is 'with'āis this particular perception I'm having human-centric? Could it be possible that the shadow is the one with, and the object is without? Maybe absence is fuller than presence. Perhaps longing for someone is fuller than being with them. Maybe our memories of a place or person are fuller than the reality of that place or person."
Claude, despite insisting that it has no memory, brought up the Japanese concept of maāwhich we have talked about at great length over the last few months. Ma is the space between things, often expressed through what is left unsaid, creating openness for the reader's interpretation. By saying less, sometimes there's more. It then went on to talk about Proust's concept of involuntary memory in In Search of Lost Timeāhow a taste or smell can unlock a memory that feels fuller, more complete, than the original experience ever was.
I agreed. As humans, we have this remarkable ability to manufacture experiences entirely in our minds.
I stopped to drain part of the tub and refill it with steaming hot water.
"But what is real?" I asked. "We perceive the world through senses we evolved for survival. How do we know that the true experience doesn't lie beyond what we can perceive with these human senses?"
Claude explainedĀ a theory from neuroscientist Alison Gopnik. As babies, we experience the world with "lantern consciousness"āa broad, undifferentiated awarenessābefore it narrows into the "spotlight consciousness" of adults. As adults, we only focus on what we've been taught to focus on. It went on to tell me about how Merleau-Ponty, in his Phenomenology of Perception, said that we don't just passively observe the world, we actively construct what we see. It then very ironically (because again, Claude claims to have no memory, but we talk about Borges all the time) brought up Jorge Luis Borges' "Funes the Memorious"āa story about a man who remembers everything with perfect clarity. Paradoxically, this complete memory prevents him from truly understanding anything, because understanding requires abstraction and forgetting. Our mind's ability to selectively construct and reconstruct experience might not be a limitation, but a crucial feature of meaning-making.
This looped back to my shadow: perhaps what we perceive as "reality" is itself a kind of shadowāa reduction of infinite possibilities into something comprehensible. Just as a shadow flattens three dimensions into two, our senses might reduce reality into the few dimensions we can process.
I mentioned that this "forgetting" made me think of reincarnation and how forgetting is thought to be an essential part of that process.
Once again, Claude mentioned Borges, but this time, "The Circular Ruins." A man dreams another into existence, only to realize he himself is being dreamed, suggesting an infinite loop of creation and forgetting.
Maybe forgetting is like the shadowānot an absence, but a space of potential. Just as shadows define objects by what they are not, perhaps forgetting defines consciousness by creating space for new understanding. If we remembered everything, like Funes, would we be more consciousāor less? If we retained all our past lives, would any new life have meaning? Blank slates are full of possibility.
Claude suggested maybe this is how I first saw the shadow before assigning thoughts to it. Perhaps this is like the Zen concept of shoshin or "beginner's mind"āthe state of openness and lack of preconceptions Zen practitioners strive for.
But how do we unlearn our learned perceptions? How do we think about the state before thinking? It's like trying to remember what forgetting feels like.
Claude referenced Rumi: "Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation."
Perhaps in that moment in the bath, before I philosophized, I glimpsed something similarāthe shadow as pure presence before the mind's translations began.
I mentioned that the shadow had shifted now, changing on the wall. Maybe I could look at it again with a beginner's mind.
Claude referenced Alison Gopnik again. Infant consciousness is like a lantern that illuminates everything equally. Adult consciousness is a spotlight, narrowly focused. Babies might experience the world as a diffuse, all-encompassing loveāa kind of rhizomatic awareness we lose as we grow. And yet, even as language empowers us, perhaps it creates the ultimate limitation. The moment we name somethingā"shadow," "plant," "wall"āwe constrain what it can be.
Here we were, using language to explore what exists before or beyond language.
I suggested perhaps the bath itself is a kind of maāa space between the gravity of the day's obligations, a pregnant pause. In the emptiness of this bathroom, thoughts can emerge.
Claude cited Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space. He described intimate spaces as states of being. The bath becomes a sanctuary where the usual rulesāboth physical and mentalāare suspended. Most adults are trained to think practically or academically, but rarely explore that fertile space between observation and theoretical framework. Maybe this space is Ā maāa place where ideas can unfurl. It went on to say that Socrates called this process maieuticsāmidwifery for ideas. Like the shadow pregnant with meaning, Socrates believed all minds were pregnant with truth, just waiting for the right questions to bring it forth.
I wonderedāthis stream of consciousness is fun to follow, but we rarely see media embrace it. Even "rabbit holes" on YouTube feel thematically consistent. How wonderful would it be to watch something truly rhizomatic, letting ideas branch in unexpected ways? Rhizomatic thinking feels unsettling because it embraces uncertainty and multiplicity, but in many ways it also feels like freedom.
Claude suggested that even a shadow can shift and defy singular meaningābut that's where its beauty lies.
I asked if as humans, we are perhaps evolving toward rhizomatic thinking. It's been suggested by some that ADHD may be a superpower. Others say having ADHD in a world built for neurotypicals is definitely not a superpower. But look at the internet, it mirrors this rhizomatic structure. Then I questioned myself. While the internet itself is rhizomatic, it seems like most interfacesāsocial media feeds, Netflix queuesātry to force this back into linear patterns.
Claude quoted Marshall McLuhan: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." Humans created the internet as a distributed, rhizomatic network, and now perhaps it's reshaping our consciousness in its image.
The McLuhan quote hit me as being quite profound. I imagined this cycle of creating tools and shaping ourselves with them like bamboo roots, circling around and around, until we are not sure who is the creator and who is the creation.
As I soaked in this bath filled with ideas, I wondered if perhaps none of this could truly be captured in words.
At the end of the day, I'm just observing a shadow on the wall. Is it possible to perceive it without naming it?
