On the emergent properties of things perceived
I suspect that most of us do not realize that we see and think in abstractions all the time, even when we are paying close attention to the details.
We even generate these abstractions in our imaginations and in our dreaming consciousness. The other night I dreamt I looked to the sky and saw thousands of stars. Did I look at and examine each sparkle, or count them all? Of course not. I could surmise that there were thousands of them by "deciding" to perceive a generality instead of each little point.
The tendency to see generalizations is with us in every moment of our perceptions and thoughts. Look outward at even the simplest material object. That chair is a swirling configuration of atoms, each comprising particles having statuses that are imperfectly determinable. Think of the vastly more complex systems, like that bird outside the window. It is alive -- a fact that depends on the properties that emerge as the levels of complexity are ascended, from the particle to the atom to the molecule to the cell to the tissue to the organ to the system to the organism. When you look at that bird, you don't see all that complexity. You see the abstraction, i.e., the emergent property of birdness. You might even think of these collections of properties as epiphenomena.
Thank goodness we see these collections of properties. Can you imagine how hopelessly complex and, indeed, meaningless all that we see would be if we perceived only the innumerable seething and teeming complexities and were not able to discern patterns or properties?
But the pattern recognition can be taken too far. It is not difficult at all -- in fact it's the ordinary, unexamined mindset -- to see only the generalizations and to lose sight of the smaller, sometimes invisible, yet always interdependent parts that are doing the comprising.
So here's a need for balance or moderation. In seeing things and understanding what they are, we owe ourselves a healthy dose of mindfulness, so that we can grok them as best we can. There is too much extraordinary detail to gloss over. But we cannot afford to get so lost in the minutiae that we go crazy.
Photo credit: Kris Smith.
