Your World Is Not The World

It's already getting hot outside, at nine o'clock in the morning. Last night I saw lightning, the wind kicked up, but whatever storm that was blew right past us. The summer solstice is past, days are getting shorter -- not that you can notice. Really, this week has had some of the most beautiful sunshiney days. Today has sunshine, but it looks like it may be an uncomfortably warm one.

I'm going to give a talk in the fall to a group of biologists in Australia, and I have been thinking about some things. I hope you don't mind if I ramble a little. Well, it is Sunday morning, I guess it won't be the first time!

We went to yard sales yesterday. We went to different neighborhoods in Rockville, just wasting an hour of a beautiful Saturday morning visiting with people and seeing if we spotted anything we needed. I suppose I should put that in quotes: "needed". I ended up getting a new case for my camera for fifty cents, and a flash for a dollar. The case I needed, I already have a flash but this one looked good, and I like to set up a shot with light from different angles. Sometimes I use something called a "slave flash," it's a device that can tell when your flash has gone off, and it instantly sets off another flash unit without being connected to your camera, so you can get light from two or more points. I didn't really need this, but it was only a dollar.

At a yard sale you stop your car and get out and some people are there, and you talk to them, and it's sort of like dropping in and sitting in their living room with them for a few minutes. There's usually some initial stuff about the weather, you picked a nice day for this, or we picked a terrible day, it's too hot, or whatever, there is some talk about whether there are a lot of sales or they have had a lot of customers. But after a minute or two you might find out something about them, or they find out something about you, and you talk a little bit. Typically, somebody knows somebody from the same place that the other person knows somebody from. It's not usually anything personal. I think the main times I've seen it become very personal is when people are selling stuff that belonged to a family member who died. Usually there is some joking and conversational interaction, small talk.

One thing you notice is that people assume you're like them. Maybe you haven't seen me, my hair is long, I'm in my fifties, I tend to wear jeans and cowboy boots (standard manly footwear where I come from, not so common out here in The East). I carry myself like a respectable citizen but I think people might not know how to take me at first, from looking at me. I joke with them, if I hear them speaking Spanish I might try to get a little practice in, I enjoy small-talking with the people. It seems to me that as soon as I have said something to somebody, they tend to be friendly with me -- it doesn't mean I'm a nice guy, people are just like that.

So say, there was a couple sitting along the sidewalk in folding chairs, in the shade of a big tree. You look at their stuff, they're selling their old kids' clothes and toys. There's an unopened bottle of wine for sale, some camping equipment they never used. See? You get a feeling for what they like and what they think is important. There is a chest of drawers, and they forgot to empty one of the drawers, so you see what they had in there. You look at their old CDs and albums, the books they're getting rid of. One guy had a whole shelf of L. Ron Hubbard, who would have guessed that? The way they talk to each other, the way they talk to their kids, you get an idea about how they live -- I find this so interesting!

We were at a yard sale in a rather snooty part of town, I won't say where. It was near downtown Rockville, they had better-quality stuff than some of them. I actually considered buying one of the guy's ties, except I remembered I have about a hundred ties already, and I never wear one. But they were only a dollar, and they were nice. These people had Christmas ornaments, some books from law school, nice clothes, lawn equipment, lots of picture frames. I didn't buy a tie.

A little girl was selling lemonade for a quarter. I went over to get two glasses. She might have been five, she had pink lemonade. I asked her, "What is lemonade made out of?"

"Lemons."

"What color is a lemon?"

"Yellow," she said. (I grew up in citrus country with lemon trees in the back yard, but don't know if kids Out Here know what an actual lemon looks like.)

"But the lemonade is pink," I said. "How do you get pink juice out of a yellow lemon?"

Usually kids that age giggle or ask you a question or something, they engage you when you throw them a curveball like that. This little girl looked at me like she didn't comprehend. Just blank, calm eyes looking at me, as if there was something unnecessary or frivolous about my question. Did I mention she was five?

I tried to make it easier. "Where do lemons come from?"

"A lemon tree."

"So you got your lemons from a lemon tree?"

"No, this juice came from a can."

"Oh," I said. "Well, maybe it grew on a lemon-can tree."

At this point the girl's mother came over to bail her out. She said, "She's a girl, she likes pink things, she wanted pink lemonade, and that's how it came out."

"Wow, so whatever she wishes for, it happens," I said.

The mother looked at me, the girl looked at me. It was clear the conversation had died. Usually it goes better than that, though I got a certain rewarding kind of amusement out of the awkwardness of the situation. Well, my wife and I had our dixie-cups, the little girl had her two quarters, her mother reminded her to thank us and she said "You're welcome." It was time to leave.

Clearly, I hadn't been joking in a kind of way those people appreciated, and they didn't really want to hear any more of it. I'm sure that family has its way of joking, things that are in-bounds at their dinner-table, but it appeared that absurdity is not part of their day-to-day dialogue, questioning reality and the meanings of things. Things, for some people, are as they appear to be, and there is no fun in turning it all inside out, or in trying to understand why somebody else would. Words are not toys, for some people.

I said something here the other day about people who think their world is The World. People see things from a particular perspective, but everybody to some extent realizes that other people may see things differently from them. Most of us accept other people's perspectives, to varying degrees, but some people just seem to think that other people are wrong. For instance, someone may accuse you of "moral relativism" because you allow that something you don't approve of is all right for somebody else. Appreciating that someone else may have a valid point of view, even if you don't understand it yourself, is called "respect."

One thing that people do better than any other animal is to take the perspective of another person. Like, if you are with a chimpanzee and you look at something, the chimp might look at it, too -- it is identifying with you and looking at what you're looking at. A study a few years back found that dogs are good at that, too, even better than chimps. But people are most excellent at it -- when somebody expresses an interest in something, we think about it too, when something happens to someone we imagine how we would feel if that thing happened to us. If somebody does something, we understand it by imagining what would impel us to do that thing, we feel what it must have felt like to be them doing it. One word for this is "empathy."

This kind of shared-perspective thinking turns out to be really useful for problem-solving. You think of a problem solution, somebody else thinks of one, you put them together and you can come up with an innovative and successful way to solve the problem. We tend to think of people as isolated, autonomous individuals, but when people have something they can't understand or a problem they're trying to solve, the thing they do is to discuss it with other people. Nobody really thinks alone, inside their head, thinking itself is mostly imagined interactions with other people. You might not know this about me, but I have published many papers on a topic sometimes called "swarm intelligence" or "particle swarm optimization," that builds computer programs based on this simple concept. The dynamical process of sharing perspectives is a powerful way to solve hard mathematical problems, and it is a crucial part of human intelligence.

But there are people who see the world from one point of view, they know their own experience and that's it. They surround themselves with people whose experiences are similar to theirs, and they build relationships on the overlap, ignoring the differences or even discouraging people from differing from them. People who share their perspective are good people, those who don't are bad people. Does this define conservatism in our time? It seems possible.

Well, everybody does that to some extent. You could never communicate with people without making some assumptions about their subjective experience, and you have to assume that their experience is something like yours, because that's all you know, that's all you can go on. And that's what makes this hard.

It seems to me that civilized people must know that other people's lives are different from theirs, and their thoughts and beliefs are different. Living in a round world, we have to know that there are people in other lands who think in different concepts from us, marry a different way, walk and talk differently from us, believe differently -- we are just one people among many. But of course it is not reasonable to consider other people equally with one's own perspective -- you do have to look out for yourself. It seems necessary that there is always a balance between self-respect and respect for others. And some people's ideas can be rejected outright as being unreasonable, false, or dangerous -- can you reject those ideas and at the same time retain respect for the person? I'm not even sure if that's worth doing. We recognize a bad idea, and we somehow automatically attribute badness to the person, maybe there is some value in that, and maybe we do it inappropriately sometimes. These are all traps that derive from being embodied, seeing the world from a single point in space. You can walk around and try things, you can sample a range of experiences, but you can never actually see the world from somebody else's point of view, because of the straightforward limitations of existing in physical space.

Nobody ever solves these problems, nobody ever really figures these things out. If you are going to engage the world you are going to live in a fluid state where boundaries shift all the time, you will have your ways and you will also question yourself sometimes. Of course it is possible to live disengaged. I think a lot of people probably do that.

I just heard a tune on WPFW, it was Danny Gatton's band Funhouse, live at the Birchmere in 1988. I was sitting here typing and spacing out, and all of a sudden I heard this guitar that just went crazy, off the deep end, the guy went outside the key into some insanely fast lick that basically sounded impossible to play, and you knew right away it was Danny Gatton. It's terrible what the music business does to you. You wish that every person's talent could be appreciated in its proportion, but it rarely works out that way. You have to find a "market," you have to stick within a genre or at least some perceptible permutation of one. You have to please the crowds, first the drunks in the nightclubs and later the politely applauding audiences in the concert halls, and then if you're lucky the roaring masses in the arenas. Hardly anyone passes the Darwinian test of adapting to all those environmental extremes. So an outrageous talent like Gatton meets with enthusiasm, appreciation, on a local level, people who heard him recognized his skill, his expressiveness, but somehow he stayed stuck in a local rut. I won't speculate about his suicide, I don't think it makes sense to try to find the "reasons" for such an act, but the pressure of being a local demi-god at fifty bucks a night or whatever is not going to be easy on a guy, especially after some number of years. I think I'm going to try to find that mp3 on the Internet, I'd like to learn that lick.

We have a good friend who went into the hospital this week. She had a cold that dragged on and then they said it was bronchitis, and now the tests are showing that she has cancer. This has affected everything we do this week in a strange way, sorry if I seem gloomy or more introverted than usual. All the tests aren't in, but it sounds like the doctors are optimistic about this, though it will definitely be a hard go for her. We will have to circle the wagons a little bit here and get her and her family through this.

Man, I just walked the dog and it is really nice out! We walked over by the woods and the sunshine is clear and good, there are some clouds and I understand there could be a thunderstorm later but this is perfect. Montgomery County really is a cool place to live.