Reading the world

We read the word wondering
what we mean by it.

We read the world wondering
what it means by us.

The sense of wonder is a primary spiritual capacity. But we tend to waste it on extraordinary or imaginary phenomena, because our habits tend to blind us to the ordinary wonders right under our noses. Like all of our habits, we tend to take our perceptual reading skills for granted – especially our skills at reading ‘texts’ (such as other people’s faces) that we are most predisposed to read. One way of gaining a new respect for the range and depth of such reading is to consider some unusual cases. Murray Gell-Mann takes up one of these:

The man in question, Dr. Arthur Lintgen of Pennsylvania, said he could look at a record of fully orchestrated post-Mozart classical music and identify the composer, often the piece, and sometimes even the performing artist. [Professional magician and debunker James] Randi subjected him to his usual rigorous tests and discovered that he was telling the exact truth. The physician correctly identified two different recordings of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’, as well as Ravel’s ‘Bolero’, Holst’s ‘The Planets’, and Beethoven’s ‘Sixth Symphony.’ Naturally Randi showed him some other records as controls. One, labeled ‘gibberish’ by Dr. Lintgen, was by Alice Cooper. On seeing another control, he said, ‘This is not instrumental music at all. I’d guess that it’s a vocal solo of some kind.’ In fact it was a recording of a man speaking …

— Gell-Mann (1994, 290)

Gell-Mann comments, ‘This odd claim that turned out to be genuine violated no important principle’ – meaning that it didn’t undermine currently well-supported models of either biology or physics. On the contrary, it shows that the natural semiotic processes by which people extract meaning from physical signs (sinsigns) can be more powerful and versatile than we usually give them credit for.

One more specific example (from Wegner 2002, but also found in other sources): a horse called ‘Clever Hans’ became famous in Germany around 1900 because he could apparently add, subtract, multiply, divide, read, spell, and identify musical tones, answering questions by tapping his hoof. It took a persistent investigator named Pfungst to figure out that Hans was doing all this by reading very subtle body language cues from his trainer and other humans – cues so subtle that the trainer himself was wholly unaware of them. So Hans really was ‘clever’ enough to fool quite a few humans, but not because he was trying to, and not by violating any basic principles of equine psychology. This case does not undermine the consensus that using symbolic language is beyond the skill of a horse, but it does extend our understanding of how meaning can happen biologically (and without conscious intent) – because Herr Pfungst managed to explain the apparent anomaly by means of careful empirical observation.

Sensory perception is far more worthy of wonder than speculations about extrasensory perception. Ordinary experience of the natural world is infinitely more wonderful than stories of the supernatural. Perhaps the greatest wonder of all is the continuous presence of the phaneron – if only we could look it in the face.

Wherever you turn, there is the Face of God.

Qur’án 2:115 (Cleary)

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