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May. 19th, 2005 04:02 pmWe are order-fiends. The human brain looks for patterns in sensory data and cannot seem to tolerate the existence of anything drawn "outside the lines." So to the extent that we can control our environment, we attempt to reduce our stress by robotically drawing grids on everything, making rectangular houses and buildings connected by a rectangular grid of roads, keeping these houses and buildings as tidy as time and resources will allow. We design things with straight lines and write orderly lines of precisely identical letters.
Our fascination with language and number is so intense that we even dare to assert that these fictions of the human mind are more real than hyle. ...Okay, okay, I'll be fair. This is not something we do consciously; this is a result of two things our brain does before sensory data hits the layer of "conscious experience." Firstly, we break down all sensory data with cognitive shortcuts. Secondly, our minds prefer the abstract representation of our surroundings over "messy" reality itself. The abstract form takes much less effort to deal with.
What inspired this was a comment on the friend's list yesterday (in a locked post) about order vs. chaos and the relation of this distinction to spirituality. The "swirling interplay between order and chaos" is an optical illusion created by the fact that order, nature, and mathematics, are only approximations of raw reality.
There is no sense in denying that the universe has an overarching kind of self-consistency, but we feel most spiritually active in the presence of beauty -- or rather, at those moments when we grok the fullness of what is around us without abstracting it.
Our fascination with language and number is so intense that we even dare to assert that these fictions of the human mind are more real than hyle. ...Okay, okay, I'll be fair. This is not something we do consciously; this is a result of two things our brain does before sensory data hits the layer of "conscious experience." Firstly, we break down all sensory data with cognitive shortcuts. Secondly, our minds prefer the abstract representation of our surroundings over "messy" reality itself. The abstract form takes much less effort to deal with.
What inspired this was a comment on the friend's list yesterday (in a locked post) about order vs. chaos and the relation of this distinction to spirituality. The "swirling interplay between order and chaos" is an optical illusion created by the fact that order, nature, and mathematics, are only approximations of raw reality.
There is no sense in denying that the universe has an overarching kind of self-consistency, but we feel most spiritually active in the presence of beauty -- or rather, at those moments when we grok the fullness of what is around us without abstracting it.
