The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.

Novalis, translated by C.E. Passage

Brad De Long published an article on the Internet in August 1995 entitled "Ontological Breakdown" (see bottom of page for link to this article). It caused me to ponder on the relation of the "real" world and the world we "create" by abstraction/ imagination/ elaboration from hard "reality." We do this on many levels: as a culture through our myths, arts, religions, collective beliefs, also in many ways as individuals in our private lives and relationships.

De Long's sense of reality was challenged by his and his son's living so much in an electronic "virtual" world. But we find the same interplay of imagined and concrete realities in all sorts of other settings. For instance, we form images of far-away places or unknown people based on media representations; and then, if we go to the place or meet the person, the reality is a let-down, almost always disappointing! Whether it's a picture postcard of the Vatican, TV image of Chinese scenery, or reproduction of a painting in the Louvre -- the picture is always as perfect as it's possible to make it. In reality, the cathedral ceiling is too dark and far away to see clearly, the real painting in the museum is dingy, behind glaring glass, and impossible to see anyway for the milling, agitated crowds. The Chinese landscape is dusty and hot, the vendors and tourists distracting, and your stomach a bit queasy from the bus ride and diesel fumes. And you must have finally met the fashion model who's not nearly as beautiful in the flesh as her media image; or encountered an admired author/artist whom you feel you know intimately through their work, and find them trite, maybe a bit crude, but surely not a person you'd enjoy knowing.

And this is not a mere side-effect of living in a modern "media culture" -- the more I try to understand aboriginal peoples' world, the more it seems filled, densely packed even, with imaginal beings, creation stories, metaphysical dramas that infuse their world with meaning. The aboriginal world is vivified by unseen ancestral and cosmic beings. Looking at these living aboriginal relics of ancient human-kind, we see that telling stories is an intrinsic feature of man's consciousness -- and his unconscious as well. For in dreams we weave a story out of the virtual sensory events aroused by random neural stimuli flooding into the cortex from the brainstem. Thus the waking and sleeping mind both appear to be story-making machines, using the story to integrate perceptions, to make sense out of chaotic events.

There is also a lower level perceptual tendency, shown in animal brains as well as human, to "complete" an imperfect form, see a full circle when only a fragment is shown, abstract a form out of partial elements, imagine shapes in random splotches, etc. It may be only a variation of this tendency that causes us to be ever creating representations, internal images, that abstract an idealized, more beautiful form out of the very imperfect tangle that is reality.

Even before modern media saturated us with synthetic images from unseen or non-existent places and persons, we were living in a "virtual reality." The process of idealizing extends, of course, to ourselves -- people have an idealized image of themselves that they try to make the rest of the world believe. (Ever read "singles" ads and then meet some of those people?) And we do something similar with others -- even in intimate personal relationships, we seem to construct and have a "relationship" with an imaginary version of the partner rather than the reality!

Thus, I share some of De Long's anxiety and concern with the shifting interface of the real physical world and the virtual electronic one. But in some ways the challenge of living amidst two worlds is not new. In religion, art, and our daily personal lives, we have always created an alternate "virtual world" to explain, enhance, and enliven the perceived material world, so that we come to "live" in that internally re-created world as much as in the concrete one. Human nature (the "seat of the soul" as Novalis says) actually comes into being through this interplay, this dance.

If you believe as I do, that all these primordial features of our minds and feelings, including our values (personal, social, moral), rest on an evolutionary base, then the next step would be to ask: what is the survival value of the innate tendencies being observed here? Why would we evolve an "intelligence" with such built-in mechanisms for self-delusion? These are worthwhile considerations that would lead into still deeper territory.

Brad De Long's 1995 article can be read at the Tidbits archive:
Ontological Breakdown.
clicking here will open a new browser page; close that window to return to this page -- your "Back" button may not work)

References, books about evolutionary psychology:

Konner, Melvin, THE TANGLED WING, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982.

Konner, Melvin, WHY THE RECKLESS SURVIVE, Viking, 1990.

Wright, Robert, THE MORAL ANIMAL, Peter Smith, 1997.

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