|
|
|
Where is this ? Excerpt from Chapter 4 of Ten Zen Questions |
|
|
|
|
|
Where is this? Where is what? Well I have to start somewhere, so how about starting with what is right in front of me, here and now. It is winter in my hut, and right in front of me are three sprigs of bright yellow winter jasmine. My gaze is resting gently on them. There they are: yellow, bright, clear. Where is this yellow winter jasmine then? Sit; look. I look steadily and calmly at the flowers.
What is wrong with the idea that the yellow flowers are right there, where they seem to be, about two feet in front of my face? Actually quite a lot, now I come to think of it. Philosophers have argued for centuries over the location of experiences – are they in the brain that creates them, in the outside world where they seem to be, or without any location at all, as Descartes believed? Psychologist, Max Velmans, builds his entire theory of ‘reflexive monism’ on this question, claiming that the contents of consciousness are not exclusively in the brain but also in the perceived physical world, but few believe he has escaped from dualism by this route. There are lots of problems. I’ll work them through as I sit very still, with the flowers before me. I realise I have made some kind of object out of the flowers, as though it is independent of my experience. But the question was “Where is this?” and “this” is my experience of the flowers. I am seeing them from over here, and from here they appear in a particular way. This petal overlaps that one, these stalks go in just that pleasing pattern across each other; that whole shape is just as it is. I know that if I moved they would appear differently. Someone else would see them from a different angle. The trouble is that I am imagining an abstract three dimensional space and putting these actual flowers into their position. There’s nothing wrong with that. If I wanted to measure them, or paint them, I could use that abstract construction to work out the coordinates of every point in the whole complicated bunch. But that abstraction would not be “this”. “This” is my experience of the flowers right now. And the question is “Where is this?”. How about tackling the colour. That might be simpler. This wonderful bright, special, only-winter-jasmine-can-be-like-that, yellow is right here in front of me. Where is this?
Here is the yellow, bright and clear. I take the two obvious answers. The first is that the yellow is out there, on the petals of the flower, right where it seems to be. This is a no hoper. I know that. Here is the problem. The colour yellow is not really in the flowers at all because it only appears to be yellow when a particular sort of visual system looks at it. If a bee flew over that flower now, for example, it would not perceive it as yellow like I do. Bees have visual systems quite unlike ours, with compound eyes made of lots of little eyes instead of just two big eyes with lenses. And although bees cannot see some of the red colours we can see, they can see far further into the ultraviolet than we can. All this has evolved because many flowers use bees to pollinate them. Over millions of years, flowers attractive to bees were better pollinated and produced more offspring than dull ones; bees that could detect the colours better got more nectar from the flowers and so produced more offspring able to detect them. So the insects’ visual systems and the colours of flowers evolved together. There are probably guide marks on the petals that I cannot see and the bee can, because they are only visible in the ultraviolet. The yellow, then, is not out there where it seems to be, in the petals of my beautiful flower. It takes me, and my particular eyes, and my particular brain, as well as the flowers, to make this yellow. Hmmmmm. Let’s try the other tack. The yellow is in my head. I know something about that too, and it doesn’t help. When I look at a yellow flower the colour receptors in the back of my eye start firing with electrical bursts, and send signals along the optic nerve to my brain. Because the flower is yellow some nerve cells fire more than others, and this information is carried on to the visual areas at the back of the cortex. There, in areas called V1, V2, V4, and so on, there is more firing of certain groups of nerve cells and less of others. If I were looking at a purple flower, the proportions firing would be correspondingly reversed. So if neuroscientists could look inside my brain in enough detail, they would probably be able to tell which colour I was looking at. But is this neural activity the yellow itself? How can it be? I am stuck. That yellow. It is so ….. yellow. This is how it is, but “Where is this?”
I feel a smile forming, though whether of delight or despair I do not know. Colours are the quintessential philosopher’s qualia; those supposedly basic, private, indescribable, raw feels that make up all our experiences; the “what it’s like” of subjective experience; the awfulness of pain or the redness of red. Philosopher Paul Churchland is sure that the redness of red simply is the patterns of firing within our brain… Dan Dennett rejects the entire concept of qualia, along with the “actual phenomenology”, the what it’s like now. There’s no such thing, he says. … No such thing as what this is really like? Well, is there? I slow down, the passing grass slows down. It’s green. What is this greenness of green? It’s like. Um. Settle down again. I slowly, slowly light another incense stick, paying attention and moving with care. Calm the mind again and look. The rain is easing and the yellow flowers are where they were before. There’s something very obvious here. I began by separating out those lovely yellow flowers from everything around. I lost “this” altogether. “This” is the whole thing; the whole experience; this. All around is the hut and the garden beyond; and beyond that the city with its droning cars and distant sirens and thumping of some machine. All this comes and goes, waxes and wanes. The flowers are there in the midst of it all. So Where is this? I run through that now familiar route. My eyes rest gently on the flowers as I mentally traverse the space between them and me. There’s the step, there’s the floor, there are my knees – getting hazy now – there is the rug and my hands hardly perceptible – merging into …. what? Right where I thought I should be, here are the yellow flowers. Here they are again. And me? Only a nameless void, filled with the yellow flowers. A petal drops.
It is night time in my hut. A candle sputters somewhere behind me. I look up. Most things I ignore when I’m meditating but I need to know that the candle isn’t going to burn the place down. I look up in front of me. I see the reflection of the candle in the window, sputtering a little, flickering back and forth. There are two of them; candles hanging in their glass globes. In the window I see their reflections, back and forth, one directly, another from behind, this one reflected twice in both the windows, the other three times, another (I lose track of which) five or ten times, reaching out in an ever diminishing flow. Where are they? Are they in front or behind? Do I see the candles? their reflections? an image in the glass? an image projected into the space beyond? Where is this? I have no idea. The rows of lights pass right through me, or pass through what I once thought was me, or where I once thought I must be sitting. Where is this? There are many things that happen all at once, or separately, or in their several threads. The rain spatters on the roof in a steady drum. Odd drips fall on to something loud, somehow separate from the rain. Oh – and there’s that perpetual traffic sound that someone seems to have been listening to all this while. And there are birds singing from time to time. All around is the space of the hut, and the matting clearly there in vision, and the cold of the damp air. Where is this? Suddenly
a plane bursts overhead … My investigations haven’t got me very far. I settle down to watch and ask. Where is this? This? I realise I have no idea what I am talking about. For I omitted to ask the simplest question at the beginning. Which “this” am I supposed to be asking about? There’s “this”, and now there’s “this”. And there are all those threads, going on their ways and seeming to stretch backwards into some indeterminate past. Someone seems to have been listening to that oh so regular breathing – slow and steady, clouds of visible breath coming out of nowhere and disappearing again into the invisible air. Someone was hearing that occasional call of the blackbird in the tree, now, and again now. This bird or that? Breath in and out. Which is this? Where is this?
Discuss this chapter at the Ten Zen Blog Back Home To Sue Blackmore's Web Site Back to Ten Zen Home Page created date
23 March 2009 |
|
It’s time
for a break. I get up stiffly, wriggle my legs, pull on my waterproof
top, and set off running round the garden; up and down the paths, up and
down the steps to the garage, round and round the vegetable patch. I
don’t look up, but watch the ground in front of me so as not to disturb
the meditation. Blurs of grey stone, and green grass pass as I run.