Observations On Perception

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We tend to think we know where a tree comes from.   We place a seed in the ground, water it, wait, and eventually a green shoot breaks through the surface.   The explanation seems almost too simple to deserve a question.   The tree comes from the earth.

Yet a mature tree can weigh thousands of pounds, and almost none of the increase in its dry mass comes from the soil.   The minerals absorbed by its roots are indispensable, but they account for only a small fraction of the matter that eventually becomes trunk, bark, branches, and roots.   Much of the carbon incorporated into the body of the tree entered through its leaves as carbon dioxide, an invisible gas dispersed throughout the atmosphere.   With water and the energy of sunlight, the tree incorporates that carbon into sugars, cellulose, lignin, and the extraordinary architecture we call wood.

That much of a tree’s dry mass originates in the atmosphere is elementary biology.   Its implications are anything but elementary.

A tree appears solid, independent, and bounded.   We can touch its bark and walk around its trunk.   We can distinguish precisely where the tree ends and the air begins.   Yet the history of the matter that constitutes the tree contradicts the apparent simplicity of that boundary.   The matter that now forms a trunk was once dispersed through the atmosphere.   Water entered the tree from the soil and will leave it again.   Minerals passed from rock into soil and from soil into roots.   Energy arriving from a star made possible the chemical transformations that sustain living structure.

The tree, then, is better understood as an organized continuity than as an isolated object.

And so are we.

The contrast between our ordinary perception and this material exchange can be unsettling because perception encourages us to picture the body as a closed unit.   We experience ourselves as contained within the outlines of our bodies and conceive of the world as a reality beginning beyond the skin.   We speak naturally of what occurs within the body and what lies beyond its limits.   These distinctions are useful and biologically necessary, but their usefulness does not make them absolute.

Every breath contradicts the idea of an entirely closed bodily boundary.

Matter that a moment ago was outside our bodies subsequently participates in the body’s internal chemistry.   Oxygen enters the bloodstream.   Carbon dioxide leaves it.   Water passes through us.   Food supplies matter for tissue and chemical energy for vital processes, while tissues are continually broken down and rebuilt.   The substances that compose us have histories immensely older than our own appearance and will continue to enter other processes once our present organization has ceased.

We are not, therefore, substances that permanently possess a fixed collection of matter.   We are organized processes that maintain a recognizable form through continuous exchange.

Individuality does not become unreal merely because our bodies depend upon continuous exchange.   A tree remains a tree, and we remain ourselves.   The continuous exchange of matter and energy, together with the relationships that sustain life, does not erase the difference between the tree and us.   It is more fruitful to understand individuality precisely as differentiation within continuity.

We do not have to choose between absolute separation and indistinction.

The tree is not the same as us, yet the tree and we do not belong to entirely separate orders of existence.   We arise within the same material world, depend upon intersecting cycles, and participate in exchanges that precede each of our individual forms.   Our difference is real, but our separation is never complete.

We habitually imagine the subject as an inner realm set apart from an external object.   We look at the tree.   But our experience never arises from an isolated consciousness contemplating a reality wholly external to itself.   We see because we possess bodies capable of sight, because light travels between the world and our eyes, because the nervous system transforms physical events into perception, and because our bodies already belong to the same world that appears before us.

We do not exist first and enter into relation with the world afterward.   Our relation to the world is part of the very condition of our existence.

The separation between the perceiving subject and the perceived world therefore ceases to constitute an absolute opposition.   The perceiving subject and the perceived world belong to the same sensible field.   We may say that our individuality is a conscious differentiation occurring within a continuity that has never ceased to contain us.

The idea of differentiation within continuity acquires a different gravity when we lose someone.

When someone we love dies, absence imposes itself with a gravity that seems absolute.   A voice no longer answers.   A body is no longer available to touch.   The consciousness with which we once shared words, gestures, and attention no longer responds to our own.   We confront a rupture that no philosophical subtlety should attempt to erase.

Yet death may compel us to reconsider what it has actually interrupted and what it has not.

We often speak as though the person had been removed entirely from existence, as though an individual life were an isolated portion of the world that death could simply annul.   Material processes do not conform to such absolute cancellation.   Matter does not fall into nothingness.   Energy does not simply disappear.   Structures dissolve, bonds break, and substances enter new cycles.

Matter continues to undergo transformation, but that continuity is not enough to preserve the person.   The continued circulation of atoms does not mean that the singular consciousness we knew and loved continues with them.   With death, the living form that made that singular consciousness possible comes to an end.

We never existed as isolated substances confronting an external reality.   Our bodily, perceptual, and relational experience has always arisen within the same sensible reality to which we still belong.

A life also remains inscribed in other lives.   It leaves memories, alters decisions, awakens affections, and produces consequences within a shared world.   Death may bring the consciousness of that person to an end, but it cannot remove from reality the events that life made possible or the transformations it produced in those who remain.

We cannot infer from the conservation of matter or energy that personal consciousness survives death.   Science provides no basis for such a conclusion.   Nor does the continuity of physical processes constitute evidence that an individual mind persists after death.

But neither are we required to imagine death as an expulsion from existence.

The person who has died no longer persists as the conscious organism through which we knew and loved that person.   Yet nothing requires us to imagine that the life itself has somehow fallen outside the world from which it arose.   The individual organization has ceased.   Material continuity, belonging to the sensible world, and the consequences of that life have not been annulled.

Once we recognize that physical continuity does not demonstrate personal survival, it becomes understandable that the ancient idea of reincarnation might enter our thoughts.   Nothing we have recognized, however, implies the migration of an individual consciousness from one body to another.

Perhaps we can reformulate the intuition that the word reincarnation attempts to name.

The continuity of existence need not mean the repetition of the individual.   The matter and energy that made a life possible enter new configurations, while the relationships and consequences produced by that life remain inscribed in the lives of those it affected.   The person does not reappear in those new configurations or in the lives transformed by that person’s own, but the end of a singular form does not therefore amount to an absolute fall into nothingness.

The carbon in our bodies belonged before us to other organisms and material processes and will later become part of others.   The elements that compose our bodies have histories reaching back to earlier generations of stars.   The living world continually incorporates, transforms, releases, and reincorporates matter.

Our life begins within that ceaseless exchange and retains a form for an interval.

Transience does not make our lives insignificant.   On the contrary, perhaps it is precisely the transient character of form that gives a life significance.   A melody does not become unreal because its notes do not continue sounding forever.   The identity of a melody resides in an organization that unfolds through time.   We do not require music to become permanent matter before granting it reality.

Why should we require permanence of ourselves?

Perhaps we resemble a melody more than a monument.

Our existence does not consist in the permanence of a substance exclusively our own, but in an organized continuity of matter and energy within processes that exceed every individual.   For a time, that continuity takes the form of a particular body, a particular perception, and a particular voice.   That individual acquires a history and a name.   Loves particular people.   Remembers particular rooms.   Looks at a tree and recognizes a presence distinct from itself.

When we look again at the tree, we discover unexpectedly that the separation between our bodies and the world was never as absolute as we had imagined.

We discover that matter which appears solid may once have been dispersed through the air.   Matter that appears motionless participates in constant exchange.   An organism that appears self-sufficient depends upon innumerable relationships.   Forms we perceive as separate can retain genuine differences without ever having been absolutely severed from one another.

We need not deny that death has occurred.   We need not invent certainties about what happens to consciousness when the body can no longer sustain it.   We can acknowledge the full gravity of absence while also examining the assumption that absence amounts to absolute separation.

Death brings a singular form of presence to an end, but it cannot turn into absolute separation a life that was never absolutely separate from the world or from other lives.   Those we have loved do not remain as consciousnesses demonstrably accessible to us, but neither can their lives be excluded from the shared reality in which they occurred and of which our own lives remain a part.

The singular form of each person cannot be replaced.   That person’s consciousness cannot simply be reconstructed from the matter of the organism that once sustained it.   Yet that life created relationships, left memories, and generated consequences that now belong to the actual history of the world and to the lives of those transformed by its presence.

We continue within the same reality that once held us together, not because death has preserved an intact personal identity, but because separation was never the original condition of our existence.

The tree thus becomes a way of understanding that extends beyond the example of photosynthesis.   The existence of the tree invites us to reconsider the categories by which we divide reality.   Air and wood, self and world, presence and absence, permanence and transformation may not stand on opposite sides of the absolute boundaries we habitually draw.

Perhaps existence does not consist primarily of separate things that occasionally enter into relation with one another.

Perhaps relationships are constitutive, and individual forms arise within them.

We can therefore say, without giving the phrase a literal biological meaning, that the tree is also us.   Not because our differences disappear, but because every difference occurs within a continuity that no individual form originates and no individual ending can abolish.

We do not stand outside existence looking in from the exterior.

We are among the transient forms capable of recognizing the continuity of the existence to which we belong.

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