Witchy Memes

A way that I like to think of things is that we (and any living organism, for that record) are effectively a highly complex sensory system.

A plant is an analog light detector. It will reach in the direction of the light. For many plants, if they have lower than ideal light levels, they will stretch towards the light and become leggy bois (i.e. become etiolated). The relative degree of etiolation is inversely proportional to the average light levels received by that plant.

Plants are also sensors for the salts in soil. At the extreme side of things, too much salt in the soil will kill the plant, but we also see distinctive responses when the soil levels are closer to the normal range.

Many of our sensing functions exist in this realm of concrete biochemical reactions too. Rhodopsin is the protein in our eyes that gives us dark vision. It denatures rapidly in response to light, which we can't see in the dark very well immediately after turning off the light. But then our night vision slowly improves, as the denatured rhodopsin is replaced with functional stuff the longer we remain in the dark. That means that our degree of night vision is like the output for a sensor that detects how long we've been in the dark.

I like this example, because it's fairly intuitive to think of our eyes as being a part of a system of sensors, but this is a function of sensing and measurement that's more abstract than how we'd typically think of vision.

The way I think about things is that concepts like "good" and "bad" do exist in the universe in a tangible and real way, just as much as notions like sound or light do. There are infinite dimensions of the universe, and we have the capacity to sense a small fraction of it. Non-human organisms can sense plenty of things that we can't, but equally, humans can sense things that other organisms can't too, like evil, or beauty, or justice.

I find a lot of comfort in this framing when I'm desperately trying to grasp at a sense of purpose in an overwhelming world, or wishing to be capable of more than what any human can reasonably be. I am a human, and I will never not be a human. There is a great amount of diversity in the sensory capacity of each human, but there are hard limits to what I am capable of detecting or knowing. It would be foolish to mope too much over this fact, because that would risk shutting myself off to some of the vast amounts of information that my sensor systems are capable of detecting and responding to. And that would deny myself the chance to choose what kind of sensor system I want to calibrate myself as.

For example, choosing to notice beauty in the world makes me more attuned to beauty, which makes me notice it more, which makes me ever more precise in my enactive existence as a sensor of beauty. The way it works is that I see something beautiful, and something in me resonates with that — it's not my eyes that are the sensor here, but me.

In your comment, you said that the universe doesn't distinguish between good and bad, but I would disagree with you on that. Even if you don't vibe with my framing of humans existing as enactive sensor systems, I would still argue that we are a part of the universe. We see good/bad, and we care about it. That care makes us continue to hone and refine our ability to see good/bad, and the cycle repeats. We are a part of the universe, not apart from it. The universe absolutely cares about distinguishing between good and bad, because we do. We are one of the ways the universe comes to know itself.

Or to distill the point down a bit: Our eyes are the sensory organ that humans use to detect light^[1]. Humans are the sensory organ by which the universe detects good Vs bad.

I hope that my comment is coherent enough that you were able to follow my points, even if you end up not agreeing with my perspective. I suspect that if you have been following me, this will either be massively helpful in helping you grapple with the ideas in your original comment, or it'll cook your brain all the more (or both!)

[1]: technically the melanin in our skin also functions as a light sensor, but that kind of persnickety detail is peak footnote material.