The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part I, Ch 2: The Method of Observation

Your eyes are not a window. Your brain is an editor, built to spot tigers, not truth. And the tiger now is a bad idea it has not learned to see.

In brief: In this chapter I take apart the machine that produces what I used to call knowledge: the senses, the brain, and the quiet editor that works between them. I look at how a signal from the world becomes an experience, how an experience becomes an idea, and why the brain sorts everything into threat and not-threat. It matters because that machine was built to keep us alive, not to show us the truth. Today the gap between those two can get people killed.

Once I had started to think about what "true" could mean, I noticed how many shapes the word came in. I noticed how slippery it became the moment you tried to hold it still. After that, the next thing I had to take apart was the machine that was producing what I had been calling knowledge in the first place. The truth, whichever kind, sits at the end of a long process. The process begins much earlier. It begins in the senses, in the brain, in the moment a thing out there in the world becomes a thing in here that I can think about. Most of what we proudly call thinking is actually that moment, repeated billions of times, mostly without our noticing.

I lived for a long time as if my eyes were a window. As if what I saw was what was there. It is not a stupid assumption. It is the one every person walks around with for as long as they can get away with it. But it is wrong in a way that turns out to matter. I want to slow down here and look at how it is wrong. The reason is simple: once you can see the machine that has been doing the seeing for you, you can stop being run by it. If you have not looked at the machine, you cannot really claim to know anything. You are just letting it run and assuming whatever it hands you is the world.

The simplest name for what the machine is doing is observation. To observe is to pay attention. That is the whole of it. We pay attention with the senses we were born with, and we pay attention with instruments we have built to extend those senses. A microscope makes the small visible. A telescope makes the far visible. A clock makes time countable.

Think of X-rays, infrared cameras, and the meters that pick up the flow of electricity in a wire. These reach into places the human animal was never built to see, and they bring back something we can use. Without the instruments we are limited to whatever range our species happened to evolve into. With them we can examine the inside of a cell and the surface of a moon eight light-years away. I know an astronomer would stop me there. No one has yet seen the surface of any moon around another star. The moons we have mapped up close all belong to our own solar system, a few light-hours away at most. Still, we have, between us, built a much bigger window than the one we were born with.

What we observe comes in two flavours. Some things you describe by quality: the water is salty, the paper is smooth, the night is dark. Some things you describe by amount: this person is one hundred and seventy centimetres tall, this room is twenty-two degrees, this stone weighs four kilograms. The first kind you compare by feel, person to person. The second kind needs a shared unit. With a shared unit, what I measure here and what you measure where you are can be set side by side and trusted by both of us. A kilogram in Kerala is a kilogram in Stockholm. Measurement is what turns a private impression into something two people can argue about honestly.

The act of observing is rarely as innocent as it feels. The looking changes the looked-at. Try to check the pressure in a bicycle tyre, and you let out some of the air you were trying to measure. Quantum physicists found that if you put a detector by a slit to see how light is moving through it, the light behaves differently from how it behaves when nobody is watching. Physicists would put this more carefully: what changes the light is the detector interacting with it, not a human eye or a human mind. No one needs to be watching at all. The observer is never entirely outside the thing being observed. There is no perfectly clean window onto the world. There is only a person, looking, and the act of looking is already changing the room a little.

Every observation, once you slow it down, has two parts. One is what comes in: the raw signal, before the mind has made anything of it. I will call this the experience. The other is what the mind makes of the signal once it has arrived. This is the label it sticks on, the meaning it folds in, the thing you can now think about and name. I will call this the idea. Most of what feels to you like a single moment of seeing is actually these two, running so close together that the seam between them is invisible.

Consider the alarm going off in the morning. Sound waves leave the speaker, travel through the air, and reach the ear. The eardrum is set vibrating. The vibration is passed through three small bones in the middle ear that amplify it. The amplified signal moves into a fluid-filled coil in the inner ear. There, tiny hairs are bent by the wave, and the bending opens chemical gates that fire an electrical signal. The signal runs up a nerve to the brain. The brain recognises it as the alarm. The whole journey (from the speaker to the part of the brain that thinks "alarm") takes about a tenth of a second. The recognition feels like one thing happening. It is actually a chain of seven things, any of which could go wrong. The seamlessness of the whole is the brain's own work, not the world's.

The other four senses run their own version of this. Light becomes a nerve-signal. Smell becomes a nerve-signal. Taste, touch, the same. The brain takes the signals from each of the five doorways and decodes them. When the decoding is done, what is left in your awareness is what we call an experience.

Most experiences arrive through more than one door at the same time. When you eat a mango, the brain is taking in colour, smell, the feel of the skin on your hand, the taste, the small wet sound of the cutting. Each sense leaves its own physical print in its own region of the brain. The brain then stitches the prints together into a single thing. You later remember it as "eating a mango," as if it had been one event rather than five running side by side. The print stays as long as the brain decides it needs to. The more useful the print is for keeping you alive, the longer it stays. Most prints fade. Some last a lifetime. The brain is making these decisions in the moment, without consulting you, all day, every day, for as long as you are alive.

There are two kinds of experience. There is the first time you eat the mango, hear the song, meet the person. At that moment there is no print yet, and the brain is building one. Then there is everything afterwards, which is mostly the first experience being pulled back up and laid over whatever new thing is happening. By a certain age, most of what we call life is the second kind. The first taste of mango was decades ago. Every mango since has been quietly compared to that first one, whether you noticed or not. A commercial for a burger you have not eaten can pull up the taste of one you ate ten years ago. You find yourself hungry without having seen any food. This is what most of the daily texture of being alive actually consists of. We mostly do not encounter. We mostly recognise.

The brain learns by repetition. The first time you do anything, the wiring is not there, and the brain has to build it slowly. This is why everything new is hard. It is also why everything old is easy. Repeat a thing enough, and the brain decides it must be important and lays down a road that drives itself. A child learns a first language without trying. An adult learns a second one only with great effort. The road for the first was paved without their noticing, by thousands of hours of repetition before they could speak. The second has to be paved on the side, in adulthood, against the slope of an already-built first.

Driving is the same. Terrifying the first time, requiring every part of your attention. Ten years later so quiet that you arrive home without remembering the journey. The road in the brain has been carved. The conscious mind is free to think about something else. When this happens, we say the action has become intuitive, and the word is worth keeping. Intuition, when you look closely, is not a mysterious sixth sense. It is ordinary intelligence that has been repeated so many times the brain has stopped charging it the cost of conscious attention.

The same mechanism is what makes habits so difficult to break. Whatever you have done many times, the brain has decided is essential. It will keep offering it to you, whether or not it is still good for you. Addictions are this mechanism working overtime. The brain has been told, by the repetition, that the substance is necessary for life, and the brain believes its own story. The way out is not magic, and it is not willpower in the inspirational sense. It is patience. Nerves are like muscles. What you stop using atrophies, which means it wastes away. What you use strengthens. Most of what people call willpower is really just willingness to sit through a slow rewiring without giving up halfway.

I want to add something here that took me a long time to absorb. For most of my life I assumed my impressions of the world were direct. I assumed that what landed in my awareness was the world. Once I started looking at the machinery I have just described, I realised the world I was seeing was not the world. It was the brain's edited version of the world, filtered through years of prints it had decided to keep. And the editor was deciding for me which prints got pulled up to overlay every new moment. I had been living inside the editor and thought I was looking through a window. That correction is small, said in one sentence. It took me about a decade to actually internalise, to take in so deeply that it changed how I see. Most days I still forget. The brain prefers the window story. The editor story is more work to keep in mind.

If experience is what comes in, an idea is what the mind makes of it. An idea is anything that can be known: a chair, a friend, a sound, a feeling, a worry, the sun, your mother, the country you were born in. The mind takes the wash of incoming experience and breaks it into pieces. It names the pieces, and from then on it treats them as separate things. It does this because a mind that could not break experience into separate things would not be able to spot the thing that was about to kill it. The breaking-into-ideas is a survival tool, first.

Most ideas do not hold still. What "friend" means to you when you are nine is not what it means when you are nineteen, and not what it will mean when you are fifty. The idea forms, grows, decays, gets replaced. This is normal. A mind whose ideas could not change would be unable to keep up with a world that does not stop moving. Most of the suffering people carry into middle age comes from holding onto an idea. It may be an idea about themselves, about another person, or about what life is supposed to look like. They hold onto it long after the world has stopped supporting it.

A few ideas do hold still. They are the abstract ones: whiteness, tallness, heat. The objects that are white change. The idea of white does not.

Some ideas exist only to compare two other ideas: cooler, taller, faster, heavier. They have no content of their own. They are just measurements running between two real things. We use them constantly. We hardly notice we are doing it.

Strung together, ideas make stories. Stories, organised, become languages. Languages let one mind hand its contents to another. Without language, philosophy would not be possible. Most of what is happening on this page right now is one person's ideas being moved into another person's head through small arbitrary marks. By arbitrary I mean that nothing in the shape of a letter tells you what it means. We simply agreed on it. The marks are not the ideas. The marks are just the road the ideas walk down to get to you.

The same idea will appear differently to two people, and at different times to the same person. The sun seems, from where we stand, to move across the sky. A child watching this concludes the sun is moving. A more careful look, done by someone willing to question the obvious, says the Earth is rotating and the sun is roughly fixed. The experience is the same. The conclusion is opposite. This is one of the most important things to remember about the mind. What you see is not the same as what is there. Truth requires going past what you saw to what is actually true. Most people stop at what they saw and call it knowledge. They are wrong, but their conviction is enormous. The certainty of a person who has only ever looked is exactly as strong as the certainty of a person who has actually checked. This is one of the things that makes life difficult.

The thing observed, finally, does not depend on you observing it. The sun does not pause when you close your eyes. The world keeps going whether or not anyone is watching. This is obvious if you say it out loud, but it is worth saying out loud. The reason is that there are philosophies and most religions that get a lot of work out of pretending otherwise. They pretend that consciousness is the centre, that the watcher creates the watched, that without God observing the universe it could not exist. None of this survives a careful look. The world keeps going whether you or I or any god is watching. Most of what this book has to say about reality later on is going to rest on that one stubborn point.

Every idea has three layers. What it is. What it does. What makes it itself. If you have only seen the first layer, you do not know the idea. You have just seen its outside.

Think of Chuck Noland in the film Cast Away, the man stranded on the island after the plane goes down. He walks along the beach. He sees a tall, swelling trunk with a crown of leaves at the top. From his old life he recognises it: a coconut tree. That is the first layer. The physical layer. What the thing looks like, feels like, weighs. Most of us notice this layer and stop. We say we have seen the tree. We have not. We have seen the surface of the tree.

Now Chuck looks again, with a different question in mind. What is this thing for. He realises the trunk could be hollowed into a boat. The leaves could be a roof. The husk of the coconut could be a mattress. The shell could hold water. The coconuts themselves are food and drink. The same tree, looked at with the question of what it does, opens out into a hundred uses. That is the second layer. The functional layer. What an idea is for, what it does, what it gives you. This is the layer most of life is actually conducted at. Yet most of us have not been taught to look here on purpose. We look at the surface, decide what something is, and move on, missing the functional possibilities entirely.

Weeks pass, and Chuck notices that not all the trees on the island are the same. One yields more. One has sweeter water. One sits in the shade at the right time of afternoon. By month three he has a favourite. He sits under it most days. He gives it a name: Hooch. (I have let the story run on past the film here. In the film itself, the companion Chuck names is a volleyball, Wilson, not a tree.) That is the third layer. The specific layer. The thing in an idea that makes it not interchangeable with any other example of its kind. Each coconut tree is its own particular tree. Each person you know is their own particular person.

The specific layer of a human being is endless. You can keep finding out about one person for the whole of your life and not finish. Most marriages and friendships that fail are between people who stopped at one of the first two layers and never bothered with the third. They decided what the other person was, decided what the other person was for, and stopped looking. The third layer is where love, in the sense worth using the word for, actually lives. The love that has anything to do with the actual person and not with the projection you have laid over them. A projection is the picture in your own head that you keep mistaking for the person.

This three-layered structure runs underneath every idea the mind carries. We notice the surface and assume we know the thing. We do not. The work of knowing anything well is the patient work of going through all three.

Underneath all of this (observation, experience, idea), the brain is running one program. It is asking, of everything that comes into it: will this kill me. The brain sorts every experience, every idea, every person, every situation, into one of two folders. Threat. Not-threat. Every other category we use in daily life is built on top of those two: interesting, boring, beautiful, ugly, true, false, mine, theirs.

The reason is older than language and older than thinking. The brain was built by evolution to keep the body alive long enough to make another body. It has one main job: spot the things that will end the project. Everything else sits downstream of that one job, which means it comes after it and depends on it. Beauty. Curiosity. Friendship. Even the philosophical work in this book.

Threats produce pain. A child who touches a hot kettle learns, in one fast burst, not to touch hot kettles again. The hand has moved before the thought arrived. The brain has filed the lesson. Pain is the brain's language for "do not do this again." It is the most efficient teacher in the building.

But the threat folder is not fixed. The same hot thing, in a different shape, can be the cup of coffee in the morning. Take Naina, who finds that the first sip of very hot coffee is painful, but bearable. Her mother once gave it to her on a low day, and she got through the day. Now coffee is the thing she reaches for first when the morning is hard. Somewhere between the first sip and the hundredth, her brain has quietly moved hot coffee out of the threat folder and into the not-threat folder. From there it moved it into the small daily pleasure folder, and then into the affectionate-thing-I-do-for-myself folder. She does not remember making any of these decisions. She just notices that she likes coffee.

The reverse also happens. A food you loved poisons you once, and your brain refuses it ever after, no matter how often the conscious mind tries to argue. The brain does not consult you on these reclassifications, these moves from one folder to another. It just makes them. You notice the result.

Pleasure is the brain's way of saying do this again. Pain is the brain's way of saying do not do this again. Between the two, every living thing on this planet decides what to do next. From a single bacterium to the person reading this sentence, the same two-key piano is being played. Every life that has ever lived ran on it. You are not separate from it. The freedom that comes later, after the philosophical work, is not freedom from this mechanism. It is the freedom to know it is running, and to make some space between what it offers you and what you do next.

Not-threats split further. Some are avoidable. They are discarded and ignored, and the brain does not bother saving them. The colour of the car that just passed you. The face of the stranger you walked past at the market. The brain throws these away as soon as they have passed without harming you. Others the brain keeps. It keeps them because they offer some small ongoing pleasure, or because they help reduce uncertainty about what might happen next.

This is worth slowing down on, because it is most of what daily life consists of. You are driving home on a long road. A sign tells you there is a fuel station ten kilometres ahead. You glance at the gauge. You have plenty. The sign is avoidable. You drive on. Then the mind interrupts itself with a question: what if the gauge is wrong, what if there is a leak you do not know about, what if the next station is two hundred kilometres further. The sign has now become useful. You stop. You fill the tank. You use the toilet. You buy something to eat. You drive on.

You have converted a not-threat into a small action that removed several possible future threats. This is what most of intelligent planning actually is. Not a high-minded thing. A small thing the brain does constantly, swapping a small certain cost now for a removed possible disaster later. People who are good at life are often people whose brains do this trade well. People who are bad at life are often people whose brains get the trade wrong in one of two ways. Either they skip the trade, and walk into disasters that could have been avoided. Or they do it too much, and exhaust themselves on threats that were never going to happen.

Most of what the mind does, it does without telling you. A man driving home sees his three-year-old child crawling on the rooftop. Before any conscious thought has arrived, his foot is on the brake and his hand is on the door. The chain of events goes like this. Instinct passes the observation to the intellect. The intellect runs a fast search through memory. Memory returns "child plus height equals falling." The part of his mind that says "I" recognises "that is my child." The body acts. The whole chain has happened in less than a second. Each link is real. None of them is slow enough to feel. If the man's own life had been the one in danger, even the intellect would not have been consulted. The body would have moved before any of the layers had a chance to think. This whole apparatus is sitting underneath what we, from above, call "deciding."

And here is where I want to be honest about something the books on this subject tend to dress up. The reason the father runs to save his child is older and less noble than the word "love" lets us pretend. He is protecting the continuation of his own genes. Every parent does this, mostly without noticing they are doing it. The genes are getting their work done through him. We have built a beautiful word for the mechanism. The word makes a piece of animal behaviour feel like something more humane than it is. The behaviour is the behaviour. The story we tell over it is the story. The two are not the same thing, even though we treat them as if they were.

I lived inside the dressed-up version of this for a long time. The flattering word over the mechanism. It is hard to look at what is actually happening underneath: to see that the urge to protect your child runs in the same circuitry as a stag charging a wolf. That is much harder than to live inside the inherited language about it.

I am not saying you should stop using the word. The word is fine. I am saying there is value in occasionally being able to look past the word at the animal. Once you can, certain other things in the human world stop being mysterious. The cruelty of strangers to people not their own. The fact that grief at distant deaths is much shallower than grief at deaths in our own family, even when the distant death is statistically worse. The way kindness contracts under pressure. None of this is wickedness. It is the same machinery, working as designed, with the flattering word stripped off.

A ball rolling off the same rooftop will produce no response in the man at all. A child who is not his is a different case: the response runs through more layers of calculation, and the answer is not always the same one. The brain weighs cost against benefit. The conscious mind sometimes tries to overrule the calculation. Sometimes the conscious mind wins. Often it does not. We like to believe we are above this kind of weighing. We are not. We just do not see it happening.

Different minds will respond to the same situation in different ways. A deer in a field is at peace until it sees the tiger. The deer flees. An early human, watching the same tiger from the same edge of the same field, might see something the deer cannot. He might see an opportunity to demonstrate his courage to the tribe and become its leader. The deer cannot reframe a threat as a chance. The human can. This is not a small difference. This is most of what makes our species strange.

The reframing runs the other way too. A moon in the sky is, to a deer, neither food nor predator, and so it is ignored. A person looking at the same moon (say, the hunter's wife back at the fire) sees a not-threat she has decided to convert into pleasure. She writes a poem about it. She reads the poem aloud in the evening. The moon has not changed. The mind looking at it has done the work. And that work, taking something that costs nothing and squeezing meaning out of it, is most of what we call culture.

Sometimes we create threats out of not-threats by intervening when we should not. A man out for a walk sees a snake on the path, minding its own business. The snake is, to him, a not-threat. He could just walk around it. But his mind worries. What if someone he loves comes down the path next. He picks up a stick. The snake hisses, warning him. He pushes the snake anyway, because he is sure he knows what is best for everyone, including the snake. The snake bites him. He ends the afternoon in hospital. The threat was created by his own intervention. The intelligence that lets us anticipate danger also lets us invent it. We do this on small scales, with snakes. We do it on large scales, with whole countries. The same machinery, the same protective foresight, produces both.

You cannot predict how one person will respond to a situation by watching another person respond to the same situation. The mechanism is the same in every head. The shape the mechanism takes is the particular history of that head. This is why generalising about human behaviour is so dangerous and so common. Every person is the result of the universal machinery running through a private history. And the private history is what makes them not interchangeable.

Evolution did not select for truth. It selected for survival. The only requirement, for all of human history before about ten thousand years ago, was that what you believed should not get you killed before you had made more of you. In plain words, before you had children. Believe whatever you liked about the moon, the stars, the gods, the afterlife. As long as your beliefs did not march you off a cliff, the species kept going. Whole religions could be wrong about almost everything important and still keep their followers alive. They could do this because being wrong about the cosmos did not, day to day, harm the body. The brain you and I have was tuned for that world. It still is.

That is not the situation any more. We have built a world in which beliefs travel faster than the people who carry them. In this world, a story told in one place can be in the heads of a billion people by the next morning. And it is a world in which ideas can kill many other people at once. False ideas, scaled up, are now more dangerous than wild animals ever were. People are killing each other today over stories they were told as children. The stories are about which god is the right one, which book is true, which group of human beings is less human than the others. The ideas are the predator now. The brain, which evolved to detect tigers, has not yet learned to detect bad ideas. It still mistakes the loud and familiar one for the safe one. It usually picks the wrong one.

So the work of knowing (the slow, unglamorous work of asking how you know what you know) is no longer optional. It is what survival in this century actually requires of an ordinary person. The brain has to be taught a new job, on top of the old one. It has to learn to spot threats that come dressed as truths.

That is one of the reasons I am writing any of this down. The machinery I have just described is what every reader of this page is also walking around inside. None of us asked to have a brain that runs threat-folder sorting on every story we hear. We have it anyway. The way out is not to pretend we don't. The way out is to know the machinery well enough that we can step in, slow it down, and check before letting it decide for us.

Knowing how the machine works was the first half of this work. The next thing I had to figure out was which of the things coming out of the machine I could actually trust. The machine takes in experience and hands us ideas. But ideas are not yet knowledge. They have to be tested. Which sources of knowing are reliable. What I can know by looking and what I can only know by being told. How to handle the gap between what I have seen with my own eyes and what I have only heard from someone else. That was the next stretch of road. That is where I want to go next.

Words to Keep

• observation: paying attention, with the senses we were born with and with the instruments we have built to extend them.

• measurement: describing a thing by amount in a shared unit, so a private impression becomes something two people can check and argue about honestly.

• experience: the raw signal that comes in through the senses and is decoded by the brain, before the mind has made anything of it.

• print: the physical trace an experience leaves in the brain, kept for as long as the brain decides it is useful for staying alive.

• intuition: ordinary intelligence repeated so many times that the brain no longer charges it the cost of conscious attention.

• idea: anything that can be known, and what the mind makes of experience by breaking it into named, separate pieces.

• the three layers: what an idea is, what it does, and what makes it itself: the physical, the functional and the specific layer.

• threat and not-threat: the two folders the brain sorts everything into, by asking of each thing whether it will kill me.

• reframing: the human power to see a threat as a chance, or to turn something that costs nothing into meaning and pleasure.

Sources and Further Reading

• This chapter comes mostly from my own observation of how my senses, habits and fears work, not from any one book.

• Robert Zemeckis (director), Cast Away (2000). The film about Chuck Noland, stranded on an island, that I use to show the three layers of an idea.

• Thomas Young and the double-slit experiment. Young first did it with light in the early 1800s, and quantum physicists later repeated it with single particles and a detector at the slit.

• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859). The theory of evolution by natural selection behind my claim that the brain was built for survival, not truth.

• Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976). The gene's-eye view of behaviour that I lean on when I talk about the father and his child.

• The International System of Units (SI). The shared units that make a kilogram in Kerala a kilogram in Stockholm.