An essay on human perception - Marvin

You and I are one,
You are in me as I am in you.
I am to you what you are to me –
A parasite!
We follow each other, one consciously so,
Like day and night.
My host, my guest –
You make a wonderful shoe!

- The “conscious” man to nature

Everything in our world is explained relatively. The concept of ‘night’ is explained in contrast with the concept of ‘day’, the concept of ‘above’ is explained in contrast with concept of ‘below’. Similarly, the concept of ‘indoors’ is explained in contrast with the concept of ‘outdoors’. In fact, oddly enough, neither one can exist without the other. If you ignore one concept the other does not make any sense at all. The point is it is impossible to perceive any environment except from the context of another one. So also, a time period in history can be perceived only with respect to another.
It makes one wonder what future generations will think of us. They might call us ‘objectivists’ because we view everything objectively. And we insist that our view is correct by saying that the nuts and bolts reality of the world is true because it is common sense. The question is whether a few centuries from now this ‘sense’ will be commonly shared or will people realize that the subjective world and the objective world have no meaning except in terms of each other – just like ‘outdoors’ and ‘indoors’.
We speak of nature as a collection of objects ranging from atoms to galaxies. We speak of nature objectively, regarding nature as ‘it’. We speak subjectively only of ourselves. Why is it that we cannot view nature subjectively? Why is that we cannot accept a psychic ‘other’ than ourselves? And why is it that we cannot accept nature as a ‘being’ which is an extension of our own?
In a sense, all of us have been through this process before in that early discovery of our bodies as a part of our own being. Joseph Church in his interesting book ‘Language and the Discovery of Reality’describes this process. Speaking of the very young child, he says:
When shortly before six months, he discovers his hands explicitly and visually, it is as external objects. More stricking still, is the baby’s disscovery of his or her feet, which he treats as alien entities – and which his now active hands capture and bring to his mouth for tasting. When he bites on his toes, he seems surprised that it hurts.
Dosen’t this sound surprisingly like our own recent growth, wherein – we have looked upon nature objectively and regarding it as an alien entity we have tried to exploit ‘it’, only to realize that we are the one’s that get hurt. That is why we hear about rights for animals, wildlife protection and nature conservation today. We cannot come to terms with the idea that nature, like our bodies, may be an extension of our own being. It requires a redefining of the meaning of self that trancends both individual mind and body.
And thus, the opening lines.

- Marvin