I opened up my email today to find the following important message about a workshop that I apparently must attend if I don’t want to be left behind in the fossilized digital dust:
Escape the Stone Age! Don’t be a Dinosaur! Quickly Learn ChatGPT Tools!
I’m pretty sure the marketing geniuses who crafted this gripping subject line acquired all their knowledge of natural history from the Flintstones. The real irony, however, is that the FOMO bandwagon marketing strategy being used here is among the most ancient advertising ploys in existence—archaic even, practically Paleozoic.
But nerd-out with me for just a second, and take the “dinosaur” reference at face value. Dinosaurs existed for more than 180 million years. And they managed that unprecedented feat, it should be noted, without a single nested algorithm.
Modern humans have only been around for between 300k and 160K, depending on how you define what a modern human is. That’s not even in the same ballpark as dinosaurs, but still a couple orders of magnitude longer than the existence of civilized humans like the ones who sent me this important message about the workshop.
Despite their miniscule 9k existence, civilized humans have managed to make a lasting mark, however. For example, they have successfully orchestrated an impressive mass extinction event that is on course to completely eclipse the one that ended the dinosaurs. It is (perhaps not) unfortunate that this extinction event will be taking civilized humans along with it—sparkly dehumanizing AI tools or no.
The point is that, from a logical/factual standpoint, neither dinosaurs nor Stone Age humans are a good choice here. But don’t ask me to rewrite the ad copy for them. I’m pretty sure that my suggested edits would not be very welcome.
I stepped into the daylight and started across the concrete-paved courtyard in the center of the small urban college campus. The courtyard contains several trees—literally “contains” them, sequesters them, seals them in bricks and cement, allowing just slightly more exposed earth than is necessary to accommodate their trunk girth—Japanese maple and ornamental crabapple, but also a variety of oaks with slender leaves that look like serrated arrows. It was early November, and the ground was lightly littered with recent leaf fall.
I was in a somewhat playful mood, and it didn’t take any effort for me to imagine the arrow-shaped oak leaves on the ground were speaking to me directly, each one offering its own suggestion about what path I should take across the flat open space between the buildings. “Go this way,” said the one to my left. “No, this way is really much better,” said the one directly in front, while the one next to it disagreed wholeheartedly: “You need to turn around and go back the way you came.” I noticed that many of the leaf-arrows seemed to be pointing in one of three distinct directions, corresponding to the three different paths that I have taken across the courtyard in the past. I did a quick mental calculation to see which route was represented by the largest number. Then, for some reason, I altered my course to accommodate the majority of the leaves.
I feel obligated to pause at this point to say that this is not one of those tales of spooky coincidence that ends with some fortune or misfortune experienced or avoided as a result of the particular route chosen. Nothing happened, good or bad. My day quite likely proceeded exactly as it would have if I had chosen either of the other two routes across the courtyard (although, one can never really know…). What I’m interested in exploring here is the content of my imagination, the blatantly irrational idea that there could be a message—and one directed to me personally—expressed in the way the leaves happened to be arranged.
These kinds of irrational thoughts, notions that a chance event or something as mundane as the arrangement of fallen leaves embody a nonrandom pattern or reveal a personally-directed message, are examples of what clinical psychologists and psychiatrists call ideas of reference, and they are symptomatic of certain types of mental disorder, most notably schizotypal personality disorder. Ideas of reference can take a variety of forms. Someone might think the people at the next table at a restaurant are laughing at them; or they might think that the crow cawing in the tree outside their window is speaking to them directly, trying to tell them something important; or perhaps they interpret the passing of two yellow cars in close sequence as a sign of impending danger. Ideas of reference are not unusual. They are fairly common in folks who are not suffering from mental disorder; and probably everyone has experienced the sense that some pedestrian event might have more to it than meets the eye. For some people, however, it can get a bit out of hand.
Mental health professionals make a distinction between ideas of reference and delusions of reference. With ideas of reference, the person is to some degree aware that the ideas are not entirely valid or consistent with reality. Of course, I know that leaves don’t point. Oak leaves are not arrows. Obviously, I was just bored, and changing my path to align with an imagined leaf suggestion was a kind of game I was playing with myself. With delusions of reference, on the other hand, the person truly believes that the universe is speaking to them personally. They really are the target of the laughter coming from the next table. The crow really is telling them something. The leaves have fallen that way on purpose. One of the diagnostic difficulties that mental health professionals face is that self-referential ideas and delusions fall on a continuum that incorporates substantial gray area.
But how crazy is it, really, to think the world speaks to you personally? Learning to see the personal relevance of everyday phenomena and events is a capacity that is likely hardwired into us from our earliest animal beginnings. Our mental systems evolved in circumstances in which the natural world really did speak in meaningful ways, ways that would be dangerous to ignore. In addition, most of us now live in an artificially constructed reality in which many phenomena are in actual fact directed specifically at us; numerous concrete features of civilized society are designed with the specific expectation that we will respond to them in a self-referential way: the orange flashing hand is clearly telling you to wait to cross the intersection; the advertisement popping up on your social media was put there specifically with you in mind. My ability to imagine the leaves as arrows indicating a potential direction of movement is itself a product of experience with the many actual movement-directing arrows that I am confronted with on a daily basis: on the highway, in the supermarket, on my computer screen. So, given that both our evolutionary predilections and the intentionally designed nature of our present circumstances encourage us to interpret events and phenomena in personal ways, what criteria should we apply to ideas of reference in order to separate those that might be considered normal from those that are indicative of mental dysfunction?
To make sorting this out even more difficult, each one of us has gone through a period in our personal developmental history in which such irrational thoughts were a normal feature of our daily experience, a period during which the distinction between animate and inanimate was not at all clear, when chance events and natural phenomena were reflexively interpreted as having an agentive source. For a four-year-old, the sun purposely shines into her eyes, the chair leg intentionally puts itself in the path of her toe. On some level, this prelogical cognitive posture is still with us as adults, despite the fact that we have learned to treat animate and inanimate as mutually exclusive categories, and to separate agentive purpose from the inanimate features of the natural world. It takes very little for us to reinhabit the primal animism of our childhood minds. Consider how easily it is for many people to converse with their digital voice “assistants,” interacting with a collection of nested algorithms as if speaking to a sentient entity.
Not all cultures recognize a clear animate-inanimate distinction. Although it plays a critical role in the mythos of Western civilization—especially as regards the foundational materialism of Western science—such divergent categories are not found in actual experience. In a more traditional human society, chance events and natural phenomena are not mere mechanical artifacts of an insensible material world. They are signals and indications and messages. In a nature-based society, the world is continuously speaking to you, telling you things that you need to pay attention to. The sudden change in the wind can presage an impending weather event. Animal calls can alert you to the presence of a dangerous predator. The flight path of a pair of vultures can lead you to food.
In a traditional nature-based human society the transition away from childhood animism may happen somewhat differently than it does for the civilized. In civilization, childish ideas of reference are replaced by a sterile world of mechanism and mindless mechanical operations. Perhaps in a society intimately embedded in the natural world, childish ideas of reference will eventually mature into a deeper understanding of a universe that is active and alive, a world that speaks in the most personal ways.
There are many ways that the world is speaking to us directly, personally, on a daily, momentary basis that we have been taught to ignore. What are the consequences of our conditioned deafness? What would life be like if we could refamiliarize ourselves with the ever-present voice of the living world?
There may have been a meaningful message in the leaf-fall in the courtyard, but I have been too-long isolated from nature’s voice to notice. The pattern of leaves on the ground was not at all random. Leaf shape is not arbitrary. Each leaf is designed to move in the breeze in specific ways. This, in complex interaction with the movement of the air, led to the particular ways they arranged themselves across the concrete. The leaves fell and landed as they did as a result of the subtle features of the wind at the time that they were dislodged from their sockets, the nuanced interference of the buildings surrounding the courtyard, the ways in which their unyielding structures impeded and channeled the air, the ways the currents and whirls and eddies were shaped by the buildings’ intrusive edifices. The pattern of leaves on the ground embodied a library’s worth of information about air and land and form—voiced in a language that I once knew, but have long ago forgotten.
