We're All a Little Defective

Reality Doesn't Care for Explanation

An uncomfortable question popped into Jaya's mind. "Roz, don't take this the wrong way," she began, "but is it possible that you are defective?"

"Don't say that, Jaya!" cried her brother.

"No, it is okay," said the robot. "I have asked myself that same question. I do not feel defective. I feel . . . different. Is being different the same as being defective?"

"I don't think so," said Jaya. "Or else we're all a little defective."

― Peter Brown, The Wild Robot Escapes

Oversimplified for the sake of impact, but some nuance and research findings follow in the description of each:

The bad news on human nature, in 10 findings from psychology

We view minorities and the vulnerable as less than human.
We experience Schadenfreude (pleasure at another person’s distress) by the age of four.
We believe in karma – assuming that the downtrodden of the world deserve their fate.
We are blinkered and dogmatic.
We would rather electrocute ourselves than spend time in our own thoughts.
We are vain and overconfident.
We are moral hypocrites.
We are all potential trolls.
We favour ineffective leaders with psychopathic traits.
We are sexually attracted to people with dark personality traits.

Don’t get too down – these findings say nothing of the success that some of us have had in overcoming our baser instincts. In fact, it is arguably by acknowledging and understanding our shortcomings that we can more successfully overcome them, and so cultivate the better angels of our nature.

There's another important quality that children possess. In addition to being sneaky and smart, they're also compassionate. Children care about others, and about the world.

― Peter Brown, The Wild Robot Escapes

Source

"I believe that appreciation is a holy thing--that when we look for what's best in a person we happen to be with at the moment, we're doing what God does all the time. So in loving and appreciating our neighbor, we're participating in something sacred."

― Fred Rogers

‘We’re All Hallucinating All of the Time’
The Neuroscience of Perception, Hallucination, and Reality

Perception is not an accurate reflection of an externally existing world.

“In fact,” the neuroscientist Anil Seth says, “perception and hallucination have a lot in common. You could say that we’re all hallucinating all of the time, and when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.” . . .

The brain operates on implicit beliefs accumulated over thousands of years of human evolution. These, he explains, are what “turn the raw material of sensory data into our projected perceptual realities.”

Most of the time, we can all agree on these perceptions. But sometimes this consensus breaks down, such as in the case of the Internet phenomena of the white-and-gold versus black-and-blue dress or the “laurel” versus “yanny” audio clip. These are stark reminders of what Seth describes as the “neurological guesswork that happens behind the scenes.” In these moments, the curtain is lifted on the theater--not the window--of our reality.

“Our brain is doing its best to make sense of ambiguous sensory input,” Merriman told The Atlantic. “In some ways, our perception of the world is just the story our brains are telling us based on the sum of our senses.”

The mind’s ability to create this congruous narrative of reality continues to awe Seth.

The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy
Some of Charles Schulz’s fans blame the cartoon dog for ruining Peanuts. Here’s why they’re wrong.

Peanuts was a drama of social coping, outwardly simple but actually quite complex. . . .

Snoopy’s coping philosophy was, in a sense, even more antisocial than Schroeder’s. Snoopy figured that since no one will ever see you the way you see yourself, you might as well build your world around fantasy, create the person you want to be, and live it out, live it up. Part of Snoopy’s Walter Mitty–esque charm lay in his implicit rejection of society’s view of him. Most of the kids saw him as just a dog, but he knew he was way more than that. . . .

But for many fans, it wasn’t merely Snoopy’s brothers and sisters dragging him down. There was something fundamentally rotten about the new Snoopy, whose charm was based on his total lack of concern about what others thought of him. His confidence, his breezy sense that the world may be falling apart but one can still dance on, was worse than irritating. It was morally bankrupt. As the writer Daniel Mendelsohn put it in a piece in The New York Times Book Review, Snoopy “represents the part of ourselves—the smugness, the avidity, the pomposity, the rank egotism—most of us know we have but try to keep decently hidden away.” While Charlie Brown was made to be buffeted by other personalities and cared very much what others thought of him, Snoopy’s soul is all about self-invention—which can be seen as delusional self-love. This new Snoopy, his detractors felt, had no room for empathy.

To his critics, part of what’s appalling about Snoopy is the idea that it’s possible to create any self-image one wants—in particular, the profile of someone with tons of friends and accomplishments—and sell that image to the world. Such self-flattery is not only shallow but wrong. . . .

Snoopy’s critics are wrong, and so are readers who think that Snoopy actually believes his self-delusions. Snoopy may be shallow in his way, but he’s also deep, and in the end deeply alone, as deeply alone as Charlie Brown is. Grand though his flights are, many of them end with his realizing that he’s tired and cold and lonely and that it’s suppertime. As Schulz noted on The Today Show when he announced his retirement, in December 1999: “Snoopy likes to think that he’s this independent dog who does all of these things and leads his own life, but he always makes sure that he never gets too far from that supper dish.” He has animal needs, and he knows it, which makes him, in a word, human.

Embody your self-delusions, just don't necessarily believe them.

Tales from the Inner City, by Shaun Tan: A Review

Magical.

Marvelous, otherworldly, enthralling, haunting, wonderful. Magical.

Working in libraries has cured my of my book-hoarding obsession. I have such easy access to nearly anything I want on a daily basis, I no longer feel much need to own the books myself. This is one of the rare exceptions. It's not enough for me to have consumed this book; I want to possess it. I want to repeatedly emerse myself in it and dwell in it. I want to become a part of it and make it a part of me.

Explanation is a luxury we can't afford these days, and reality doesn't care for it, being far too busy following its own unknowable course.

This is not the kind of book you open looking for explanations. It is not one to understand, to carefully analyze with logic. This is a book of intuition. It speaks to your associative brain. It offers not rational meaning but meaningful feeling. You "get it" without being able to say just what it is you're getting. 

Tales from the Inner City is a collection of short stories paired with images, each about an intersection of humans with an animal. Each tale is a different animal--literally and figuratively. Some are a few sentences, some ten or twelve pages, most somewhere in between. Most have inexplicable and supernatural occurences that come with no explanation. They are intentionally vague and hazy and mythical. All implicitly consider the consequences of civilization on the natural world.

The "frog" tale (none of the tales have titles, merely the silhouette of a creature), for instance, opens with:

One afternoon the members of the board all turned into frogs. You might say they had it coming, but that's not what this story is about. This story is about the person who found them like that.

Or the opening tale, about a high rise whose eighty-seventh floor is secretly a crocodile habitat. Or the boy genius who dreamed about hippos. Or this, the shortest tale of all:

The rhino was on the freeway again.
We blew our horns in outrage!
Men came, shot it dead, pushed it to one side.
We blew our horns in gratitude!

But that was yesterday.
Today we all feel terrible.
Nobody knew it was the last rhino.
How could we have known it was the last one?

This is not a lecture. Yes, there are sadness and regret and acknowledgment of human error, but the book is not designed to be a guilt trip. There are stories of joy and wonder as well. They are complex and nuanced and full of confusing ambivalence. Not frustrating confusion, though. Reality is a muddle, after all. And these tales tap into that muddle magically.

They transport you into the heart of things.

Don't you know I am as old as the blood in your veins? I was running along the wintered fibers of your soul before you were even a pup, a cub, a kit, a pulse in your mother's womb! I know your every thought and feeling, more than you do yourself, every craving, every fear and dream and vice and embarrassing secret, I know them all. So please, pay no mind as I ransack the bottom drawers of your subconscious. There's nothing here that I haven't already seen a thousand times before, and a fox has no appetite for shame.

Perception is interpretation.

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, Roz, but you don't have some grand purpose. Like all the other ROZZUM robots, you were designed to work for humans. That's it."

The robot thought for a moment. Then she said, "I once suggested to a group of wild animals that my purpose might simply be to help others."

The Designer thought for a moment. Then she said, "When you put it that way, your purpose does sound rather grand, doesn't it?"

― Peter Brown, The Wild Robot Escapes