Recently, I had the opportunity to visit a building in the Colorado mountains, originally built about 150 years ago and remodeled in recent months. As I entered, a small but bright, flickering light caught my attention on the far side of the large main hall. I thought it must be an emergency lamp that activates in case of alarm. Yet no alarm was sounding.
When I walked closer, I realized that what I had mistaken for a modern addition to the old building was simply a small piece of metal, somehow lodged exactly at the edge where the wall met the ceiling.
An open window allowed a bit of wind to move the metal just enough to reflect the morning sunlight for a few moments before swinging back again, creating from a distance the sensation and illusion of a flickering lamp—a lamp that, in fact, existed only in my imagination, and would have remained there had I not approached to “investigate.”
This experience made me reflect on how often, by not “investigating,” by not getting close enough to reality to truly know what is happening, we accept what we see from a distance as real. Worse still, we build a story around that perception of appearances and then even come to believe our own story—just as I believed there was a light where none existed.
That, in turn, led me to think of the section “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge” from Jorge Luis Borges’ essay The Analytical Language of John Wilkins (published in 1952), in which Borges describes a fictional “certain Chinese encyclopedia” that offers a confusing classification of animals. The final entry refers to animals “that from a distance resemble flies.”
According to Borges, this classification of animals, seemingly “arbitrary and conjectural,” is not so, because “we do not know what the universe is.” Ultimately, each of these perceptual errors—whether corrected later or not—clearly indicates that we do not know what the universe is, whether we are speaking of lights, bits of metal, distant flies, or the universe as a whole.
For example, after finishing last week’s commentary, I copied and pasted it into an artificial intelligence program that detects whether a text has been written by AI or not. Since I wrote that commentary entirely on my own without any AI assistance, it was no surprise that the result came back as “100% human.” But when I pasted that same text into another AI, it concluded “85% AI.”
That situation made it clear that even AI (setting aside its hallucinations) also “sees” what it wants to see, without (so far) the ability to get closer to reality and change its opinion. Clearly, it will be unwise to blindly accept the answers generated by IA as the final and “real” answer.
Perhaps we need to live every day of our lives in an arbitrary and conjectural reality in an unknown universe in order not to lose our capacity for wonder—and to continue rediscovering ourselves.
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