The Invariant Gardener

I love this sentence. It’s seems meaningless, with a scent of foolishness. But it is so profound. It goes deep into the mysteries of the human psyche. It goes straight to the essence of human cognition, which is …. recognition, i.e., the fact that we are constantly checking our perception on the basis of our memories, looking for some kind of similarity. This is the one habit of the mind.

Notwithstanding our current devotion to ‘difference’, we should acknowledge the fact that looking for sameness is not only a fundamental, yet covert, goal, it has its beauty in itself, which is the fact that we do like what is like what we expected. It’s only when we can match our expectations with our perceptions that we “feel the real thing”. When we keep in touch with reality there’s a correspondance between our representations of reality and reality itself. We then feel in control, hence we feel secure, and we simply love that !

I don’t know what Dwight Eisenhower had in mind when he uttered this quasi-tautology but, sure enough, he is inviting us to look at reality as if we were recognizing it, no matter what its present state. We are invited to feel as if we were in control, as if we were secure, hence opened to reality. We are invited to pay attention to the innumerable aspects of our present reality which are fulfilling our expectations, our needs. We are thus invited to perceive, think, feel and act positively.

Of course, what is of interest here, is definitely not positive thinking. It’s the fact that we are in love with sameness but we ignore it. We are constantly looking for some kind of invariance in our lives, but we tend to deny it. We tend to associate sameness and boredom when sameness means stability, hence reality, hence control, hence security, hence comfort, hence pleasure. When reality perfectly matches our expectations, we say “it’s a dream” and we feel joyful.

On this site, we will unrelentingly investigate the consequences of our drive for sameness in every aspects of human life, intending to show how it can be at the root of our creativity like reproduction is the very spring of the whole living phenomenon.

A beautiful example of the presence and the power of sameness in our lives comes from a physicist, Hubert Reeves, who I heard recounting on the radio that after he understood Maxwell’s equations of light, he became afraid that this new understanding would ruin the exquisite pleasure he had just contemplating the beauty of a sunset. Fortunately, he soon discovered that his new knowledge of light just enhanced his pleasure.

He gaves no explanation for that. But his testimony makes sense. The more fulfilled expectations you have, the more pleasure you get. The more you know about history, music, biology etc., the more intense your understanding of all the things around you, the more pleasure you get.

Somehow, knowledge is a garantee of pleasure when interacting with the world. Discovery is so pleasurable because it gives you more knowledge, more control, more pleasure, i.e., more opportunities to think that “things are more like they are now than they ever were before”.

Welcome to my garden of ideas, where you will, hopefully, be able to gain as well as offer some knowledge over humankind and its reality.