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On the one hand, Watts says, nature is wiggly. Everything wiggles: the outline of the hills, the shape of the trees, the way the wind brushes the grass, the contour of the clouds, the track of streams—it all wiggles.
Human beings, on the other hand, find all this wiggliness too complicated. We want things to stop wiggling so we can measure them and map them. Keep still, we say; hold on. Let’s straighten things out; let’s get it ironed out; let’s get it squared away.
Wherever human beings have been around and done their thing, Watts observes, you find rectangles. We live in boxes; our streets are laid out in grid patterns. We think we understand things when we have translated them into straight lines and squares.
The problem, Watts says, is that we’re trying to translate something that is vastly complicated—the world of nature—into terms that are crude enough and simple enough that the human mind can comprehend them. In fact, human beings are just as wiggly as nature: our brains, for example, are an incredible mess of wiggles.
Yet by comparison with the world of nature, the human brain is relatively simple. The brain is a network of interconnected neurons; and each one of those neurons sends a simple signal: yes/no, on/off. But plants, birds, trees are all far more complicated than neurons; and there are billions upon billions of them. Full story...
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On the one hand, Watts says, nature is wiggly. Everything wiggles: the outline of the hills, the shape of the trees, the way the wind brushes the grass, the contour of the clouds, the track of streams—it all wiggles.
Human beings, on the other hand, find all this wiggliness too complicated. We want things to stop wiggling so we can measure them and map them. Keep still, we say; hold on. Let’s straighten things out; let’s get it ironed out; let’s get it squared away.
Wherever human beings have been around and done their thing, Watts observes, you find rectangles. We live in boxes; our streets are laid out in grid patterns. We think we understand things when we have translated them into straight lines and squares.
The problem, Watts says, is that we’re trying to translate something that is vastly complicated—the world of nature—into terms that are crude enough and simple enough that the human mind can comprehend them. In fact, human beings are just as wiggly as nature: our brains, for example, are an incredible mess of wiggles.
Yet by comparison with the world of nature, the human brain is relatively simple. The brain is a network of interconnected neurons; and each one of those neurons sends a simple signal: yes/no, on/off. But plants, birds, trees are all far more complicated than neurons; and there are billions upon billions of them. Full story...
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