Formed In "Its" Image

If the Dynamics shape the universe, they shape us too. Which of the two describes you best depends on where you are in life and which faculty you are using at the moment. This chapter makes a claim: Aristotle's instances line up with our births, and Plato's forms line up with our adult lives.

The fourth premise is about sensation. Infinite, chaotic somethings are happening everywhere. The ones that persist begin to define what would otherwise be a void, and what persisted was awareness. For us, that awareness started when clumps of cells began to feel their surroundings. Each cell matters, even when it has no idea where it sits in the bigger body, and the health of the whole depends on the health of each cell. Scale that up and it is true of people too: each of us senses the world long before we can reflect on it, and our sensations are what first define us.

An amoeba lives this way its whole life, from one sensation to the next, never naming what it feels and never asking what it is for. We are amoebas who like to put labels on things. That is why the next premise usually gets more attention.

The fifth premise is about perception. Picture two digital clocks set to the same millisecond, on opposite sides of a large room. You try to watch both colons blink at once, and every time you turn your head you miss one. Now imagine you are both clocks. When one blinks, you feel the other blink. You probably already want to account for the distance between them. That is your perception at work: it moves you through space, and that movement is what gives you time, a past, a timeline and a future self. Perception lets you imagine yourself somewhere you are not, which makes the imagined you the "poor copy" Plato talked about.

Neither one explains us alone, much as light needs both the wave and the particle to make sense. Used together, they give us a self: you sense your perception perceiving your senses, and that loop is who you are.

The sixth premise names the place where the two overlap. We hint at it with "your gut" or "a sixth sense". "Intuition" sounds too flattering, because this works both for and against us. So the book uses a portmanteau: sensception. It is your senses bubbling up with things you perceive without noticing, or your perception creating sensations of its own. Sensception is what picks up a subtle bad vibe in a crowd. It is also what invents a bad vibe when anxiety lets your imagination run away with you.

Learning to tell those two apart is a skill, and this whole system is built to help you practise it.