Calvin and Hobbes and the Total Perspective Vortex

People are story machines. Our survival-driven need to make and recognize patterns feeds itself, and we create finite and digestible amounts of meaning where before, during, and after, there is only what is. Our narratives are our default modes, our experiences bracketed by the outsides of our own ability to think and see. We do this to survive, and yet it guides our ways of living.

Douglas Adams' take:

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole 
Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. 

To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some 
way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in 
theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, 
every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and 
social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. 

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically 
in order to annoy his wife. 

Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a 
speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. 

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate 
amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the 
mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces 
of fairy cake. 

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as 
often as thirty-eight times in a single day. 

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her. 

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated 
from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: 
so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity 
of creation and herself in relation to it. 

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain 
but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that 
if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it 
cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Claiming a narrative and residing within it is not only our default mode, it is also a survival mechanism. There is too much "out there" for unfiltered perception to handle, and so we construct barriers of interpretation to let in only what we can manage at a time. We tell stories to others and interact through these barriers, sometimes affecting ourselves, sometimes the outer world, and sometimes the meaning-barrier of another person.

The survival mechanism realized in the making of a meaning-barrier relies on narrative stability in order to continue. We take pieces of our current narrative truths and use them to construct perspective-vortex-proof goggles. We maintain safe harbor in a sea of uncertainty by denying the existence of the larger and more inconvenient waves.

Adams postulates  that a move through the meaning-barrier into the real has the effect of  annihilating consciousness completely. This also leads to the presumption that existence inside the barrier comes along with a set of favorable conditions for maintaining consciousness. Harbor space is striated.

If consciousness itself can be seen as a strange loop resulting from the pattern-making activities of the brain operating on themselves, then perhaps the conditions that striate harbor-space are the same as the conditions that allow pattern formation stable enough to be stacked and re-referenced, forming the strange loop of the brain. Or perhaps it is the other way around, and the human need to maintain a striated harbor-space is just the external realization of internal pattern-driven thought.

Life with goggles on is inherently peaceful, so long as the illusion is maintained. Tension arises in us when an event occurs  that calls into question the very framework we use to navigate reality. If a framework is detailed and rigid, these conflicting experiences will occur more often. If your goggles are dark, you will run into walls more often.

Maintaining a minimum of open questions, keeping the goggles on, staying within the barrier, these are all in effect for everyone all the time. What differs between individuals, and where I believe we have a choice, is what to do with our life within the constraints of our narrative safe harbors. The size of the harbor is variable, the amount of light let in by the goggles is changeable, and the meaning-fence can enclose a bigger pasture. Yet, the outer boundaries of our perceptions remain, trained into place by our experiences, the teachings and pressure of others, and the human need to striate smooth spaces in order to have some edges to cling to.

When things happen that call into question the assumptions and models we make of reality, we have two paths. One is to maintain our model, and one is to adjust. When an event occurs outside of the explanatory power of our sustaining narrative, discomfort arises, as to the beholder, the impossible has just occurred. It's a difficult thing for any individual to realize that there are many people with many narratives, that there are narrative narratives in place at a systemic level that dictate acceptable choices in our reality-models, and at the end of the day all of the narratives are made up anyway. To each individual, life in the harbor is the way things are.

We must persist in our striated safe-harbor lives, but the same pattern-driven flexibility that allows us to construct such elegant barriers against the chaos also allows us to examine and consider the nature and structure of the barrier itself.

I believe we have a two available postures to take in any given situation. When presented with a discrepancy between the map and the yard, do we reach for a shovel, or do we reach for a pencil?