Invisibility Blindness

Chapter 9: The more you look, the more you see.

Dear Friends,

Good stuff this week. Ghost detectors, Zen, Ikea, and flat Earth believers. Obviously I am biased, but I think this is where User Zero starts to hit its stride. And there is so much more on the horizon. Thanks for continuing this journey with me.

Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade

“We are powerfully imprisoned by the terms in which we have been conducted to think.” —Buckminster Fuller

Let’s do an experiment. Take a visual survey of your surroundings. Casually note the objects, then answer the following question.

What percentage of your visible world would you say you can see? The obvious answer is "all of it." That’s the definition of visible, the part of the world that you can see. But stick with me...

Now repeat the experiment, but this time select one thing and concentrate on it alone. It could be anything, a coffee mug, a chair, or something as mundane as a salt shaker. Why is it the way it is? Where did it come from? What would happen if you used it the wrong way? How would you draw it? If you broke it, what could you do with its pieces? How would it look in different light? How was it made? Does something annoy you about it? How would you improve it? Who does it remind you of? What stories would it tell if it could talk? Let your mind drift to peripheral thoughts, find the loose threads and gently tug on them for a little while.

What just happened? Did the world change in the minutes between your first look and your second, more focused survey? No. And yet Something is different. Something appeared from nowhere, Something happened. You saw something one way, and then it changed. So let’s return to the original question. What percentage of your visible world would you say you can see? The answer is less obvious this time around, isn’t it?

If you strip the quantum mechanics out of the thought experiment of Schrödinger's cat, we are left with the following parable.

A cat is trapped in a metal box that’s rigged with poison. There is a chance the cat will die, but maybe not. From the outside you have no way of knowing if the cat is alive or dead. You have to open the box to find out. Until that moment the cat is both alive and dead. Reality is forced to decide what it wants to be as a direct result of your observation.

It feels like observation is simply discovering things that are already there. It seems like our world is a closed loop, a balanced equation. And yet this is an illusion. As far as your consciousness is concerned, nothing exists until the moment you notice it.

Let me repeat that. Nothing exists until the moment you notice it.

We become what we pay attention to. Observation is an inherently creative act. If you participate in the experience, your observation creates a new reality. But if you don’t attend these moments, your world is a snow globe – self-contained, sterile, and boring.

Observation is like breathing, we do it so naturally that it usually contains no magic. It is so easy to become complacent, to stumble through life like zombies, bumping into obstacles and tripping through traps. But you don’t have to accept that reality, you can forge your own. It starts with observation. The more you look, the more you see.

Without creativity, without participating in reality-building, you aren’t using your higher power. Creativity reopens the sealed book of your mind, awakens the child within whose brain hasn't been completely indexed. Society doesn’t birth user zeros, we clone know-it-alls. Once you understand that what you don’t know is limitless, you transform from an intolerable know-it-all into someone capable of changing the world. Or put differently, you can become someone who creates their own world.

If you have a friend for whom English is a second language, chances are you have come to an impasse in a conversation when the right word can’t be found. Most of the time you can stumble around until you identify the appropriate word, but sometimes the word doesn’t exist in English. In these situations the conversation is completely hijacked because whatever you were talking about is much less interesting than the crack in the universe that you just discovered. How can there be concepts on the other side of the world that don’t exist in America?

With some difficulty, your friend will unwind the concept. It is never as easy as you would think because the word often blooms out of deep cultural roots. To understand the word, you need to understand context, and often this requires unpacking layer upon layer of foreign concepts. I don’t know about you, but I tend to walk away from these conversations feeling slightly unhinged. It is uncomfortable to be reminded that you don’t know everything, to trip on the exposed ice cube only to discover the iceberg that has been hidden beneath you undetected.

For example, my Iranian friend told me about a common Islamic belief of jinn. My mind expanded as she explained that jinn are invisible entities that interact with the physical world. Unlike ghosts, they aren’t the spirits of dead people. Unlike angels or demons, they are capable of both good and evil. Like humans they eat, drink, sleep, and have children. When they die they can go to heaven or hell.

While 45% of Americans believe in ghosts and demons, the term jinn is absent from our language and conceptual framework. We are oblivious to jinn despite 77% of people in South Asia believing in them.

One of my most popular creations is an iPhone app called Ghost-O-Meter. At the peak of its popularity, Ghost-O-Meter was the number one app in Apple’s App Store’s entertainment category in six countries. In my description on Apple’s App Store, I explained how Ghost-O-Meter uses the incredible technology of modern phones to detect paranormal energy and guide you to ghosts that are nearby. As a non-believer in ghosts I thought the absurdity of that description was self-evident. I wasn’t expecting fans of Ghost-O-Meter to track me down asking me if the app was real. Here is a typical review that Ghost-O-Meter receives in the App Store:

“If all of you are going to say it’s fake, it isn’t. I’m not a big fan of all the paranoia stuff, but I know when something’s real when I see it.” —MathisKatelyn

The first question I get about Ghost-O-Meter is always, “How does it work?” Like any good illusion, the trick is less impressive once you understand it. I won’t bore you with the mechanics. The question that nobody asks, and the much more interesting question is, “Why does it work?”

How would you go about trying to convince someone in the existence of ghosts? How many words would it take to persuade someone that there is a spirit in their bedroom? Our instinct would be to find a non-believer and present them with convincing facts and arguments that support the possibility that ghosts exist. Perhaps you would conduct research, building a binder full of data to bolster your case. That’s not how to do it.

The more effective method is to ask a compelling question and let the people who are naturally curious convince themselves. Ghost-O-Meter was effective because it shut-up and let user’s imaginations create the ghosts. The app is essentially a dead needle that occasionally twitches to a soundtrack of static. There is no tutorial. There are no buttons. There are very few words. There are no settings. There are no essays or links to Wikipedia. Suddenly the needle jumps and your phone seems to lock onto something in the darkness. At this instant your imagination is magnitudes more convincing than anything I could put on the screen.

When I tell people about Ghost-O-Meter I often get a “Why didn’t I think of that?” response. This is the second illusion of Ghost-O-Meter, the impression that the success of a product hinges on the invention of a novel idea. Indeed, there are many knock-off ghost detection apps available by other developers. The thing that amuses me about these competitors is the additional features they invented to one-up Ghost-O-Meter. Each new feature adds complexity that risks breaking the illusion. The idea is the easy part. Figuring out how to capture people’s imagination is difficult.

I should also remind you that just because Ghost-O-Meter doesn’t actually detect ghosts that doesn’t prove that ghosts don’t exist. I have no evidence one way or the other. If you are prone to eye-roll at people who believe in things that are invisible, that might say more about your own blind spots than it does about the believers.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes a conversation with his son where he needed to recant his disbelief in ghosts after he compares the traditions of Native American culture to his modern beliefs.

“Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”

“What?”

“Oh, the laws of physics, and of logic ... the number system ... the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.”

The narrator continues,

“That law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”

If you don’t have a word for something, that thing is essentially invisible to you. If your culture, your upbringing, your education, and your personal experience lacks the vocabulary to describe something, you can develop huge blind spots. You literally see a different reality from the people who see things that are hidden from you.

The best example I can think of to describe the reality-altering property of language is the color blue. Until modern times, humans couldn’t see blue. The first time people hear this, they don’t believe it. Perhaps you don’t believe it either, so allow me to explain.

On a clear day when you look up into the sky what do you see? Unless there is a plane or a bird passing by, the answer is probably nothing. All we see is blue. We have a word to describe this color so we take it for granted that the sky is blue. But what if your language didn't have that word?

Scholars who study the evolution of language note that the last color to receive a name is always blue. The first culture to add blue to their vocabulary was Egypt, who were also the first people to create blue dyes. Despite living under the same blue sky as everyone else, it wasn’t until humans could create blue objects that their language required a word for that color. They literally couldn’t see blue. Yes, literally.

The eyes of ancient people functioned exactly as our eyes, and yet when they looked into the sky they didn’t see blue, they saw nothing. The heavens were a void, an utterly empty expanse, an infinite zero. If you told an ancient person that their eyes were the same color as the sky, they would be insulted, thinking you see holes in their face.

Color has more in common with ghost detection than you would think. A simple question such as “How many primary colors are there?” is not easily answered. The rainbow is said to have seven colors. The traditional color wheel has three primary colors. Your printer only requires four inks. The colors on your phone are combinations of three colors. Are these competing versions of truth or something else? At what point does red become orange? We search for answers only to find more gradients, spectrums within spectrums, waves of waves, particles within particles. It doesn’t end. The more you look, the more you see.

If color theory doesn’t persuade you, let’s examine mathematics. It takes great effort to believe that the number zero needed to be invented, that there was a time when society functioned just fine without a number representing zero. Here is Robert Pirsig again,

“Zero, originally a Hindu number was introduced to the West by the Arabs during the Middle Ages and was unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans. How was that? he wondered. Had nature so subtly hidden zero that all the Greeks and all the Romans – millions of them – couldn’t find it? One would normally think that zero is right out there in the open for everyone to see.”

We don’t think of numbers as technology, it feels like they exist on their own. And yet numbers are inventions. It’s not just that this concept is invisible, you are blind to the idea altogether. Like Jinn or the color blue, the existence of zero appears at the moment you have a word to describe it.

If English is our first language, then our thoughts are inevitably limited by the assortment of words contained in English. No language is perfect, and the inevitable shortcomings result in thin, brittle structures upon which our thoughts must hang. Too often, we outsource our thinking to the words themselves. Some of us become so lazy that the entirety of our critical thinking remains in the words themselves. A scientific outlook is baked into our language and we don’t even realize it.

If I asked you what is an alternative to the scientific method, your mind would probably jump to thoughts of witchcraft, mysticism, and science-deniers. Susumu Tonegawa, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Medicine speaks both Japanese and English. He claims that it is easier to reason in English than in Japanese. He told his countrymen, “We should consider changing our thinking process in the field of science by trying to reason in English.” Faith in science is so baked into American culture that it is hard to imagine alternative modes of thought.

We can try to push beyond the limitations of our vocabulary, but this inevitably feels like swimming against the current. Some successful linguists can speak endlessly, sounding intelligent with every syllable, and yet never really say anything. Smooth talkers have mastered linguistic tricks that allow them to bypass our minds and speak to our autopilot. Before we know what hits us, we have parted with money, applause, or our dignity because the word masters have moved us. More on this in chapter 12 when we study conmen.

We mistake logical-sounding phrases for actual logic. We gravitate to vague, but powerful-sounding phrases because they allow us to project our own beliefs onto them. Black Lives Matter. Make America Great Again. The personal narratives we tell ourselves about these slogans are where their power resides, not in the words themselves. It is in the best interests of the leaders of these movements to never clarify them because a single definition would shatter the stories each of us has invented. They point in a dark corner and let us create the ghosts for ourselves.

The irony is that while we dismiss belief in magic, ghosts, and gods as primitive, we fail to recognize the mysticism of our normal routines. It takes a very modern faith to function in a world of advanced technology. In any other era, our tools would be considered magic. All we need to know is that our tools work, and we trust in the ghosts of progress and the gods of industry to keep the system running. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

It has become second nature for us to crush anything carrying a whiff of the supernatural. In the rare situations when we are faced with uncertainty, our mental computers take comfort in the scientific method. We believe that with enough time and effort, there isn’t a mystery in the world that we can’t grind into powder under the crushing weight of logic. You can live your entire life grinding mysteries into dust.

Our mental models feel strong so we resist the idea that there is information that exists outside of our understanding. Our knowledge feels so real, so obvious, that it is hard to imagine a time before they existed. This permanence illusion results in anger whenever you encounter people who see something else. This is the reason why flat Earthers strike such a nerve.

People who believe the Earth is flat might be the last demographic that it is still socially acceptable to discriminate against. We can tolerate almost anything except the person who refuses to accept the lessons we learned in grade school. If we are able to get over the initial shock, we hear the flat Earther using the scientific method against us. They tell us to:

Question what we see, to compare our observations with what people are telling us.

Stop blindly accepting what we are told and build our beliefs off of things we have tested.

Invest the effort to really understand our world rather than memorizing textbooks.

You are probably nodding in agreement with these statements but mentally screaming at me additions like "...but that doesn’t mean..." or "...but you can’t just..." to the end of my sentences. I know, I know. Me, too. But let’s try to suppress that reflex temporarily and see where it leads us.

There is a cognitive bias known as the IKEA effect. It says that when you build something you irrationally overvalue it. To test this theory, researchers asked subjects to price items that they created versus objects made by others. On average, people valued their Lego, origami, and IKEA creations 63% higher than the same objects made by somebody else.

We fall in love with our creations. The same is true of our ideas. An idea that you generate yourself will be treasured more than an idea fed to you in a PowerPoint presentation. Unfortunately, self-generated ideas can go horribly wrong like a poorly built IKEA shelf and we will still love them. The flat earth theory is contagious because it has a do-it-yourself component that our textbooks never provided us.

To see a flat Earther as a victim of the IKEA effect, is to see ourselves in their predicament. We all fall in love with our ideas, we hold on to them dearly, refusing to accept that maybe we are wrong. If you can get to this point, you may for the first time have a sympathy for these people that was previously beyond reach. Did you feel your Earth bend a little with this new realization? And if you can connect to people whose planet is shaped differently, there is nobody you can’t reach.

User zero emerges when we find the reset buttons in our mind that allow us to change reality. Things you thought were impossible, like putting yourself in the shoes of a flat Earther, are only possible with intentional mental effort to question long-held beliefs. Which ideas do you cling to irrationally, like improperly constructed IKEA furniture? Can you learn to tell the difference between ideas that are genuinely good, and those that you prefer simply because they are yours?

The good ideas, the ones that can really make a dent will strike your ears exactly like a suggestion that Earth is flat. That’s the only way they come. The only way to progress is straight through crazy. So how can you tell the world-changing ideas from the crazy ones?

There’s a technique that artists use to evaluate their art. There’s nothing formal about it and they might not even realize what they are doing. They look at their work through squinted eyes. It's an odd thing when you think about it. What can you see through blurry eyes that you can't see with 20/20 vision?

Artists have learned, often the hard way, that they can get so attached to their work that they can't see it the way other people do. Fresh eyes might see a mess, but the artist has invested so much into their work that they risk becoming blind to the truth right in front of them. They experienced firsthand just how easy it is to hallucinate a masterpiece.

To avoid the trap they squint. They turn their painting upside down. They look at it from across the room, through mirrors, and in low light. They go to great lengths to see their work with fresh eyes.

Unfortunately, what you usually see through squinted eyes is how horrible your creation is. You realize you have spent so much time in the details that you lost the hierarchy that could hold the work together. You have iterated so much that their original concept has become muddy and confusing. Sometimes you realize that there is nothing you can do to salvage the work, no amount of surface-level touch-up can save the art. Squint tests are risky because they allow for the heartbreaking possibility that the creation you thought was a masterpiece is actually an illusion. How do we uncover truth hiding in plain sight? That is the topic of the next chapter where we enter the negative space in search of answers.