Tal, a conversation with an alien (5 page)

Yes, that's right. You did see me
, and I saw you. Frankly, I was a bit surprised you didn't recognize me when I met you downstairs. Perhaps your mind was on something else.

Yes,
it was on gathering my juice. I only caught a glimpse of you. I guess it didn't register immediately because you were wearing the jacket now. But why were you just standing there instead of running? Where you not scared of the earthquake?

Why should I be scared, I knew there was no danger.
And at any rate it was not an earthquake.

How do you know?

Because I caused it, and it was nothing really, a minor mishap.  Don't worry, I took care of the situation and it won't happen again, we are quite safe.

--My guest's delusions of grandeur did not bother me as much as
the realization that being in my apartment was all part of his plan.

So you
followed me here?

Not exactly, I followed the juice.

What do you mean?

I needed your cherry juice. And though I would have brought you another case tomorrow, I thought you might think it rude if I just grabbed it
from you while you were walking down the street.

Why would you want cherry juice?

While cherry juice is somewhat helpful to humans, it is even more helpful to me, as you can see. Plus it helps to hide me from their scanners.

--My thought then was that he was certainly in
sane and possibly schizophrenic. I felt somewhat sorry for him and tried to reason with him.

You do realize that while there are plant pigments in the juice, it doesn't actually make you look like a plant.

Of course.  But notice that I am already hiding in your apartment, thus I have taken care of any exterior visual identification protocols. However, there are other ways of scanning. But don't worry, as I said I have everything under control. Let's continue with the story shall we?

--I was going to ask him who “they”
were, but I really didn't want him to get into it. I wanted him to tell me what he wanted to tell me, and leave. He took a sip of juice and continued as if nothing happened.

I know
of a creature that lives on a stormy desert planet similar in size to your earth. Unlike the earth however, this planet is tidally linked to its sun, hence the sun only shines on one side of the planet and the other side is cold and dark. On this planet, a female of the species lays her eggs many miles apart on the dark side of the planet, away from her children's many predators. Once her children hatch, their subconscious internal directional system sends them on a long journey through the cold and stormy desert. If they survive, the hatchlings will at some point reach the lit side of the planet, where the weather will be warm, and they will meet others of their species and spawn. These creatures initially are blind, since they are born on the dark side of the planet and do not receive much information in the form of light. Yet they are actually born with organs you might call eyes. However, these eyes are dormant, they are not engaged until later in life, when they get closer to the illuminated side of the planet. These young creatures, though highly intelligent, often do not meet any other sentient beings for quite a while as they blindly travel the vast and desolate desert surface of their planet.

Sounds like a difficult life.

Yes, now
imagine looking at the world through the eyes of these solitary creatures, walking through the desert. Initially they do not see, so what they know about the world is defined by their sense of touch. As they walk, they touch things; rocks, strange insects, various cactus like life forms. They bump into things, and then they keep moving. They perceive the world in a very different way than you do. An object, say a rock comes into existence for them only when they touch it, since they can't see it coming, and when they no longer touch the rock, it disappears.

Well
the rock isn't gone, it’s just behind them.

You know that to be true, but from their point of view it is not so obvious.
Remember that they are solitary creatures, moving ever forward to the light side of the planet. Since they communicate with no other creature, they only have one point of reference, themselves. But you are right, being intelligent, they would have several ways of interpreting what is happening in the world around them. The most simple is that objects come into existence when they touch them, and then the objects are gone as soon as they lose touch with them. The more subtle idea would be that they are walking on a road that actually stretches farther than they can sense, objects already exist but they simply haven't come in contact with them yet.

I am not sure it is so subtle, it seems very obvious to me that any semi intelligent alien would realize that the world isn't being created just for them as they walk
around. It already exists but they just haven't experienced it yet. 

Yet this is how you think of time, as
the world popping into existence when you touch the present moment. Now when we are talking about space, the answer seems obvious to you, but to these creatures, until they meet someone who tells them of things further down the road, they would have no reason to believe that there is any world outside of what they are touching at that moment. To them, the entire world is their world of touch, things will appear within their world when they touch them, and disappear again. The concept that there is a massive world outside of what they can touch is a more subtle idea that only comes about once they have interacted with others, or develop the ability to see far away objects. Until they reach the warm and lit lands where they can see the vast expanse of their planet, the idea that there is a massive world beyond the surface of their body would be too much to imagine. 

I see what you are saying.

Now imagine what happens in a hypothetical encounter between two such creatures walking from slightly different directions. After bumping into each other, one would say "Wow, hello I am sure glad you came into existence, I have been quite lonely." The other would say, "Hello, but it is not I who just came into existence, it is you. I have been alive a long time." At that point, if neither attempted to kill the other for usurping their privileged place at the center of the universe; after much discussion and experimentation, both could come to the realization that things do not come into existence, they already exist. Once you get close enough to sense them, their existence is, uncovered. Still this would be a logical understanding only. Wouldn't it be much more pleasant for them to continue to believe that they were the center of the universe, that all things appear and disappear but they were constant? Would it be so easy for them to change their egocentric worldview to one where they were just one thing amongst many things?

Well t
hey would have to, if they were logical. Perhaps they could modify their view. After all, their world would still be very small. Even if they realized it was bigger than just what they touch, they would have no idea how big it really is, they could still be the major part of it.

Yes, d
irect sensory observation would be far more dramatic and enlightening. Imagine what happens when these new friends finally climb over the summit of a hill, and below them lies an illuminated valley. Their dormant organs of sight awakening, they see for the first time the true expanse of space. 

It would
surely be an amazing experience.

Just as these c
reatures can only know the existence of what they can touch, you can only know the existence of what you can sense with your mind at the present moment. You cannot actually observe the future, hence you naturally believe time exists only at your location. Time only pops into existence when you experience it.

We
ll you can't fault us for understanding things according to how we sense it.

The nature of a dimension
, whether time or space, can be easily misunderstood if you lack the senses to understand it properly. Your sense of sight gives you a very good understanding of the spatial dimension. Yet humans do not all have the same ability to see. Those who have problems with their sense of sight often get nearly as confused about the nature of space as these alien creatures do.

Yes,
since I have my own space perception issues, I have read quite a few case studies about spatial perception in people who have vision problems. 

Do you recall one
of the most famous early cases, documented in the seventeen hundreds, about a boy who gained vision late in life?

Yes,
he was born blind because of cataracts in his eyes, and had them removed at thirteen. When he first regained his sight, he thought that the new images he saw with his eyes actually touched his eyeballs. As if they were pasted onto his eyes.

Right,
even though he had lived for thirteen years, all that time touching, listening and moving in space, he had very little understanding of space and distance. To him space was flat. Humans who have spent their entire lives in rain forests or places where they are enclosed, also tend to misunderstand space. When they are removed from the enclosed spaces of the forest and first see objects far away from them, they believe those objects are still close, but just very small. Your understanding of a dimension depends on your brain's interpretation of the sensory information it receives. Even what you might consider a subtle change in your sense perception of space can have a very meaningful impact on how you understand it. One of the greatest abilities humans have when observing the spatial dimension is their ability to observe it from two distinct coordinates. You gain information from two eyes that are spaced apart from each other. Your brain creates a coherent image by combining the images from these two different perspectives of space. When it does so, you gain a sense of depth perception, what your scientists call stereoscopic vision. However, there are humans who only see from one coordinate, one eye, and this creates a more limited ability to see depth.

Yes
, that’s a condition called stereo blindness. People who lose an eye for instance, will lose some of their stereoscopic vision. They lose depth perception, and they can't judge distance accurately. I know of a well-documented story of a woman named Sue Barry, a neurobiologist and writer who gained stereoscopic vision only as an adult.

Yes, s
he is a pretty famous case. She was born with a condition called stabismus, or misaligned eyes, one well known type of stabismus is crossed eyes. Though her eyes were later realigned with surgery to cosmetically appear as if they were straight, her brain did not correctly combine the two images from her eyes. Instead of combining images, her brain switched from one eye to the other. If you cover one eye, you will actually see everything in two-dimensional space, there is no depth in the image. The image will still appear to you as three-dimensional because there are other depth cues besides seeing from two different perspectives such as the size of objects, shading, or one object blocking the view of another. These cues give you a sense of 3D space, and you brain will use those cues to create a coherent 3D image; it will simulate depth. This makes the condition of seeing space from one perspective minor or even unnoticeable to most people. If you had stereo vision all your life, your brain will give you a simulated sense of depth even if you cover one eye. But if you never had this type of vision, you literally live in a two dimensional world. Due to the closeness of your eyes to each other, the angles at which they see the world are not that different, hence as you look farther away, that three-dimensional perception fades. So distant objects, past a few hundred feet, are always seen in a two-dimensional way by everyone, though your mind will still create a sense of depth. When you look at the moon at night for instance, you cannot really perceive its distance from you. If a cloud happens to then float over and partially obscure the moon, you can get a sense of the vast space between you.

Is that very important?

I think you will see the value. Sue writes that she often tried to use her imagination to visualize what truly seeing in three dimensions would be like. When she found out there were newly developed vision therapies that could teach her brain to synthesize the images of the eyes instead of switching back and forth, she pursued them. She was shocked when her stereo vision first began to manifest itself. Even though she was in the field of neurology and understood her condition, the actual experience of stereo vision was nothing like what she had imagined. As things began to randomly pop out at her, the world began to look completely different. Though she logically knew that she existed in a three-dimensional world, and she used other depth cues to function; without being able to see space from two different locations, she did not actually see it the way you do. She writes eloquently about how she and others who suffer from stereo blindness perceived space before and after gaining stereo vision. Before, she felt separate from what she saw, for instance in a snow storm, snow fell in a flat sheet in front of her instead of all around her. Though she didn’t specifically feel her visual detachment from the world, she found herself drawn to activities where she could at least physically feel herself within a medium, for instance swimming in water. Other people who regained their stereo vision had similar stories. They felt separated from what they were looking at. They also did not sense the space around them and between objects, the negative space. The interesting thing is that though she never had stereo vision, Sue’s world seemed complete and natural. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary at the time, it was just the way it was. Only in retrospect did she become consciously aware of these shortcomings. Her change in vision even changed the way she thought. Feeling detached from her surrounding, she tended to look at each object separately. She could see the details of a thing, but not easily understand it as a whole. Her thinking had evolved to work in a very sequential way, object by object. After gaining stereo vision, she was able to take everything in at once, instead of having to look at one thing and then the next. She got the big picture.