Why are you here?
 
What are the chances that we alone survived among all the groups of similar organisms that inhabited Earth over the past six million years? The earliest group, Ardipithecus, had four member species that died out about four million years ago; the last one, our own Homo group, has had seven members, but we were late to the game, making our first appearance as Homo rudolfensisand Homo habilisjust a couple of million years ago. Between the rise of our group and the demise of the Ardipithecus group lie four members of Australopithecus and three members of the Paranthropus group. In all, we seem to have had seventeen “sister” or ancestral species since we separated from the great apes.* Was there a plan in all this? In any of it? 
 
Tie in a bit of quantum mechanics here. The November 21, 2018, article “Photons, Quasars, and the Possibility of Free Will” that Brian Koberlein wrote for Scientific American, if I read its implications correctly, suggests that the universe is both random and determined.** He makes a good argument for using the photons from quasars to test for entanglement and the problem of measurement. That’s the famous problem that involves Schrödinger’scat that is simultaneously alive and dead until someone observes its status as one or the other; or, that involves two subatomic particles (e.g., photons or electrons) that appear upon observation to be “paired” somehow, regardless of the distance between them. Since the actual measuring or observing apparently affects the outcome of experiments with entangled phenomena, any laboratory apparatus might have unknown variables associated with the experimenters. To get around the possibility of some bias or interference on the part of the lab workers even as they use random generators to pick their entangled photons to study, Koberlein reports using the light from quasars, photons that left their place of origin billions of years before Ardipithecus ate its first leaf. Such photons can’t be entangled with the experimental apparatus or with the experimenters because neither existed when the photons left their quasars. 
 
Koberlein writes that “randomness is still possible throughout the cosmos” and that “your fate is not necessarily sealed.” You, he argues, get to decide; you apparently have some free will.
 
And that “free will” and randomness, if demonstrated by photons billions of years old, seems to indicate that some choices were made along the path of hominoid and hominin evolution. So, back to my questions: What are the chances that we alone have survived? Why are you here? Was it a matter of fate or will? 
 
Certainly, there were random events that put our predecessors in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the volcanic eruption that laid down the ash marked by the footprints of Australopithicus afarensis. And since we’re talking about not just millennia but millennia of millennia, something “bad” was likely to happen: Eruption, drought, flood, bolide impact, new virus, etc. However, regardless of happenstance, our ancient ancestor species might have made little decisions, such as choosing to turn left where a waiting carnivore coincidentally lay in wait. (Haven’t you accidently walked into a spider’s web?)  
 
We could say that the matter of our existence isn’t a matter of much debate. We’re here. That’s it. Nothing more to discuss. We made it, but the others didn’t. But now we come to whether or not we are making the choices that lead to our own group’s disappearance to follow the Ardipithecines and others into extinction. 
 
Interestingly, some of those predecessor groups were contemporaneous, just as we were contemporaries of Homo neanderthalensis. But look around. Do you see any species that would continue the hominin group if we die out now that Neanderthals are, except for some genes in us, out of the picture? 
 
In the sense of continuing an evolutionary path, even in a random walk, all those other groups were entangled. We can’t, of course, fully explain how our group arose and survived beyond saying that Darwinian random mutations led to what we are without certainly acknowledging that some choices were made along the way, some that led to the demise of some groups and the rise of others. How, for example, do we explain that we knew that some plants were poisonous and that ingesting them was perilous? After the first taster fell sick or dead, did the word spread like some smart phone alert about tainted lettuce? Did that hard-learned lesson then involve subsequent food choices? 
 
Do you find yourself arguing from both sides of the fence of fate? Do you see yourself as making choices in a random setting and then seeing consequences determined by those choices? Do you occasionally “feel” that some of your choices were the consequences of circumstances over which you never had control? Were they “consequent choices” (or choices imposed by previous consequences)?   
 
Sometime along the long temporal path of humanity’s rise, both random choices and consequent choices played a role in making us what we are. Did little Lucy’s relatives make a choice of going left and not right, of seeking food that endangered them, or of choosing to live in a spot that seemed safe at the time only to find it increasingly dangerous or precipitously catastrophic? 
 
If this seems a bit too unrelated to your current presence in the universe, then consider a version of this that is more germane to your everyday life. Have you noticed the tendency to ascribe choice to otherswhen something “bad” happens and randomness to you when you experience the same. Their “bad” is a matter of choice; your bad is a matter of fate. 
 
It seems that when we make “bad” choices, we have a tendency to ascribe them to fate, whereas we ascribe our “good” choices to free will. And we seem to do the opposite with regard to others.
 
 
*Salhelanthropus tchadensis, Orrorin tugensis, Ardipithecus kadabba, Ardipithecus ramidus; Australopithecus anamensis, afarensis garhi, and africanus; Paranthropus aethiopicus, robustus, and boisei; and Homo habilis, rudolfensis, erectus, floresiensis, neanderthalensis, heidelbergensis, and sapiens. 
** https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/photons-quasars-and-the-possibility-of-free-will/Accessed on November 29, 2018. The subtitle is “Flickers of light from the edge of the cosmos helpo physicists advance the idea that the future is not predetermined.”

I suppose we could all agree that dogs know stuff. They know commands, warnings, pleasures that follow an owner’s opening a bag of treats, and foreboding trips to the vet. They can also figure out how to get to the other side of a fence, and they know who will pet them. Again, dogs know stuff. They also seem to know how to know by exploring and interacting with an environment. But dogs don’t know anything about the neurons that give them their capabilities. In contrast, we know a little, and we continue to experiment to discover more about our ability not just to know, but also to know about knowing. But do we know much about why we favor one thing over another, say type of music or speech?
 
Consider our very sketchy knowledge of why we choose to know what we know and appreciate. Take your taste in music or literature as an example. Why do you like what you like, and how does your brain go about the liking? More fundamentally, before you even establish a liking for one kind of rhythm or pitch or for melody or harmony, how is it that you distinguish between speech and song? I ask these questions in the context of what every generation experiences: Music and speech can be fashionable, and, like clothing, can be generation-specific. Otherwise, all English-speaking people would be listening to the music of John Dowland and speaking like Æthelred the Unready. As you know, the music you favored during your teenage years and probably still like isn’t the current favorite music of most contemporary teens.
 
I bring up these questions in light of my having just discovered that one of the specialized branches of the Max Planck system is the Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Now there’s a combo you won’t get at a MacDonald’s. What’s the assumption behind the institute’s existence? Empiricism and aesthetics are not just juxtaposed, but also interwoven in the fabric of knowing? Only in the modern world of specialization, eh? We divided knowledge into special branches over the centuries only to begin putting them together again, as in biogeochemistry, neurophysiology, and now empirical aesthetics. 
 
Well, there’s more to this than your humble average guy on the street might guess. 
 
Street reporter: “Excuse me, sir, do you think much will come of the Max Planck research into empirical aesthetics?”
 
Pedestrian with latte, “Huh?”
 
My feelings exactly. I don’t know what I would say. Com’on, at best I might think that the institute is studying what drives people to movie theaters. Surely, that’s what producers and directors of so-called “summer movies” and “holiday movies” do. There’s a formula they figured out empirically. Gotta be. Every one of those movies seems to fall into a pattern. And maybe that’s why there are 12,000 Fast and Furious and Star Wars movies: They discovered the secret aesthetic of the human brain. But that discovery and application in movies might also be why people tire when they finally grasp that they’re seeing the same thing just slightly altered. We can apply the same principle of mental fatigue to music, literature, and film. It might be why we say of some arts film, “That’s a masterpiece.” 

How do we know what we like? How do we know the difference between the aesthetically pleasing and the unaesthetically repulsive? Should we rely merely on the words of critics who tell us what is good or bad, artful or inartistic, B-level or A-level entertainment? Should we follow the dictates of some philosopher of aesthetics? 
 
Just as a little background, you should know that researchers in the Max Planck system are widespread and diverse. I just want to give a partial list of specialized institutes so you’ll get the sense of how we have devised branches of knowledge over the past two centuries. Put “Max Planck Institute for…” in front of each:
 
            Art History
            Neuroscience
            Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean
            Astronomy
            Astrophysics
            Biological Cybernetics
            Biology of Ageing
            Empirical Aesthetics (mentioned above)
            Cognitive and Brain Sciences
            Chemical Energy Conversion
            Chemistry
            Comparative and International Private Law
            Demographic Research
            Extraterrestrial Physics
            Human Development
 
Get the idea? There are more than 50 such institutes. Germany has most of them, but you can find them in Italy, the USA, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. So, as I was saying, there are people devoted to the study of “empirical aesthetics.” Is that the science of knowing what we find pleasing? It brings up personal questions for each of us: “What makes me like what I like?” “How did I come to like what I like?” “Why do you and I like the same stuff?” “Why don’t you and I like the same stuff?” (In fact, I’m listening to the music of John Dowland on YouTube as I write this, but I’m guessing you aren’t listening to it as you read it) 
 
Fifty plus institutes would indicate fifty specializations in knowledge. We’ve done much to separate branches of knowledge since Max Planck was born, so maybe the institute devoted to empirical aesthetics is an attempt to put knowledge back together and to understand knowledge and the process of knowing holistically.  
 
It’s in light of this blending of specializations that I read a paper by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Leipzig. Neuroscientists there published a paper in 2012 entitled “Perception of Words and Pitch Patterns in Song and Speech.” Julia Merrill and six colleagues looked at the brain in an fMRI study to examine “shared and distinct cortical areas involved in the auditory perception of song and speech at the level of their underlying constituents: words and pitch patterns.”* Seems like a study that the people over at the Institute for Empirical Aesthetics might want to read (I don’t know whether members of various MPIs read publications from other branches). Let’s not get too involved here, but the following sentence from the conclusion will provide a sense of the study: “While the left IFG coded for spoken words and showed predominance over the right IFG in pitch processing in speech, the right IFG showed predominance over the left for pitch processing in song.” IFG? You have two just in case you’re interested. They’re in your head. Put your index fingers on your temples. Got it? Now you know where you have inferior frontal gyri. They play a role in distinguishing between speech and song; obviously from the study, the right IFG plays a role in the brain’s “creative half.” 
 
So, even before you consider what you like or don’t like in music or literature, you might want to consider how you know you are listening to music or to speech. Well, according to A. D. Patel, the timing you recognize in music has a stricter periodicity than the timing you hear in speech: “there is no evidence that speech has a regular beat, or has meter in the sense of multiple periodicities.”** You perceive a regular metric in music but don’t perceive the same for speech because it is heterometric.*** Of course, you might want to argue that some languages seem more “musical” than others, but that’s a topic for another fMRI. More germane to the discussion here is that beyond the basic distinction a brain recognizes between song and speech is the question of quality or aesthetics, that is, the distinction between “good” and “bad” music or speech.
 
You have brain parts that can distinguish between speech and song. But why do you like different music from your teenage relatives? Is there something in you that says, “I know what makes music or speech aesthetically pleasing?” How did you come by that knowledge? Mere habit, or, rather, enculturation? 
 
If we assume that tastes in music and language are acquired tastes, the offshoot question about how we know what we know becomes how do we come to like what we like? 

​Apparently, we’re getting close to understanding how our brains know speech from song. One more time: “The IFG was involved with a differential hemispheric preponderance depending on whether words or melodies were presented in song or speech. The results suggest that the left IFG shows relative predominance in differentiating words and melodies in speech (compared to song) whereas the right IFG (compared to the left) shows predominance in discriminating words from melodies in song.”* Okay, I get it. I can distinguish between speech and song by rhythm and pitch. But I still don’t know why I like what I like or whether or not my right IFG is the chief determinant in my preference for one kind of music over another. I don’t know whether or not my left IFG tells me that John Updike could write melodic prose. Nor do I know whether a musical or opera appeals to an audience because it perfectly merges right and left IFGs.  
 
I really don’t know much about how I know or appreciate, do I? How about you? I might have to rely on someone at one of the many Max Planck institutes to discover what I don’t know about myself. 
 
*Merrill, Julia, et al., Perception of Words and Pitch Patterns ij Song and Speech, Frontiers in Psychology. 2012; 3: 76. Published online march 19, 2012, doi:  [10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00076] . Accessed November, 27, 2018. 
**Patel A. D. (2008). Language, Music, Syntax, and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press.
***Brown S., Weishaar K. (2010). Speech is heterometric: the changing rhythms of speech. Speech Prosody 100074, 1–4.

Your life is like a magic show. Appearances and disappearances on a stage of misdirection and distraction keep surprising you. You live an unexpected life even as you live in expectation. Don’t be too concerned. It’s like that for all of us. The Bad appears in the midst of the Good, and sometimes the Good appears in the midst of the Bad. And both disappear just as they unexpectedly appear. 
 
Just when each of us learns the secret of one trick, we fall into befuddlement by another. And the trickster, the magician, doesn’t have to be a person. Mother Nature is herself the supreme magician, pulling storms, earthquakes, landslides, eruptions, floods, and fires out of her hat or from behind a dark curtain. Why, She even made a small asteroid explode over Chelyabinsk in 2013, injuring a number of people just minding their own business. Nothing in the clear sky foreshadowed its sudden appearance. She’s good at what she does, playing the same old tricks on every new and unexpecting audience. 
 
You might reconsider how you view the stage on which you live your life. Maybe Shakespeare could have written
 
                        Every life’s a magic show
            And both the sexes have magicians;
            They ply their many misdirections;
            And play their tricks in every age….
 
But, no. He simply put us all in a theater to play out our lives in “seven ages.”
 
                        All the world’s a stage,
            And all the men and women merely players;
            They have their exits and their entrances,
            And one man in his time plays many parts….
                        --As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, Line 138*
 
In that magic show called life people outdo any trick Mother Nature has. If we think of our lives as part of a magician’s show or if we expect the unexpected as the genre of our lives, we might be less surprised by those sudden appearances and disappearances that so affect our sense of security and alter our plans. 
 
Surrounded by magicians of all kinds, we should consider the old adage “Expect the unexpected” to be good advice. That’s not a call to become anxious. Rather, it’s an admonition that what you anticipate is rarely a problem.    
 
 
*If you don’t have a copy of the monologue by Jaques, you can find it online. 

Supposedly, when Galileo recanted his claim that Earth orbited the Sun, he whispered something like “Nevertheless, it does.” The guy was arguably the very first scientist in his adherence to experiment over predisposition and contemporary opinion. Eventually, others adopted his rational approach to Nature or independently discovered it on their own. The result is every modern convenience and modern science. Yet, here we are centuries later, still struggling with predisposition and science, still struggling to find a balance between our contemporary opinions and our desire to know, to explore, and to invent. 
 
The topic arises because we can be ethical beings. It’s one thing to make a primitive telescope and discover moons orbiting Jupiter. It’s another thing to experiment with humans, other organisms, or ecologies in the name of science. Somewhere between the extremes of discovery and debasement and between invention and destruction lie what we consider to be the objects and objectives of science.  
 
Here’s a short list of three comments to consider. Think of yourself as Galileo or Giordano Bruno kneeling before the Inquisition, threatened with imprisonment or death over whether what you have done, intend to do, or what you have reasoned is worthy of further pursuit. 

1. Adler astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz, the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology and a guest on National Geographic’s Mars, said, “It’s been troubling to me to hear people erasing what’s going on here on our own planet both from an environmental standpoint and an indigenous rights standpoint when they talk about going to other planets.”  She makes this comment in light of another one in which she says that in going to Mars, humans will transform the planet, possibly negatively affecting any life that exists there. She also said, “There’s the matter of inclusion..We have to think about the way we talk about who goes to space….”
2. Cosmologist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein of the University of Washington and a fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said, “Do we have the right to make that choice [of changing potential evolution] for the [Martian] ecosystem?”
3. Jocelyn Kaiser and Dennis Mormile reported in 2015 Scienceonline that “a Chinese team had altered the genetics of a human embryo….” According to the report, microbiologist Guo-Qiang Chen of Tsinghua University said, “My personal opinion is that as long as they can control the consequences they should continue this work.”

 
What do you think?

Bertrand Russell wrote that admiration is difficult, whereas envy is easy. Russell wrote that thought in his 1930 self-help book The Conquest of Happiness.*
 
Now, a lesson someone taught me decades ago. 
 
Years ago, I set out to look for a property on which I could build a house not too far from the University. One day, a colleague accompanied me. In the pre-Internet age, we drove around to survey what might be available (Those were rather primitive times of newspaper real estate sections and “for sale” signs). As we drove past a junkyard, I noticed a new and impressive house the owner recently built on the hill above the wrecked and rusting cars. 
 
I commented, “Why would someone build such a nice house overlooking a junkyard?”
 
My friend replied, “That junkyard built that house.”
 
Emulate; don’t envy: Grass that looks good on the other side of the fence represents constant hard work. If you must envy, then envy effort, not its result. 
 
*Republished numerous times: in 2006 by Routledge and in 2013 by Liveright, for example. Bright guy, old Bert (actually, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rdEarl Russell of Kingston Russell, Viscount Amberley of Amberley and of Ardsalla, etc., etc., etc.; he had to be bright just to remember all the ancestral and personal titles) was mathematician, philosopher, epistemologist, and Nobel Laureate. 

Once on a field trip to the South with geology students, I stood with them and a colleague on the precipitous upper overlook at Linville Falls, North Carolina. Magnificent area even for non-geologists, it attracts numerous visitors, including school groups. The area is not only beautiful, but also very peaceful. Get a portable chair, go there, and become one with Nature. 
 
As we stood on the overlook, a narrow area bounded by cliffsides, a group of children sprinted ahead of trailing chaperones, and crowded onto the overlook. Some even crawled onto the low stone retaining wall, putting themselves in danger of plunging to their deaths. My colleague, a geologist who had actually fallen from a cliff face and spent time in a hospital, was desperate to provide safety, and shouted, “Who’s in charge here?”
 
That was not met with a cooperative spirit aimed at the safety of the elementary school children. In fact, one of the outraged chaperones asked angrily, “Where are you from?” 
 
When my colleague innocently answered “Pennsylvania,” the chaperone said with disgust, “Yankees.” I don’t remember the year of the incident, but I’m ballparking it at about 25 years ago. 
 
Switch gears for a moment: One of my earliest research projects was a joint venture with agronomists from Argonne National Laboratory. Nice guys. Good, effective soil scientists. It made sense for me to learn as much as I could about soils for the project at hand, an erosion-control experiment on a gas pipeline right-of-way on a steep slope. Now, at the time, I discovered that Edmund Ruffin was considered a “Father” of American soil science because of his efforts to improve soil conservation and fertility. In antebellum nineteenth century Ed owned a plantation (called Marlbourne) in Virginia. I didn’t know it at the time of my research, but Edmund Ruffin was a member of the Fire-Eaters, secessionists who wanted to preserve slavery. Ed is also credited with firing, if not the first shot, one of the first shots against Fort Sumter to start the Civil War. It so happened that his “first shot” was a bookend to his last. In despair, he shot himself after the South surrendered. Anyway, Edmund Ruffin left a note in which he said he had “unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, & to the perfidious, malignant, & vile Yankee race.”*
 
Back to my story about children from a North Carolinian elementary school on a field trip: Obviously, some group of adults still carried a grudge against “Yankees.” And that grudge came after more than a century of intermixing cultures, Northerners buying homes and condos in the South and opening businesses there, and Southerners going to northern colleges and similarly buying residences and opening businesses, the mixing going all around, North, South, East, and West. 
 
So, a brief calculation: If I remember correctly on the approximate year, the incident at Linville 
Falls would have occurred about 1993. The Civil War and Edmund Ruffin ended in 1865, or 128 years before a college class took a field trip to North Carolina. Still, there were those who carried Ed’s hatred forward. One hundred twenty-eight years! 
 
Not a big deal in comparison with the longer-lived hatreds of the Hutus and Tutsis, the people of the Middle East, and, well, just about every two cultures that once had a beef. So, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my well-intentioned colleague who just wanted to make sure no children fell to their deaths was met with disdain by people who ignored the safety of those children, preferring to bring up a wound they had never personally suffered.
 
And that brings me to this. Those who carry such grudges from distant generations fail to protect children of their own time as they unknowingly run toward a precipice. In some long-fought conflicts, the parents literally push their children toward the precipice of personal ruin. I have no way of knowing whether or not Edmund Ruffin’s ten children or their progeny moved to North Carolina, where those field-trip kids attended classes. I would certainly be curious to see whether or not his descendants carried any of Edmund’s grudges through ensuing generations of “Southerners.” Poor Edmund. If one of those descendants now lives in the North and associates with “Yankees,” the late Fire-Eater would be turning over the soil above his grave. When I think about Edmund's desire to improve soil, turning it over would aerate the dirt over his permanent "farm" and be a fitting tribute to the “Father of Soil Science.”   
 
Children will fall from the heights of beauty and peace if we don’t eliminate generational grudges. 
 
*Walther, Eric. The Fire-Eaters. LSU Press, 1992.    

For whatever you have done, are doing, and will do to uplift others, thanks.

TV Drama: The Girl Who Saved the Astronaut
Time: Several hundred years hence.
Place: Earth and nearby space.
Characters: Our descendants.
Plot: A young girl interested in all things astronomical discovers old documents that show a potential collision with the 694-lb infrared telescope called Herschel, originally launched by ESA/NASA in May, 2009 and deactivated in June, 2013. In spite of doubtful adults and restrictions imposed on her, she sets out to convince authorities and to warn astronauts aboard various space stations. 
 
You can imagine our distant descendants cursing us and our generation for jeopardizing their lives with an incoming telescope. Through the young girl’s efforts, they discover that we had a choice when the mission ended: We could have sent the Herschel Space Observatory crashing into the moon or sent it into a heliocentric orbit to keep it from crashing into Earth—for hundreds of years. We chose the latter because it was a cheaper option. At the time of our story, Herschel is back, possibly about to encounter people in space or people on the ground. D—n those ancestors. In the short run, Earthlings saved some money. In the long run, they jeopardized the future. 
 
Maybe they figured, “We’ll be long gone. Anyway, what’s the chance of Herschel’s hitting something or someone when it swings back around hundreds of years from now? Even our great grandchildren won’t be affected. So, what’s the big deal. We can save some money.”
 
Let’s think positively here: The Herschel scientists didn’t have that attitude in 2013. Maybe they reasoned that the chance of a collision is so small, it won’t happen. But then think of our own ancestors and the conditions they left us: Felled forests, desertification, soils depleted of nutrients, or dammed rivers, for example. Or, think of us: Dead whales and turtles with plastic objects in their stomachs. 
 
It’s difficult for any of us to think of long-term consequences. We have enough on our plate, such as not spending money we don’t have just as the Herschel Space Observatory managers saved some money. We do pretty much live in the present. Maybe we think in terms of days, weeks, or months. Certainly, we don’t have distant centuries on our minds. So, for us all consequences are local and relatively immediate. 
 
Chances are slim that Herschel will hit something or someone the next time it’s in our neighborhood. But a slim chance is still a chance. We’ll never know. And if on that slim chance someone is hit, people will probably ask, “Where did that come from?” However, if someone does discover those by then old documents, they might say, “Those damn ancestors!”

Challenge for the day: Pick one you especially don’t want to lose: Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. I’m in favor of seeing as a primary sense. 
 
I always thought that my preference for sight over the other four senses derived from some basic biological and mental abilities and needs. I figured that evolution endowed us all with a hierarchy of senses. Survival depends on knowing where one is, and sight gives us immediate clues about place. Because mental mapping is valuable if we want to make our way around the neighborhood without taking time to re-explore, sight is our best cartographic tool. Of course, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I can close my eyes and know when someone drives me past a bakery, and in a dark hallway, I can touch the wall to find the light switch.
 
It's really easy for us to talk about what we see. Or is it? Can we describe sounds or tastes better? What about describing what we touch? “It’s rough.” “It’s smooth.” “It feels like….”

What if people reared in different cultures compared how they describe what they sense? Would cultural influences matter? I would have been one to say that such descriptions are universal before I read Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass:Why the World Looks Different in Different Languages.* People everywhere, I thought, should understand what I mean by “rough” or “smooth” surfaces, by “grating” or “calming” sound, or by “sour” and “chocolatey.” They should understand analogies and metaphors that I base on physical phenomena and the way I perceive them. 
 
Here’s what a recent study showed: “There is no single universal hierarchy of the senses or a dichotomy between higher and lower senses: Influenced by culture, every language has its own sensory story to tell.”** As Professor Asifa Majid has revealed, “Our work shows that there is far more diversity in the linguistic coding of the senses than earlier work had imagined.” To put it in other words: “The surprise is that, despite the gradual phylogenetic accumulation of the senses, and the imbalances in the neural tissue dedicated to them, no single hierarchy of the senses imposes itself upon language.”***
 
To find out whether or not culture influences the way we deal with what we sense, Majid and colleagues “asked whether the senses are equally expressible (or, alternatively, ineffable) in all languages.” Turns out that’s a big “no.” 
 
Turns out more specifically, for example, that people in different cultures with different languages describe pitch variously: As “high” and “low”; “thin” and “thick”: and “big” and “small.” And there are similar examples for colors, shapes, tastes, and smells. Culture, not biology, not those 3.5 billion years of overall and phylogenetic evolution, is an important influence. Our species has a diversity that extends beyond some superficial appearances in skin color, facial features, or stature. That diversity lies in the very way we understand and express what we see, hear, touch, taste, and feel.
 
Think you share a common sense of the senses with everyone else on the planet? Think again. And if we can’t agree on such fundamental perceptions of perceptions, how can we agree on what it means to be “good” or “beautiful”? Is it possible that the very way we perceive and the way we perceive our perceptions are chasms across which people of different cultures build only rickety bridges for exchanging AND understanding ideas? Has every culture established in its language a secret and fundamental code that restricts communication? Do those differences at the most fundamental levels of expressing our understanding of the world keep us from fully accepting one another?  
 
If so—if the way we encode the world we sense differs—then it’s no wonder we have so much trouble trying to achieve a peaceful coexistence.****
 
*Deutscher, Guy. New York. Metropolitan Books, 2010. 
You can read a counter argument in John McWhorter’s The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. Oxford University Press, 2014. 
**Majid, Asifa, et. al. differential coding of perception in the world’s languages. PONAS November 6, 2018, 115 (45) 11369-11376, Online at http://www.pnas.org/content/115/45/11369
***from the abstract
****You might also consider the talk by Lera Boroditsky online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71Hakkxnu-s

“I’m old enough to remember the announcement. The Russians launched a satellite. “Wow! I’m living in the space age,” I thought. Some six decades later, we’ve launched so many satellites and bits and pieces of other rockets and materials that we now have space junk, a danger to space traffic. Lonely out-in-space-country orbits are highways with driverless vehicles controlled only by gravity and interaction with the top of the atmosphere and wayward meteorites. The space junk has even been featured in movies and news stories. And now, SpaceX gets the go-ahead to launch 12,000 more satellites. It’s a big home, this planet Earth, but the attic is now as crowded as that in an old house. There goes the neighborhood. I can see alien visitors not stopping by as they comment, “Not there. If their orbital sidewalks are that cluttered, can you imagine their house?”
 
“Apart from my worries that on my next trip to outer space I will encounter a traffic jam between mile markers 208 and 215, I am concerned that so many decaying orbits will make a rain of fragments as significant as the Perseid meteor shower. 
 
“At the time of Sputnik’s launch, America didn’t have a fully developed and currently overcrowded interstate highway system. The vehicles were gas and diesel powered. Natural gas and electric vehicles were a novelty and an imaginative dream that Disney used to design propane vehicles to transport people around Epcot when it first opened. Now, BepiColombo, a spaceship that will go to Mercury, is powered by ion thrusters. Wow! Now we’ve entered the space age with the kind of propulsion only science fiction authors used. 
 
“Am I sounding a bit like the couple in Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs. They perform on a semicircular stage that hints of a circle, seem locked in an endless cycle of life that has become just ‘more of the same,’ and speak without really saying much. Of course, Ionesco was part of the Theatre of the Absurd movement, so one might expect some existential pessimism or nihilism. More people arrive at the couples’ home during the play, even an ‘emperor,’ and they all get chairs. Chairs in the play accumulate like satellites. And the message that the old man delivers to the ‘emperor’ falls on his deafness.
 
“Satellites. These new ones will put us under an umbrella of WiFi, I think, really, we’ll be virtually in the same “room.” We’ll all be communicating and learning from one another as Earth turns beneath the new shield of space junk. We’ll be inside a ‘larger’ entity, a sphere of new space junk that will have us talking to one another, not just soon, but as long as the satellites work—that is, until the force of gravity, collisions with other space junk, micrometeorites, or disinterest in hearing the same stuff repeated in decaying circularity bring down the system.” 
 
“Hey! This is too negative. I don’t want to hear any of this. Think of the benefits. Mankind truly connected, not just by a single satellite like NASA’s Echo I that it launched in 1960, but really connected by thousands of satellites: A Brotherhood of Man from the US to Sudan.”
 
“Okay, but WiFi brings its own problem, that of hacking, of eavesdropping. And the universality of the system will flatten Earth.”
 
“Flatten Earth?” you ask.
 
“Well, not the physical planet, but the inhabitants. We’ll reap the benefits of diversity at first, but then we’ll probably succumb more and more to worldthink. Perspectives will merge, ‘flatten.’ I’m for the access to the world, but not for others’ access to me. And I’m not a one-worlder if being so lessens diversity and creativity as political correctness and extremism always do.
 
“We’ve already seen the benefits and the ills of a worldwide communication system. It’s great to be connected as long as we aren’t personally so connected we feel handcuffed to the system and to what others think. Crowded space is about to become cyberspace. 
 
“But like the couple in Ionesco’s The Chairs, are we going to think we are in a cycle of nothing new, chatting to one another, but like the deaf Emperor, not hearing? Once the WiFi room is built, will we simply carry in more ‘chairs’ until we fill it and make everything not only the same, but also the overcrowded same? In the world portrayed in the play, the old couple jumps out the window, but we won’t have that escape option, for if we do choose to jump from the room, we’re likely to get hit by the space junk we so happily and optimistically added to the once lonely space traveled by a little Russian satellite promising a space-age future in which technology would benefit all mankind.
 
“In the play, the old man says, ‘the further one goes, the deeper one sinks. It's because the earth keeps turning around, around, around, around.’ It’s really a depressing attitude, but then, it was a play in a genre that expressed despair in a meaningless world. Obviously, we can find meaning—even in a meaninglessness-themed play—and optimism in our technology. But we have spent years filling our spaces—and now cyberspaces—with products of that technology. Yet, we still have all of mankind’s ills, and with more of us sharing the ‘room’ more of those ills in absolute numbers, if not in proportion. 
 
“But, hypocrite that I am, when the universal WiFi is up and running, I’ll probably tie in. I’ll connect. And I’ll say, ‘Gee, isn’t technology wonderful. Thank those Russians for putting up that first satellite.’ It was a time of wonder, not because it was a Russian accomplishment—that was a wakeup call for Americans—but because it was a human accomplishment, just like the landing on the moon a little over a decade later could be considered a human triumph. I just have to keep remembering that with all those technological advancements and with the coming universal WiFi, we have yet to eliminate man’s inhumanity to man. If we eliminated all the tech stuff, all the gadgets, all the materials of our affluence, and we imported through time a person from the pre-tech age, and asked him or her to look around, would we hear, “the further one goes, the deeper one sinks. It’s because the earth keeps turning around, around, around, around’?
 
“I just don’t want to be a character in a play from the Theatre of the Absurd.”