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Wondrous Wednesday 18: Making Sense of Our Lives

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Summary

Wonder of our ability to make sense of life - breathing, sleeping, eating, talking, seeing. Our minds patch together a story that transcends our physicalness. Picking up a seed: don't think about fingers or electrical impulses, just do it. Talking: air, tongue, mouth movements happen without thinking. We abstract everything in real time, modeling the world as we experience it, filtering and putting in useful perspective.

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to Arts and Ideas in the Air, Wondrous Wednesday, where I talk about
0:06 something wondrous. So I thought I'd just talk today about kind of the wonder of our
0:15 ability to make sense of, you know, our lives and just sort of really focusing
0:24 on, you know, thinking about, really think about what we do, you know, think about
0:33 breathing, think about sleeping, eating, talking, you know, just seeing, witnessing
0:45 everything around us. Congratulations. So the ability to make a story that we go
1:06 along with. Our minds are patching together this, you know, wondrous tale
1:17 that, you know, it transcends the the actual physicalness that we are, right?
1:27 Like there's so much that our bodies do that we just don't think of in some
1:36 sense that way. Like, you know, I pick up, pick up a seed, you know, and I can feel
1:42 it and I think about the picking up. But, you know, I don't really think of, you
1:52 know, the particular fingers that are going to do it. I don't think of any of
1:56 the all the chemical electrical impulses that are happening. I just, I just do so,
2:04 right? And it makes sense. In my mind it's like I picked up this seed. Now I can, I
2:10 can concentrate on it and I can feel it and I can feel more of of it all. And I
2:17 can drop the seed because kind of a klutz. But I'm gonna drop it again. But, you know,
2:25 that there's an abstraction even at that level of, you know, it's a very tactile
2:32 experience. Then you think about talking and, you know, you know, there's the air
2:40 coming out and the tongue and movement, the mouth movements and all of that. And,
2:45 you know, you can think about it as you talk and get totally distracted from the
2:49 actual talking. But in general we just, it's like, we just, you know, the words are
2:55 coming out. I just think it's pretty wondrous that we are able to, in real
3:04 time, abstract it all out. We are modeling the world in the very way that we are
3:10 experiencing it. Filtering everything and putting it in a perspective that, you
3:21 know, makes sense of it all and is useful. So that's what I'm wondering about today.
3:28 Just that beautiful way that, you know, there's all the stuff going on in order
3:35 for us to accomplish almost anything. And it just happens so so beautifully and
3:43 wonderfully. So, yeah. Yeah, so that was my wondrous Wednesday for the day. I will
3:54 see you when I see you.