The Meaning of the Bug Hunt

A reflection on cats, ESP, symbolic reference, names, and deja vu

I was in the kitchen the other day and Lazy-Eye Louis the cat was just sitting there, staring up at the wall. He continued to stare for quite some time. There was a bug, just clinging up there by the ceiling. Not moving. But Louis was going to watch that bug until it did move, then watch it some more. It is the calling of his people to do so.

That got me thinking. I still had Whitehead’s Symbolism and the nature of symbolic reference on my brain-thoughts. Louis was obviously seeing the bug in a way I was not. For him, the bug-symbol of his perception was imbued with much more importance and meaning than it was for me. We may have been seeing the same object, but our respective symbolic representations of it were quite different.

For Louis, that bug was exciting enough, stimulating enough, to hold his attention for long minutes. Maybe it would be a snack to fly into his little cat jaws, or a toy to play with, to be batted across the floor the way he bats ice cubes. (First he stick-handles that thing like a pro until it launches across the lino.) But even barring those eventualities, he would watch it. And watch it some more.

For me, it was just a bug, too high to either catch or kill, and not dangerous or intrusive enough to matter to me one way or the other.

As I wrote in my previous post on the subject, symbolic reference is what imports emotional weight into what is otherwise just another bit of color in our field of vision. That basic perception is colored in by memory, personal relevance, present and future utility, and the full range of meaning. The bug is known, identifiable, tied in so many ways to so many buggy formative experiences.

In this way, our perceptions become symbols of all those references, and they all come together seamlessly in a complex of meanings that we simply experience as single perception/conception. In this case, well, of this particular bug.

Take your name. In a roomful a people all murmuring words and phrases at random, yours will stick out. Even if those other words are very interesting words, your ears will perk up at the mention of your name. Even if whispered, it will find you. It will seem louder, clearer than all the other words and names that get lost in the din. There’s nothing about the particular sound itself that makes it so. No secret amplifiers boosting the signal just for you. You mind is primed to attend to it and performs this feat of analogue audio editing on the fly.

So when you hear your name in a crowded, noisy room, you are not merely hearing the sound of your name spoken; you are perceiving all the meaning(s) associated with it, all of its symbolic references. Which made me think a bit more on the nature of perceived meaning, and my associations brought me to that fascinating and enigmatic experience: deja vu.

Deja vu is a common experience, and if I were to describe it, it would be something like an intense feeling of amorphous meaning tied to a “not-memory” of a sequence of events. It feels like a memory, or something like it, but it isn’t, otherwise we’d just call it that. We know it’s not that. But there’s a visceral sense that something is going on, something meaningful, as if the events tied with the deja vu were somehow important in a way that the experiences just before or after are not, referring to themselves in some way just beyond our comprehension.

It’s not as if buttering your toast while a Huey Lewis song comes on the radio justifies any particular sense of meaning in and of itself. But sometimes it does. Maybe it’s just a quirk of brain chemistry. Maybe it’s a “bleed-through” of some unconscious process that gets arbitrarily tied to whatever we happen to be experiencing consciously. Maybe it’s the residue of some sort of metaphysical interference from nonphysical beings. Maybe the Wachowskis were on to something? Who knows. But for me it’s at the very least an interesting example of how ordinary perception isn’t always so ordinary.¹

Taking this notion a step further: what if the non-ordinary is actually ordinary, all the time? Whitehead’s view on perception implies that all sensory perception is nonsensory at its root. Your senses “prehend” whatever stimulates them, your brain prehends the the signals sent by the sensory nerves, and you prehend your brain activity. (“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank, you’re not your brain.”) At the end of every sensory chain of causation, you end with an act of ESP.

James C. Carpenter independently arrived at the same picture from a completely different direction: experimental parapsychology. According to his “First Sight” theory, we are constantly on the receiving end of all kinds of extrasensory information acting as psychological primes; our minds just filter out most of it, focusing primarily on the information provided by our bodies. But sometimes it seeps through in the form of seemingly random thoughts and images, hunches, premonitions, synchronicities—that “wordless voice” Lobaczewski writes about.

Just as emotional valence is the glue that binds associations together, the same goes for these extrasensory connections. It’s limbic resonance, of a sort, but not limited by physical proximity. Here’s an example. Carpenter talks about a patient of his.² One day the patient inexplicably came to his mind. He felt a strong need to call him, though the time was late. He ordinarily wouldn’t have done so, but he did. It turned out the patient was suicidal, and Carpenter was able to save his life.

When people form a close connection—lovers, close friends, patients and therapists, guys on a mission together—these types of things happen. It’s why you and your closest friends will inexplicably think of the same song at the same time, or explicably think of the same meme in response to some piece of idiocy you laugh at together. It’s why crisis apparitions involve loved ones, not total strangers, and why some dogs do know when their owners are coming home.

It’s also a reason why we aren’t aware of these things most of the time: they’re usually not immediately relevant. We have enough to deal with, and the most immediate demands for our attention are our bodies and their immediate environment. But there’s another reason such things are probably rarer than they could be: the phenomenon of belief and its effect on how receptive we are to such things.

It turns out that those most open to things like ESP are more likely to experience them (not just convince themselves, but actually empirically demonstrate them). Those most closed—firmly denying their very possibility—go in the opposite direction, sometimes so far as to demonstrate a negative ESP/PK effects (e.g. “guessing” wrong at a rate much higher than chance should allow).

Our scientific-materialist worldview is not conducive to such things, which may also have the effect of reducing their occurrence. In most cases, even when they happen, people will just write them off as fun little coincidences, not realizing there may be something more to it. By extension, being closed to such symbolic transfers may also have the effect of blocking or severely restricting our “access” to higher sources of information—higher meanings which we might otherwise experience symbolically, even our conscience.

Here’s what Lobaczewski had to say on this topic:

If we thus wish to understand mankind—man as whole—without abandoning the laws of thought required by objective language, we are finally forced to accept this [suprasensory] reality, which is within each of us, whether normal or not, whether we have accepted it because we have been brought up that way or have achieved it through faith, or whether we have rejected faith for reasons of materialism or science. After all, when we analyze negative psychological attitudes, we always discern an affirmation which has been repressed from the field of consciousness. As a consequence, the constant subconscious effort of denying concepts about existing things engenders a zeal to eliminate them in other people.

Trustfully opening our mind to perception of this reality is thus indispensable for someone whose duty is to understand other people in order to offer them good advice or psychotherapy, and is advisable for everyone else as well. (PP, pp. 33-34)

In The Matrix, deja vu was instrumentalized as a warning that code was being rewritten. Similarly, suprasensory perception can fulfill a similar purpose, honing that soundless voice, Soctrates’ daimon. It will come in handy when the stakes are high, and the information available is scarce. It may let us know, for instance, when we are dealing with a predator, whispering to us: Auspicious exterior, suspicious interior!

1. Less common, but perhaps in a similar class of experiences, would be the heightened perceptions in altered states of consciousness. “I’m one with the double cheeseburger, man! It’s full of light!”

2. It might’ve been in my interview with him, linked just above, but I can’t remember for sure. This is the gist of it, though, as best as I can recall it.