Design Lies in the Eye of the Perceiver

By Sally Morem

Note to readers: I wrote this essay as an entry for the Great America Think-Off in 1996.
This annual philosophical essay and debate contest is run by the Regional Cultural Center
in New York Mills, Minnesota. I answered that year’s question: “Does God Exist?” With
this essay, I was named one of the four finalists in the contest. As a result, I participated
in the annual debate in New York Mills.

Does God exist? This imposing question generated a stream of other questions in my
mind. Is the world a made thing or did it just happen? Is our perception of Design in the
world accurate or is it merely a reflection of our deepest hopes and fears? Could we ever
perceive the true nature of reality or must we be content with approximations? Does the
Designer live outside or within ourselves?

While in high school, I found myself pondering these questions from an unusual
perspective. I came as close to ceasing to exist—to being unable to experience anything
—as one can without being in any real danger of dying. I needed an eye operation
because the muscles in my eyes wouldn’t work together properly.

A nurse began the process of prepping me by injecting my thigh with a light anesthetic to
make me drowsy. After I was brought into the operating room, I received the strong
anesthetic. Two seconds later, I was out. Yes, I counted. (One thousand one, one
thousand two.) The surgeon needed to use a powerful anesthetic so that I would sleep
deeply.

Why? So my eyeballs wouldn’t twitch at the wrong time. One false cut would have been
disastrous. The next thing I knew, I was waking up, very groggily, but no worse for wear.
But during those few hours, I the pattern-seeker sought nothing, experienced nothing—
not even the passage of time—and thought nothing. When I realized later that nothing
meant anything to me while I was under, I began to realize how important the human
ability to perceive and interpret was and I wondered if this ability, not God, was the fount
of all human meaning.

If so, then where did we come by this talent? Our brains are powerful pattern seekers.
They are primed to seek out and find. They search for every meaningful pattern in the
world as if our lives depend on it. They do. Our brains enable us to hunt for food and
keep a wary eye out for predators, to seek friends to protect us and guard against enemies
who may harm us. During our long history, friends and enemies were not limited to other
humans, but were titles bestowed on anything appearing to be sufficiently humanlike to
gain our fear and respect. We gave the sun, moon and stars, thunderstorms, volcanoes
and earthquakes the names of spirits and gods and we worshipped them with fear and
hope.
I lived in a house with a bathroom wallpapered with marvelous designs. Young winter
trees graced the walls with trunks, branches and twigs. While I sat on the porcelain
throne, I’d turn the fortuitous combinations of lines into faces and figures. Do you
remember naming the shapes you saw in clouds? In both wallpaper and clouds, we are
able to perceive patterns of our own devising. How can three pounds of gray matter
perform such magical feats? Our visual cortex, for example, receives the most basic
forms of stimuli from the eyes—lines, color, direction. Then, groups of neurons take the
resulting information about the outside world and analyze it, giving more weight to some
bits of it, while ignoring most perceptions in a manner directed by internal models of the
world previously devised by the brain. Larger portions of the brain then push the analysis
of what was perceived to greater and greater levels of abstraction. We “see” whatever we
are looking at only after this process is done.

We never experience the world directly, only though these cerebral filters which protect
us from the onslaught of sensation and the fuzziness of reality. We perceive reality
through lenses of pattern perception which cull and code the vast assemblage of
impressions and deductions to make them usable to us. As a result, we humans become
makers.

Ever since the first Paleolithic flintknapper chipped his first handaxe, we have imparted
design to the world. We naturally see design all around us, and where there is design, we
believe there must a Designer, a greater Maker. We project humanlike qualities into our
surroundings, imagining intentionality where none exists.

Reality exists. The outside world is demonstrably there and has its own pattern, its own
organization. But the intelligence that we see manifested around us lies within our
minds. God does not exist. It is we who string beads of light together, crafting the design
of the world.