At that level, biologists talk about and think about what genes
To people who deal directly in dogs and not in molecular biology, this kind of thing is taken for granted. Dog folks talk all the time about the temperamental and mental propensities of this or that breed, as if all this were somehow completely detached from the physics and chemistry of DNA (not to mention physical levels finer than that of DNA), and as if it resided purely at the abstract level of “character traits of dog breeds”. And the marvelous thing is that dog folks, no less than molecular biologists, can get along perfectly well thinking and talking this way. It actually works! Indeed, if they (or molecular biologists) tried to do it the pure-physics way or the pure-molecular-biology way, they would instantly get bogged down in the infinite detail of unimaginable numbers of interacting micro-entities constituting dogs and their genes (not to mention the rest of the universe).
The upshot of all this is that the most
CHAPTER 13
The Patterns that Constitute Experience
BY OUR deepest nature, we humans float in a world of familiar and comfortable but quite impossible-to-define abstract patterns, such as: “fast food” and “clamato juice”, “tackiness” and “wackiness”, “Christmas bonuses” and “customer service departments”, “wild goose chases” and “loose cannons”, “crackpots” and “feet of clay”, “slam dunks” and “bottom lines”, “lip service” and “elbow grease”, “dirty tricks” and “doggie bags”, “solo recitals” and “sleazeballs”, “sour grapes” and “soap operas”, “feedback” and “fair play”, “goals” and “lies”, “dreads” and “dreams”, “she” and “he” — and last but not least, “you” and “I”.
Although I’ve put each of the above items in quotation marks, I am not talking about the written words, nor am I talking about the observable phenomena in the world that these expressions “point to”. I am talking about the
With my hopefully amusing little list (which I pared down from a much longer one), I am trying to get across the flavor of most adults’ daily mental reality — the bread-and-butter sorts of symbols that are likely to be awakened from dormancy in one’s brain as one goes about one’s routines, talking with friends and colleagues, sitting at a traffic light, listening to radio programs, flipping through magazines in a dentist’s waiting room, and so on. My list is a random walk through an everyday kind of mental space, drawn up in order to give a feel for the phenomena in which we place the most stock and in which we most profoundly believe (sour grapes and wild goose chases being quite real to most of us), as opposed to the forbidding and inaccessible level of quarks and gluons, or the only slightly more accessible level of genes and ribosomes and transfer RNA — levels of “reality” to which we may pay lip service but which very few of us ever think about or talk about.
And yet, for all its supposed reality, my list is pervaded by vague, blurry, unbelievably elusive abstractions. Can you imagine trying to define any of its items
Reflected Communist Bachelors with Spin 1/2 are All Wet