In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice heard that the Owl had not just answers, but The Answer. So, Alice sought out the Owl, and when she found him, she said, "It is said that you alone have The Answer." "My friend," the Owl replied, "as much as is said of me is true." Alice then asked her question, to which he answered carefully, "You must find out for yourself." Alice angrily replied, "Did I need the Owl to tell me that I must think for myself?"

"But, my friend," the Owl replied, "That is the answer."

I was reminded of this story while reading a review of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noë(Hill & Wang, 2009). Noë is a cognitive scientist and philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, who for the last 15 years has been researching consciousness and how it works. Noë postulates that our perception of consciousness is a true act of faith, not the mechanistic action of the brain as René Descartes, Francis Crick, or other cognitive scientists would have us think (or is it,believe").

Noë argues that consciousness is the product of a living organism dynamically interacting with the world around it. [You can read the review here.]

As I thought about this, I began to wander, if Noë's supposition is correct, how does this change our understanding, or perception, of physical space? Which in turn brings me back to the Owl's answer to Alice's question. When it comes to perceiving our surroundings are we arriving at our understandings from dynamically interacting with it, or from static thinking?

Several years ago, I wrote a brief essay entitled, "The City is Living Narrative." Although specifically referring to the city, I think the essay speaks to my question:

The City is a dynamic, living narrative, an unfolding autobiography, a melding of countless invisible stories; raveling not in words, but in movement, fear, desire, need, coupling—the daily of living.

The city seen is a narrative painted upon the canvas of the city invisible; meaning – definition – is found not in the narrative, but in the illegible depths of the unseen city. To think that the "painting" is the narration is delusional. For what is seen is but an incomplete snapshot in time, one fragment of the ever-unfolding narrative. Incomplete because it cannot capture the full dynamic of that moment. Rather it is limited to the immediate perspective and surround.

Yet, we delude ourselves into believing that we can arrange the narratives of the "captured city" into a collage called, "The City." Deluded, we seek to manage that which has been captured; convincing ourselves the fiction that we write is The City.And in so doing, The City ceases to exist.

If we follow the theory that our consciousness, and thus our perceptions of our surroundings are mere mechanistic brain functions, we lose our ability to dynamically interact with the space around us. Not because we cease to dynamically interact (assuming Noë is correct in his hypothesis), but because we fail to recognize that we are dynamically interacting, and in so doing, we fail to grasp the nuances of that which surrounds us.