Lightning

A few days ago I was treated to an amazing lightning storm. I was recalled from my computer-trance by repeated flashes from outside. At first I seriously thought there had been an explosion at a nearby construction site, because the flashes came repeatedly, and from lower on the horizon. But the noise was the thunder of the passing storm. Southward Milwaukee got it the worst, whence the flashes. Part of it passed right over my house, and another part north of me.

Initially I just wanted to see what this was. Most often (every other second or so) I saw the "background flash" lightning, which lit up the whole cloud, but nothing distinct. Think: you can't see the tungsten in a frosted light bulb. But as I saw more distinct arcs of electricity sear the sky, I wanted to stay and see more. Since there is a large tree in my way when I'm on my porch, I took a walk down the street. I stood in the middle of the intersection near my house for about half an hour simply watching the show of raw power from the sky. One cloud-to-cloud bolt went in a circular "C" shape.

...Then I realized that I was standing directly under crisscrossing power lines with a lot of electrical somethings nearby, and as the rain was starting in on me in earnest, I went back to the porch.

I seriously doubt I could use words to describe what I am saying, and I'm certainly not trying to convince you of the impressiveness of the experience. That's not a good thing to do. I bring the example up because you might have shared a similar experience, and I want to touch on that experience. What do you do when you encounter something so full of power and beauty? You can do nothing but behold it, and try to stay alive.



I don't mean beauty like with frills and lace and foppish effeminate males. I don't really even mean beauty like the arch-form that is "truth, goodness and beauty" at the pinnacle of the created order. I suppose those could stand in, and will eventually be what I mean, but let's not jump into bed with Aristotle and Aquinas just yet. All I mean is: it looked COOL. I liked the look of bright blue lightning arcing across the dark sky the first time I saw it, and I liked it after receiving the sight of it for the following forty five minutes.

But after I beheld the sight for a while, I felt like I understood lightning better. I'd gotten to know quite a bit more about what sort of thing it was. I can know things about ions and electrons and why lightning happens, and that's one kind of knowledge. Another would be consulting a storm chaser telecast and learning about the tornado that happened a few towns over. Yet another was seeing the raw power and reveling in it for a moment. After the storm, I have an inkling of what lightning is like. That's the kind of knowledge I mean.

I think that this kind of knowledge is a distinctly human thing, and integral part of what makes us human. Without it, we could not reason with one another, and speech would be rendered incomplete.

Our ability to speak and reason grants us vast power to understand and name the world.

The fact that you and I can look at the thing flashing in the sky and make some kind of noise that identifies it as lightning is amazing. No animals that we know of communicate abstractly about non-present things. They're trained to associate sound A (thunder) with stimulus B (rain, lightning, possible death by electrocution), and thus respond with C (run like a scared little dolphin). I can train my dog to do lots of things, but write poetry? Confess that his love is like a sweet sweet rose? I think not.

I could write an artificial intelligence to use heuristic / visual tools and a gigantic database to identify the given moniker for whatever evidence it can empirically observe. Imagine a cinematic AI as an example here.... the red blinking eye from 2001 Space Odyssey or the thing in the movie Eagle Eye. They can label what they detect, but they don't know what a thing IS, or even what it's like in any sense but the material. An AI might be able to dialogue quite accurately about those things, but it is merely mechanical, and would only be relaying data, nothing more.

In this way, human beings are far more than animals, and far superior to any such machine. Animals respond to stimuli, and yes, we know, humans do to. If you poke me, I will yelp. Offer me steak, and I will do many manly things to obtain it. I'm an animal too, but more than just an animal: I can understand what a steak is. I don't just salivate because I'm hungry and at the mercy of my stomach, I sigh a sigh of relief because I like the steak-ness of the meal.

A better example, and quicker: I love my family. Not because of the sum of the things they do for me, but because of something about them that is more than the sum-of-the-things-they-do-for-me. As a human being, I am more than the sum of my material parts. A human being is more than a quivering sac of jelly-like fluids and caffeine. So it seems entirely likely that if we identify something else, animate or not, that we're identifying the thingy-ness of it. Its nature, perhaps.

In order to reason about a thing, we have to identify its nature, and its proper relationships to other things. Machines cannot reason because they cannot identify the nature of a thing. They're really good at identifying logical relationships (if given the rules), but actually knowing what that means? No. The gift that is speech and reason does not stand alone: we also need to see, to behold, to stand still and know the nature of a thing, because then and only then will our reason have substance.

I beheld beautiful and terrible electricity in the sky and called it a lightning storm, just as those before me have done. Now I know more about what that means, and am better for it.