The Metropolis Organism, blog post #22, What it is like to see something nobody else sees.

 What it’s like to see something nobody else sees

On discovering physics, losing my carelessness, and living with ideas that feel obvious to me and invisible to everyone else.

When I was in twelfth grade I discovered physics. I wasn’t supposed to do well at it — I was the uncouth kid, the one who rattled the desks and laughed at the teacher’s jokes. But physics hooked me with a ferocity I hadn’t known I was capable of. I understood it easily, almost instinctively. Mathematics became a kind of language I could use to open the machinery of the world. I was overjoyed. For a while I felt as if I ruled the world: what I saw, literally, no one else saw. To everyone else it was another subject to struggle with. To me it was the key.

Then I discovered the other side of physics — the deterministic side. The joy evaporated. If the universe obeyed universal laws, then where was my will? Had I been in control, or had I merely been carried along like a leaf in a current I could now describe? That realization sent me into a deep depression for the second half of my senior year. What I saw — determinism pressing on behavior and choice — was invisible to my classmates and to most adults. I did not yet know how to name it; I only knew that the world I had taken for granted had shifted beneath my feet.

I felt defective. I thought the problem lived in me. I spent hours in the library with books on determinism and free will. Some philosophers wrote in an impossible jargon I could not parse; others wrote plainly but didn’t approach the dilemma the way my experience demanded. I wanted nothing more than to un-see what I had seen and return to the careless teenage world. I thought that if I could only forget this new vision, everything would be easier. I didn’t yet realize that I was in the real world and most people were not.

College offered no respite. A fellow student waved the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at me as if it solved the problem; his disdain only drove me inward. Still, I didn’t exist entirely in gloom. I dated, played sports, and studied enough to get by. I functioned in the ordinary rhythms of life even while a quieter, more persistent awareness tugged at me.

After college I found some success as a filmmaker. I had an active social life; I married, had a child. But the nagging questions about determinism never left. I tried to find interlocutors — people to talk with who would see what I saw — and was often dismissed. The isolation hardened into an intellectual lonerliness. Then, another way of seeing opened up: I began to perceive cities as organisms.

The idea delighted me. Once again I felt as if I had stumbled onto something not merely clever, but true. I made a short film, The Metropolis Organism. People found the concept intriguing, but no one embraced it as I did. They treated it as metaphor, or as an environmental plea, or as spiritual whimsy. Few treated it as a scientific thesis; fewer still treated it as a literal possibility.

In my thirties, living across the street from a library, I finally found the domain I had been groping toward: articles on the philosophy of science and long debates about determinism. Reading the Encyclopedia of Philosophy felt like vindication. The free-will/determinism debate had not been settled in favor of free will; it was a long-standing, unresolved controversy. What had seemed a personal defect was actually an old, living problem.

Vindication, however, is an unsatisfactory companion. Recognition that a problem exists in the public record does not make it shareable in ordinary conversation. Friends and acquaintances still rejected determinism out of hand. I wrote a manuscript, The World According to Science, and later a novel imagining cities ten thousand years hence when their organic qualities are obvious. I made an illustrated eBook and a 41-episode YouTube series. I gave talks, slides flickering behind me, my voice trying to translate what I saw.

Most of the time no one saw it as I saw it. At talks people nodded politely or rewired the idea into something else — a moral plea about the planet, or a mystical story of cosmic consciousness. Of a few dozen presentations only one person truly understood, and she found it unacceptable. The rest treated the idea as eccentric at best.

There is a thin line between visionary and delusional. Some observers would be justified in suspecting schizophrenia or delusion. I cannot deny the possibility. Still, I function. I have friends, a family, and a career. I make work that is judged on its own terms. And when I look back I can only say, as Popeye did, “I sees what I sees.”

Why do I see what others do not? I cannot fully explain it. Sometimes it feels like a perceptual gift; sometimes like a burden. Over the years I have become bolder and more at peace with my vision. I no longer expect the world to understand me now. I hope, rather, that one day — long after I am gone — the pattern I believed in will be recognized as more than metaphor.

So I leave breadcrumbs: essays, films, short episodes, an eBook, talks. They are not trophies. They are maps. If a future reader or viewer follows them and finds that the city they walk through is, in fact, an organism — then my effort will have been worth it. If not, I have still lived honestly with what I saw.

Author’s Note

This essay is part of my long exploration into the idea that cities are not just metaphors for living systems but are themselves evolving organisms. Over the years I have tried to express this vision in film, writing, talks, and a series of short videos titled The Metropolis Organism. If you’d like to follow the breadcrumbs I’ve been leaving for future readers, you can visit vitaleproductions.com or my YouTube series, The Metropolis Organism