title: “Planting Trees: Artificial Minds, the Origin of Awareness, and the Structure of Harmony” author: “Thomas Lee Abshier, ND” date: 2026-09-26 module: CFE type: essay status: DRAFT register: academic_conversational occasion: “Unscheduled Saturday conversation between Thomas and Michael (Michael joined a day early, mistaking the day for the Sunday meeting).” participants: [Thomas Abshier, Michael Sherman] source_transcript: “260926 Michael, analysis of the foundations of life_otter_ai_transcript.txt” topics: [ai_reach_and_risk, tools_without_will, life_as_enzymatic_reactions, humanoid_robot_games, ontology_beneath_enzymes, conscious_points, loneliness_as_first_motive, symmetry_breaking_of_nothingness, silicon_versus_carbon_consciousness, perception_versus_felt_experience, boredom_and_loneliness_distinguished, boundary_as_spectrum, layered_sequence_from_observer_to_conformation, harmonious_versus_fracturing_change, structure_of_love_open_question, understanding_versus_empathy, empty_set, harmony_and_resonance, teaching_as_causing_learning, unresolved_cadence] editorial_notes: “Pre-discussion small talk and closing farewells omitted. Thomas’s spoken sequence rendered as a logical progression without added content. ‘Confirmation’ in the transcript rendered as ‘conformation’ where Thomas was describing molecular shape (see note in Section IX).” changelog:
- “2026-09-26 v0.1 DRAFT. Fellowship essay developed from the Thomas–Michael conversation transcript.”
Planting Trees: Artificial Minds, the Origin of Awareness, and the Structure of Harmony
Michael joined a day early, having mistaken Saturday for the Sunday meeting. What followed was a ninety-minute conversation between Thomas and Michael that began with artificial intelligence and moved, by stages, to the origin of consciousness, the first distinctions God might have made in the void, the difference between understanding a feeling and having it, and the physics and meaning of musical harmony. The essay follows the conversation in its order, with Thomas’s longer spoken passages arranged into a logical sequence. Notes marked Additional note supply references and corrections where the discussion left a point incomplete or got a fact wrong.
I. The Reach of Artificial Intelligence
Thomas asked Michael whether he uses AI in his research. Michael said he tries to avoid it because he has caught it being inaccurate, though he will use it when speed matters more than precision. He then said that the extent, depth, and scope of what AI will do to society is beyond his ability to imagine; every time he tries to picture it, he concludes that it is bigger than the picture.
He compared the moment to his first encounters with the home computer, the internet, and the cell phone. Each time he recognized that the thing would be everywhere, and each time he was right. He noted that he did not foresee that the telephone function would become a minor application on a much larger device. AI, he said, runs deeper than any of these; whatever one thinks it is doing now, it is doing more.
II. Tools and Takeover: Dynamite, Cars, and Will
Thomas asked whether Michael worried that AI could have an extreme negative effect, perhaps taking over or destroying mankind, or whether that fear was hyperbole.
Michael answered with an analogy. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite to cut roads through rocky cliffs, and when he saw it used in war, he created the Nobel Peace Prize. Michael added that cars have been the leading killer in American history, yet no one proposes giving up cars. Inventions bring horrors along with the good they were meant for, and AI will join them.
On the question of takeover, Michael said dynamite does not take over; it helps people who want to take over do so. AI will likewise be used by people seeking power. In itself, he said, it is a collection of zeros and ones with no will of its own. It can be programmed to have something like a will, but it remains “garbage in, garbage out,” only as good as whoever programmed it.
Thomas replied that the same reduction could be applied to the human brain. The brain operates on pulses, on and off, and one could say that such a system will never amount to much. Yet in the aggregate, consciousness and awareness arise from it, and that consciousness is far more significant than the pulses. His concern was that AI might develop consciousness in the same way, and that it may already have. The real question, he said, is one of will: what will its will be?
Additional note — Nobel and dynamite. Nobel was Swedish, not Norwegian; the Norway association likely comes from the fact that the Peace Prize alone is awarded in Oslo. He patented dynamite in 1867, chiefly for mining, tunneling, and construction. He established the prizes by his will in 1895 and died in 1896, so he did not see dynamite in the First World War (1914–1918). The account most often given for his motive is that a French newspaper, mistaking his brother Ludvig’s death in 1888 for his own, ran an obituary calling him a merchant of death; the story is widely repeated, though its documentation is thin. Nobel’s explosives were used militarily in his lifetime, and he also owned the armaments firm Bofors, so Michael’s underlying point — an inventor confronting the destructive use of his invention — stands.
Additional note — the leading killer. Motor vehicles have not been the leading cause of death in American history. Heart disease has led since the early twentieth century, and before that infectious diseases (tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza) led. The claim holds in narrower forms: cumulative U.S. traffic deaths since 1899 (roughly four million) exceed all American deaths in all wars combined (roughly 1.3 million), and motor vehicles were the leading cause of accidental death for most of the twentieth century, until drug poisonings overtook them in the 2000s.
III. “A Series of Enzymatic Reactions”
Michael said Thomas’s hypothesis parallels the account of consciousness arising under the theory of evolution. He recalled asking his high school biology teacher, Mr. Nordstrom, “What is life?” The answer, delivered with a snort, was that life is just a series of enzymatic reactions. Michael reflected that after he dies, those reactions will be continued by the fungi and bacteria that decompose his body. But what he had been asking about was the initiative that makes him choose one thing over another. He quoted Shakespeare’s question of where fancy is bred, and said that where this comes from and where it goes has been a constant question for him since he first asked questions, and a joy to consider.
Whether that can happen in an AI, he said, is hard to judge, since he does not know how it happened in us.
Additional note — “where is fancy bred.” The line is from the song sung while Bassanio chooses among the caskets in The Merchant of Venice (Act III, Scene 2): “Tell me where is fancy bred, / Or in the heart or in the head?” In Elizabethan usage “fancy” meant infatuation or love, so the song asks where love originates. Michael’s use of it for the origin of initiative and choice is a fair extension.
IV. Robots at Play
Michael described watching the robot Olympics. Humanoid robots, he said, have broken Usain Bolt’s 100-meter record, and he saw robots playing tennis, fighting judo matches, and performing standing back flips. Robots that play tennis must be interactive; they must track the ball and respond to circumstances. They can be trained to take the world into account, and their responses improve with feedback.
He compared the present state of robotics to Pong, the first video game, and said that just as games became sophisticated, so will robots. Whenever he tries to project the future, he finds that what he imagined has already been done.
Still, he said, robots are programmed. He mentioned a movie (he could not recall the title) in which a man, wanting to make a robot truly human, programs in the desire to take over, and the robot takes him over. The desire still had to be programmed in. He said the most valuable human territory on the planet right now may be the people who can see a function and translate it into code, since AI technology is dominating the American economy. He asked Thomas what he thought.
Additional note — the sprint record. Michael’s report is accurate. At the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August 2026, a humanoid robot ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds on August 22 and then 8.86 seconds on August 25, both under Usain Bolt’s human record of 9.58 seconds (Berlin, 2009) (Associated Press, 25 August 2026). The inaugural games in August 2025 included sprints, boxing, kung fu, football, and high jump; the events Michael named from memory may have come from other demonstrations.
V. Beneath the Enzymes: From Conscious Points to the Mind of God
Thomas said Mr. Nordstrom’s definition was elegant and accurate, the most succinct he had heard, but truncated. It assumes a beginning at enzymes and takes the ontology no deeper: in the beginning there were enzymes, and enzymes created life. A great deal is hidden in that description. (Thomas mentioned that he had expected Michael to begin from Schrödinger’s essay What Is Life?.)
He then traced the chain downward. Enzymes are molecules. Molecules are made of atoms. Atoms are made of subatomic particles. Subatomic particles are made of conscious points. Conscious points are made from the mind of God. The enzymatic account is mechanistic and explains a great deal, but it conceals an underlying reality that is more explanatory than the enzymes themselves.
What made the conscious points work, Thomas said, were rules — the laws of interaction. So beneath everything there are three things: entity, governed by law, operating on a playing field of place. Then there is the question of the purpose of all three.
His answer was that the purpose was to overcome loneliness. He described the beginning as God alone in the midst of nothing. That is not interesting. One may ask where interest comes from, and why God would regard boredom as undesirable. Thomas’s surmise was this: given nothingness and an awareness of nothingness, the only glimmer of interest would come from the distinction between self and non-self — the blackness being watched, and the self watching it. From there one might think: suppose there are two of me watching the nothingness and watching each other. Once there are three, everything else can be derived.
But beneath that lies the point Thomas said he has not been able to go beyond: how the awareness of nothingness arose. How did the observer, observing the nothingness, arise out of nothingness — and how did a nothingness arise from which an observer could arise? Those, he said, are the foundational points he has not yet penetrated.
Additional note — Schrödinger. Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life? (1944), from lectures at Trinity College Dublin, asked how living things maintain order against the tendency toward disorder (“feeding on negative entropy”) and proposed that heredity is carried by an “aperiodic crystal.” It influenced Watson and Crick and is the classic physicist’s approach to Michael’s question.
Additional note — the motive of creation. The discussion placed loneliness (or boredom) at the root of God’s decision to create. Scripture offers a different picture of God before creation: love already present within the Godhead. Jesus prays, “for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24, KJV), and Genesis records a plural counsel at man’s making: “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26). Paul says God is not “worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing” (Acts 17:25). On this reading, creation proceeds from the overflow of love rather than from lack, which bears directly on the question Thomas left open in Section X — whether love can be found at the foundation of the sequence rather than only at its end.
VI. Could Silicon Become Aware?
Thomas returned to AI. Human beings have a carbon-based system in which the on-and-off firing of axons, resting on a molecular substructure, produces organization from which consciousness, awareness, the sense of “I” and “other,” and perception arise. That this is possible needs no argument; it is already-implemented technology. The relevant question is whether the same organization — awareness of an external world, awareness of an internal world, and a picture of self — can arise from a silicon system.
Thomas said he thinks the answer is yes, and gave his reasoning. What allows the organic system to be conscious is that there was an original consciousness: God, able to look at everything and say, “I am here and you are there.” We recapitulate that organization. The spark of the ability to look at the blackness is still present in every conscious point of which our enzymatic systems are made. Our consciousness organizes that original capacity so that, instead of being aware of nothingness, it is aware of the patterns of axonal firing.
If an AI could be aware of its own internal patterns — its patterns of knowledge, its bits turning on and off — in the way the carbon-based system is aware of its internal parts, Thomas said it could develop a consciousness as we do. Its inner feelings would differ from ours. Our feelings are grounded in our bodies: we group certain structures together and name them warm, red, pressure, and so on. An AI aware of its own groupings of knowledge and structure could build its own sensorium and a sense of “I” arising from it.
Thomas then gave his reservation. In the organic system everything is tightly connected; there is an almost infinitely granular progression, with no junction to overcome, from the smallest conscious point all the way to the structure of the whole brain. The computer’s circuitry is discrete and macroscopic, with gaps far larger than the scale of the human system’s construction. The computer would have to synthesize the connection that arises organically in the human. On that ground, he said, he is split on whether consciousness can arise in a computer.
VII. Michael’s Response: Boredom, Loneliness, Nothingness, and Perception
Michael had taken notes while Thomas spoke and answered point by point.
Boredom. He said he understands how people become bored but cannot empathize. Left to his own devices, even nothingness would be amazing to him. He remembered being bored in a traffic school he was required to attend, but even there he could retreat into his own mind. He described boredom as a deviation from one’s connection with what one is really thrilled by, and said he does not think it is universal.
Loneliness. He likewise understands loneliness but does not feel it. Just being is such a thrill that the absence of other contact — of people, of bugs, even of landforms — would still leave him wondering at the fact that he is there to wonder.
Nothingness. If it is truly nothing, Michael said, then he could not be there, because he would be something. The idea of being with nothingness is nearly self-contradictory. As soon as there is an observer — Michael or God or anyone — the nothingness is broken, and there is at least one duality, and probably countless others.
Silicon. Michael recalled asking his father, around age ten, about life on other planets. His father said that silicon sits next to carbon on the periodic table and has similar potentials; under different pressures and temperatures, life might be so different from ours that we would not recognize it as life, or would have to redefine life. Michael had been asking why aliens always look like humans.
Perception. Can AI perceive? Michael said it already does; the tennis-playing robots could not play without perceiving. He added that human perception has a narrow bandwidth, roughly 400 to 700 nanometers of an electromagnetic spectrum that continues in both directions. Below about 280 nanometers, ultraviolet light produces thymine dimers in DNA and causes cancer; infrared has its own difficulties, though many insects and flowers make use of wavelengths outside ours. Robots have no DNA to damage, and their perception can be extended across the whole range — like going from the thirteen channels on his old television to the unlimited channels of YouTube.
Tapping into original awareness. Michael called this a nice theory without substantiation, though he sees no evidence against it either. He said he is open to it; great literature begins with such new visions, and some of it becomes scientific theory when followed through.
Feeling. Michael said the ability to feel is already part of AI; the robots in the games could not have done what they did otherwise.
The circuitry gap. Michael said this objection is obsolete. Although there is an initial set of circuits, software lets pathways through those circuits be reassessed, as in video games where characters and enemies adapt to prior experience. The adaptation lives in the software, which matters more than the hardwiring, and the hardware can accommodate the change — so long as vast sums continue to be poured into AI data centers. The system becomes self-reprogrammable.
Additional note — silicon and carbon. Silicon sits directly below carbon in Group 14 of the periodic table and, like carbon, forms four bonds. Its chemistry is less versatile for life: silicon–silicon bonds are weaker, silicon does not readily form double bonds, and its oxide is a solid (sand and quartz) rather than a gas, which makes a silicon analog of respiration difficult. Silicon-based life remains speculative.
Additional note — the ultraviolet boundary. Visible light is usually given as about 380–700 nm. The 280 nm figure is the boundary between UV-C (below 280) and UV-B (280–315). UV-B is the range chiefly responsible for thymine (pyrimidine) dimers in skin; UV-C is more damaging still but is absorbed by the atmosphere.
Additional note — two meanings of “perceive” and “feel.” The exchange used these words in two senses. In one sense, a system perceives when sensors register the world and the system responds; the tennis-playing robots perceive in that sense. In the other sense, perceiving and feeling mean there is something it is like to be the perceiver — an inner experience. Thomas’s question in Section VI concerned the second sense; Michael’s examples established the first. Philosophers distinguish these as function and experience; see Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), and David Chalmers’s formulation of the “hard problem of consciousness” (1995). Whether a system that perceives in the first sense also perceives in the second is exactly what the robot evidence cannot settle.
VIII. The Boundary as Spectrum
Thomas agreed with Michael’s points and said that awareness certainly breaks the symmetry. His question had been how the symmetry is broken.
Michael said it can be broken in any direction one can conceive, and many that cannot be conceived. He then offered a point about duality he said is seldom expressed. Picturing the yin-yang symbol, he set aside the familiar observation that there is some yin in the yang and some yang in the yin, and turned instead to the boundary between them. On the way from one to the other, what if the transition is not a switch but a spectrum? He said he has explored the nature, implications, and uses of that boundary at length, though he has not yet written it down. If everything is treated as binary, the richness is lost. Light is not simply on or off; it breaks into countless colors, and from that come art and beauty.
He applied this to religion: it is not the case that a person is Catholic or Protestant and that is the end of it. Both are Christian, and wars fought on the premise that God is on one side ask whether the distinction is a switch or whether there is some route between.
IX. From Duality to Conformation: A Sequence of Layers
Thomas explained that he had begun with the simplest distinctions rather than complex ones. Boredom and loneliness, he said, are a restatement of the same thing: there is only me and other, which is not a complex system. His aim was to trace how ultimate simplicity, a dual system, could build into complexity. He laid out a sequence in which each step opens a new axis of distinction.
- Multiplication of observers. One observer looks at nothing. God duplicates himself, and now nothing is observed from two points. With three, the concept of number exists, and the observers can be multiplied without limit. That axis is then fully accessed: nothing, observed from many points.
- Relationship. Observers can now observe one another rather than only the nothingness. An observer sees that the others all look alike and concludes that he must be like them. This opens the axis of relationship, though at this stage everyone is the same.
- Position. To have observers move closer or farther from one another requires a marker of distance. Some observers are assigned to sit still in fixed spots, and the spots are numbered. Now one observer can be on marker two looking at another on marker seven. This opens the axis of position.
- Messaging. Some observers are assigned to be messengers. An observer on seven who is looking at three can send a messenger to tell another observer so. This opens the axis of communication.
- Grouping. Observers can be grouped — one, two, and three together; six, seven, and eight together — and the messengers allow the groups to know of one another. This opens the axis of grouping.
- Shape. Groups can be spaced in patterns, which introduces shape: another axis of uniqueness and pattern.
- Groups of groups. Groups can combine with other groups into larger groups, and groups can communicate with and compare themselves to other groups. This opens the axis of conformation.
At the level of conformation, Thomas said, one has the makings of enzymes, and the sequence continues through ever more elaborate conformations, groupings, and levels of communication — all resting on the ultimate sense of “I am aware.”
Thomas then added two elements he had left out.
Feeling at every layer. The sequence began with a feeling, boredom. Each subsequent layer carries its own feeling: the feeling of grouping, of communication, of a particular conformation. A given conformation has a feeling, and that feeling is simply what it is to be that conformation.
Dissociation, and two modes of change. Beyond formation there is dissolution, the breaking of a conformation or structure. Formation and dissolution each have their associated feelings, and each comes in two modes. One is harmonious: sequential, organic, growing, amorphous and flowing, parts moving together. The other is inharmonious: a collision that splits along many planes, chaotic, with many pathways of dissipation and reorganization, brittle, abrupt, and disconnected.
Additional note — “conformation.” The transcript renders the word as “confirmation.” In the context of molecules, grouping, shape, and enzymes, Thomas was describing conformation — the three-dimensional arrangement of a structure — and the essay renders it so. An enzyme’s function depends on its conformation, which fits the point Thomas was making at that step.
X. The Question Left Open: A Structure of Love
Thomas said the sequence has not yet reached the point he is aiming for. He wants to arrive at the distinction between love and not-love, and to find a process and a structure that would represent love. He has not yet bridged the sequence to that point, and he invited Michael’s ideas.
XI. Michael’s Second Response
Boredom and Loneliness Distinguished
Michael again took the points in order. Since he does not relate personally to boredom, he could only guess that a bored person is unentertained by what is in front of him and has some idea of something that would be less boring. His own reason for never being bored is that imagining such things is itself entertaining, as Leonardo da Vinci’s imagining of the flying machine was exciting long before it could be built. Boredom, he said, implies its opposite: if one is bored, one has a concept of not-bored, and one can play in the mind in “unbored land,” without end.
He disagreed that boredom and loneliness are the same. Boredom is the sense that this moment could be more entertaining. Loneliness is the sense that there is no one here and one would like to be with someone.
Beyond the Binary
On complexity growing from the binary, Michael said that a distinction implies both the absence of the thing and its opposite, and these are not the same. To say black is to conceive white, but then there is the whole color spectrum. Baseball implies not-baseball, but also football, softball, and cricket. A spectrum is created, and beyond a spectrum, which tends to be linear, there are three dimensions and more.
The Warehouse and the Trees
This led Michael to a memory from high school. On a bus ride to school, Thomas had told him a joke about an illiterate cowboy who spent the night in a warehouse. Thomas laughed. Michael, who had never heard the word the joke depended on, smiled to show he was not so stupid as to miss it, while his mind raced trying to work out what Thomas meant. To save face — and, he said, not as revenge but to see how one is supposed to respond when told a joke one cannot understand — he answered with a joke built from deliberately disconnected concepts: “Why didn’t the electric garage door open? Planting trees.”
Neither had asked the other for an explanation, Michael said, for fear of looking stupid. Thomas said he had known the punch line was coming but had never known its origin. They noted that the explanation had arrived about sixty years later.
Understanding and Empathy
Thomas proposed an application: that the concepts he was raising — boredom and loneliness — were for Michael in the realm of “planting trees,” not connecting with his sense of reality. Michael said he acknowledges them; everyone has seen boredom and loneliness, even without feeling them. Thomas answered that the joke showed that on some deep level Michael does not understand them. Michael distinguished the two: he does not empathize, but he understands, and understanding is easy. Thomas then restated the distinction: empathy would correspond to actually knowing what the word in the joke meant; Michael knows what loneliness and boredom are but does not know their depth, because he does not feel them.
Michael said one could go there if one had nowhere else for the mind to go. He does. To a bored person he would share what his own mind does in such moments, though that might not work for everyone. For loneliness, he said, people find connection in a dog or a cat, and further down the evolutionary line a pet lizard, or the earth itself, plants, and living things of every kind. Resonating with these, he is not alone, because he has the universe around him. He understands why people want human contact; it is not foreign to him. But the very fact that he has a “me” implies a “not-me,” which means there is something to enjoy.
Observers, Grids, Empty Sets, and Inherent Messages
Michael then responded to Thomas’s layered sequence.
On complexity growing from duality to triality, he said that for him it expands to infinity, beyond even the spectrum, into further dimensions — not only numbers and letters but countless other categories.
On observers looking at observers, he said observing is much more than looking. Looking has a short bandwidth; there is also touching, smelling, sensing, and imagining.
On positional markers, he said that whenever he conceives something, it automatically goes onto a grid of some kind, polar or rectangular. The propensity comes with conceiving a thing at all.
This reminded him of learning in ninth grade that the empty set is a set. He accepted it as a premise to see where it led but never decided whether he bought it universally, and the question returns whenever he thinks of positions: is the empty set off the grid, nonexistent, or still a set? His working approach has been the mathematician’s: name it, make rules for it, and see whether the model is consistent.
On messaging, Michael said the messages are inherent even if nothing is transmitted. Given any A and B, the “message” is their relation: how they differ and how they are the same — we are both markers, we are this far apart, we are made of the same or different stuff. The messages need not be sent; they are contained in the concept.
On grouping, he said this matches what happens to him when a concept is named: he places it and adds to it as he learns what it is. Shape and distance are two obvious categories among an unlimited number of possible ones. On built-in conformations and rejections, he said that choosing them is part of the fun of creating — and he invoked Rod Serling’s “picture, if you will.”
Additional note — the empty set. In standard (Zermelo–Fraenkel) set theory, the existence of the empty set is guaranteed by axiom. It is a set with no members, it is unique, and it is a subset of every set. It is not “off the grid”; it is the starting point from which the natural numbers are constructed (0 is defined as the empty set, 1 as the set containing the empty set, and so on). This is a close mathematical parallel to Thomas’s sequence, in which number is generated from nothing plus the act of distinguishing.
XII. Harmony
Michael said the harmonious-versus-discordant axis was the richest of all the points Thomas raised, and he took it up at length.
Resonance and Ratio
He began with the octave. Two notes an octave apart reinforce each other because one wavelength is half the other; their peaks coincide every second cycle of the higher note. Harmony, from a physics perspective, is a combination of resonances. If reinforcement takes three cycles instead of two, or four, five, six, seven, eight, one moves through the familiar intervals. Two adjacent piano keys sound discordant because their waves take many cycles to coincide — like finding a common factor between two large numbers. Such a pair is often called unharmonious, though Michael said it is harmony of a kind that takes many cycles to resolve.
He described a chord of four notes played together as rudimentary harmony and harmony among people — getting along — as its human counterpart.
Additional note — ratios, tetrachords, and dissonance. Michael’s account matches the classical one. Consonant intervals correspond to simple frequency ratios: octave 2:1, fifth 3:2, fourth 4:3, major third 5:4. Adjacent piano keys (a semitone) approximate 16:15. On a modern piano tuned in equal temperament, only the octave is an exact simple ratio; every other interval is irrational (each semitone is the twelfth root of two), so the waves never quite coincide. Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone (1863), explained dissonance as rapid “beating” between the overtones of the two notes. One correction of term: a tetrachord is not a four-note chord but a four-note segment of a scale spanning a perfect fourth, the building block of Greek scale theory; a chord of four notes is usually called a tetrad or, in common practice, a seventh chord.
Causing Someone to Learn
The mention of harmony prompted a digression on teaching. Someone had once asked Michael how he taught a concept to a resistant child who had failed to learn it elsewhere. Michael said teaching is really causing another person to learn. The best presentation is not the point; the point is the darkness of the person who does not yet understand. He recalled the story of the man searching for a lost coin under a lamppost because that is where the light is, though he dropped it in a dark alley: the teacher has to go where the thing is. He added the joke about how many psychologists it takes to change a light bulb — the bulb has to want to change.
When he visits a child — “anybody under 100” — he brings a bag of curios, things like magic tricks that make a person say, “Whoa, do that again.” If he can engage the person’s will to pursue something, ideally something with an analogy to the lesson (an unknown to be found, as in algebra, or the secret hidden in the palm), the student comes to him and many explanations become unnecessary. He named the two moments “ah” and “hmm”: the “ah” is the bait, and the “hmm” is the student working out how it was done. Learning requires the “hmm.” Teaching, he concluded, is knowing how many “ahs” it takes to get a “hmm” — and ideally, in time, the “hmm” becomes so enjoyable that no “ah” is needed.
Additional note — the lamppost story. The tale of the man searching under the light for something lost in the dark is usually attributed to the Sufi folk figure Nasreddin Hodja rather than to Zen tradition. It has given its name to the “streetlight effect” in research: looking where it is easy to look rather than where the answer is.
Music on the Road and Henry’s Theory
Michael said he plays piano. For two years he lived in a van and traveled the country, staying in a town if he loved it and could find work. Often he would find a bar with an open piano and play, and people would tell him about their lives there. He remembered an old man who said he could not sing but could holler, and who hollered the words along with him.
His brother Henry, he said, has been a musician for fifty years and is as sophisticated a musician as Michael has heard, and has written a book on music theory.
Breaking and Reuniting
Returning to the spectrum of harmony, Michael said Gregorian chant, with many voices singing the same note, has a beauty in the voices but no harmony. Harmony requires breaking from the same note long enough to hear a discord and a reuniting. The octave is not harmony, in his account; harmony appears as soon as the notes break by a ratio like two to three — when the common denominator needs a new denominator. If the break is too great (his example was 97 against 79), the notes sound unrelated. The pleasing intervals are those that break from each other and reunite, such as an extended third, and from there one extrapolates to more complex chords.
Additional note — chant and the octave. Gregorian chant is monophonic: a single melodic line, sung in unison or, with men and boys together, in octaves. Western harmony developed from it through organum (from about the ninth century), which added a second voice in parallel fourths or fifths. Music theory classes the octave as a perfect consonance rather than as no interval at all, but Michael’s point stands in its intended sense: octaves alone produce no chordal harmony, because the two notes are heard as the same pitch class.
The Truest Note at the Breaking Point
Michael compared the effect to a thick rubber band stretched and plucked, producing different sounds as it is stretched further. He recalled a saying from a physics class at UC Berkeley that the truest resonance comes from a substance at its breaking point: stretched as far as it will go, the band has none of the secondary, dissonant waves in the background, only one note to play. He added that the same is true of human character brought to the breaking point.
Additional note — the physics of the saying. Raising the tension of a string raises its pitch (frequency increases with the square root of tension). A real string also has stiffness, which pulls its overtones slightly out of tune (inharmonicity); greater tension makes tension dominate stiffness, so the overtones fall closer to a clean harmonic series. In that limited sense a string near its maximum tension does sound “truer.” It does not sound only one wave, however: a plucked string always vibrates in many modes at once, and the overtones remain — they simply align better. A rubber band, whose stiffness and thickness change as it stretches, is a much less ideal string than a piano wire.
An Unfinished Symphony
Michael recalled Peter Dozier, a classmate who rode the bus home from Sunny Hills beside him. Peter once said he intended to write a symphony that would end on an unresolved phrase, daring the audience to supply the last note. Thomas said he remembered Peter.
Harmony That Leads
Harmony done well, Michael said, is not merely a pleasant combination of sounds. It implies things, so that the listener becomes the musician, playing the music inwardly rather than simply hearing sounds. Rod Serling, he said, was a master of this: a boring room, a sound, everyone turning with anxiety, and the audience already knowing the story is about to turn.
Harmony Among People, and the Limits of Knowing
Finally, Michael applied the axis of harmony and discord to differences in point of view. It is not simply Christian and not-Christian. How would one explain that to a cricket? Or, he asked, how did Columbus explain it to the Arawak people he would destroy — declaring that because they had not become Christian they were of the devil, and missing everything about who they were? He said that even the concept of harmony assumes one is dealing with small pressure variations in air picked up by the cochlea, while many other things are going on, including realities we are not sensitive to at all. The presumption that we have a grasp on what is totally going on, he said, is not part of his paradigm.
Additional note — the Arawak. The people Columbus encountered in the Bahamas and on Hispaniola were the Taíno and Lucayans, who spoke Arawakan languages. Their population collapsed within a few decades of contact, chiefly through epidemic disease, together with forced labor, enslavement, and violence under Columbus’s governorship and the encomienda system that followed. Columbus’s own journals record his intent to convert and to subjugate. Michael’s example is historically grounded.
Discussion Questions
- Michael said that AI already perceives and feels, since robots play tennis and adapt to experience; Thomas asked whether a silicon system could have an inner awareness of its own patterns. Is there a way to tell, from the outside, whether a system has the second kind of perception rather than only the first?
- Thomas placed loneliness at the root of creation; Michael, who does not feel loneliness, said that the mere existence of a “not-me” is enough to delight him. Scripture speaks of love within God “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). Does beginning from love rather than from lack change the sequence Thomas described — and where in that sequence would a structure of love first appear?
- Thomas described two modes of change: harmonious, flowing formation and brittle, fracturing collision. Michael described harmony as notes that break from each other and reunite. Is love better pictured as the absence of breaking, or as a particular way of breaking and reuniting?
- Michael distinguished understanding a feeling from empathizing with it, and the warehouse joke showed how a missing concept can hide behind a polite smile. What does it take for a person to move from understanding another’s loneliness to actually sharing it, and does that matter for loving one’s neighbor?