Not a tree

Language is an amazing thing. In some sense it's a compression algorithm, and a really good one. We take a real, physical thing like a tree, with all of its weird complexity, the bark and the sap and the cells quietly doing their jobs, and we squash it down into a single word. Tree. Four letters.

We have to. If I had to think about a tree's true complexity every time I walked past one, my brain would grind to a halt. I'd never make it to the end of the street.

But compression is lossy. Anyone who's saved a photo as a tiny JPEG knows this. Something gets thrown away to make the file smaller. And I've started to wonder what we lose when we turn the world into words.

Try this. Next time you're out walking, look at a tree and say to yourself, "This is not a tree." Because it isn't. It's a crazy, complex, self-replicating biological system that works in ways our minds can never fully comprehend. "Tree" is the pointer in your compression algorithm at work, a pale match for the richness of the actual thing. Bark cracked into rough plates. A trunk that splits, and splits again, and again, into hundreds of branches, then thousands of twigs, then leaves.

It's not a tree. "Tree" is a language trick. A useful one, but a trick that hides the reality of the thing.

Made of air

Richard Feynman, the lovable, bongo-playing physicist who won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics (among many other things), explains where most of the mass of a tree really comes from. It's not the ground. It's actually the air. A tree breathes in carbon dioxide, uses sunlight to split the molecule apart, keeps the carbon and breathes the oxygen back out. The wood, the bark, the leaves, almost all of it was pulled out of the air a few atoms at a time. When you burn a log, the light and heat coming off the fire is sunlight that was stored in the wood. The fire is the sun, coming back out.

One project weighed a 222-year-old oak. It came in at 14.4 tonnes, and almost five tonnes of that was carbon the tree had taken from the air over two centuries.

Most of a tree trunk is actually dead. The living part is a thin layer just under the bark. A big tree lifts water hundreds of feet into the air every day with no pump at all, pulled up by water evaporating from its leaves. And every carbon atom in it was forged inside a star, billions of years ago, long before there was an Earth.

Naming

Naming is useful because our brains are prediction machines. They're built to keep us alive, not to marvel. Once the brain decides it knows what something is, it stops spending attention on it. Tree. Car. Person. Filed. It's an incredibly efficient system. It's also how we sleepwalk through the world. If trees were constantly doing unpredictable things that might hurt us, we'd pay a lot more attention to them.

But naming doesn't just label what we see. The act of fixing a word to an object can overwrite it. In 1990 two psychologists, Jonathan Schooler and Tonya Engstler-Schooler, showed people a face and then asked some of them to describe it in words. The ones who described it were worse at recognizing the face later. Putting it into words made them lose some of what they'd actually seen. It's called verbal overshadowing. The thing itself gets lost in the compression.

The cognitive scientist Gary Lupyan has found that labels pull what we perceive toward the average of the category. Once it's "a tree," it starts to look like every other tree.

For centuries people rubbed amber and watched it pick up little bits of paper. The textbooks all described it the same way. The paper sticks, then falls. The phenomenon was "known." Then scientists discovered there were two kinds of electric charge, and that like charges push each other away. Suddenly the textbooks said the paper stuck, then jumped away, then fell. That jump had been happening the whole time. People had watched it for hundreds of years. They just didn't see it, because nothing in their way of thinking said it was there.

What are we not seeing because language boxes in the world around us?

Knowing

The more you look at anything, the more complex and mysterious it becomes.

What does it mean to be "alive"? We use the word every day. Scientists can't define it. The biochemist Nick Lane says there are scores of definitions of life, and all of them are bad. A whale that died a few seconds ago has every molecule a living whale has. Something is missing, and the best answer anyone has is that energy has stopped flowing through it.

Lane studies that energy. Every one of your cells is wrapped in a membrane about five millionths of a millimeter thin, with an electrical charge across it. If you could shrink down to the size of a molecule and stand next to it, the field you'd feel would be about as strong as a bolt of lightning. Right now, reading this, you're carrying around roughly four football fields' worth of that membrane.

We look around and we're surrounded by "matter." We take it for granted. The table is solid. You don't fall through the floor. You can't push your hand through the trunk of a tree. But why? The more physicists have investigated what matter really is, the stranger it seems. "Molecules" are made of "atoms." Atoms are made of "protons," "neutrons" and "electrons." Protons and neutrons are made of "quarks." And all of it, in the end, is a form of "energy." Every one of these words fails to capture what the thing actually is, just as spectacularly as the word "tree" does.

Have you ever stopped to consider what energy is? I mean at the smallest level. All matter is energy. Light is energy. In his famous physics lectures, Feynman admits that "we have no knowledge of what energy is." We can measure it. We can calculate with it. We don't know what it is.

Meanwhile we're standing on a rock, spinning through a void. The nearest star is about 25 trillion miles away.

Once you see it, the strangeness of it all starts to be distracting.

Master or participant

There's something else going on with names, and it's harder to put my finger on.

When I name something, I feel like I know it. And when I know it, I feel a little bit in control of it. Above it, somehow. Separate from it. It's a quiet kind of colonization. In Genesis, one of Adam's first jobs is naming the animals, and in that story naming and dominion sit very close together.

The sociologist Max Weber had a phrase for where this ends up. He called it the disenchantment of the world. Everything explained, measured, catalogued. Nothing left that's mysterious. It's useful. It built the modern world. It also leaves things feeling flat.

The writer Thomas Moore talks about the opposite, re-enchantment. He describes it as the pleasure of being "a participant and not a master" in life. I love that. A participant. Not a master.

I think that's what awe is. Awe is what happens when the thing turns out to be bigger than your name for it.

In defense of words

Of course, I don't want to overstate this. Language isn't really a prison. I'm writing this in words, after all.

The cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, who studies how language shapes thought, sees languages as tools. Every language is a perspective, she says, and none of them is neutral. But asking which one is best is like asking which tool in your toolbox is best. It depends on the job. And words can sharpen our seeing too. Russian has separate words for light blue and dark blue, and Russian speakers are faster at telling those blues apart. Birders will tell you that once you learn a bird's name, you start noticing it everywhere. But knowing the name of a thing still isn't the same as knowing the thing. Feynman learned that as a kid.

Naming vs. knowing

When Richard Feynman was a boy, another kid pointed at a bird and asked him what kind it was. Feynman had no idea. The boy teased him and confidently said that it was a brown-throated thrush.

But Feynman's father said that you could learn that bird's name in every language on earth and still know absolutely nothing about the bird. You'd only know what people in different places call it. So, his father said, "let's look at the bird."

Feynman said that's how he learned, very early, "the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

So that's my little game. This is not a box of Cheerios. This is not a tree. This is not a crow. This is not a cloud. This is not a sun. I don't know what they are. They are deeply strange in a way I'll never fully understand. In that conscious un-knowing, I'm orienting my mind toward that of a beginner, a student, a learner.

Admittedly, it's a strange way to walk around the supermarket on a Saturday afternoon. But I recommend it.