62 ASTRONOMY • AUGUST 2020
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
You sit down at
your computer to
buy a telescope. A
beautiful page pops up,
promising hours of wonder
that await you. You ponder a
menu of nifty gadgets and
finally click “buy.” A few
days later, boxes arrive at
your doorstep. Your signifi-
cant other watches as you
spread the contents out on
the living room f loor and,
with a shake of the head,
wonders about this person
with whom they share a life.
You sit down in a restau-
rant to buy a meal. A young person steps up, smiles, and
hands you a menu of delicious-sounding choices. You
ponder your options, then pass your order to the waiter,
who, after a while, returns with your food. Your signifi-
cant other looks at your bowl of gumbo and, with a
shake of the head, wonders about this person with
whom they share a life.
In computer-speak, what you see when you go to the
toy store’s ... er ... the telescope shop’s web-
pa ge is a u ser i nter face , or U I. It m ig ht seem
a bit impersonal to also call the waiter who
served your meal a user interface, but the
shoe fits.
User interfaces are the outward-facing
parts of what the geek set call application
programming interfaces, or APIs. An API
sits between you and a service provider, car-
rying things back and forth, allowing both
of you to get what you need without either of you having
to know very much about the other. Back to the restau-
rant: The waiter/API takes your order and passes it on
in terms the chef will understand. The chef does what-
ever it is that chefs do, and the waiter reappears with
the goods to appease your hunger. You don’t need to
know anything about what is happening in the kitchen
to order and enjoy your food. Mercifully, good UIs and
APIs hide how the sausage gets made.
UIs and APIs simplify the world and isolate us from
complex realities. That’s their job; it’s how they make it
possible for us to accomplish what we set out to do.
That’s all fine for websites and fancy dinners, but
what about our direct experiences of the world? Surely
those offer us the real scoop about what is out there,don’t they? Philosophers call the idea that our senses
give us reliable information about the world naïve real-
ism. Naïve might seem pejorative, but it just means
something that is taken for granted by someone who
doesn’t know any better.
Surely there is no experience of the world more
direct, immediate, and reliable than sight. Seeing is
believing, right? Yet the interfaces between the world
and our perceptions are legion. An optical interface
converts information about the direction in which
electromagnetic radiation is traveling into locations on
the retina. (Of course, the properties of that radiation
are only indirectly related to the properties of the
objects from which it is emitted and off of which it
ref lects.) Next, an electro-optical interface turns infor-
mation about the intensity and spectrum of light into
electrochemical impulses. Those are further processed
in the retina before being sent down the optic nerve.
Deep in the brain, those signals reach structures that
are really more chefs than waiters.
You call it seafood gumbo, but look at the recipe and
you might discover that not much of what is in the bowl
ever lived in the ocean. Likewise, deep in our brains,
signals from the optic nerve are combined with signals
coming from many other sources. Only about 5 percent
of the signals that affect what we see comes from the
eyes. Most of that information comes from the visual
cortex itself; what you see depends far more on your
own expectations and prior experiences than it does on
anything coming from your eyes.
Once that witch’s brew has been stirred,
the chef hands it off to another API, which
carries it to the visual cortex, where the real
processing begins. How many waiters and
chefs are involved in finally conveying
something to us?
Face it. The notion that vision provides
us with direct, true information about the
world is about as naïve as it gets. Going
further, just talking about “us” and the
world is naïve. An inescapable but radically counterin-
tuitive conclusion of recent neuroscience is that our
very perception of a unified self is an illusion. It is a
useful product of layers upon layers of interfaces, no
more direct a window on our own fundamental nature
than are our visual perceptions a direct experience of
the world.
Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.”
But, having realized that my sense of self emerges from
a tangle of chefs and waiters cooking up and carrying
information around in my brain, I’m not sure what
Descartes’ truism even means.Interfaces isolate us from the world, and from ourselves.
Cogito, ergo sum?
Every time you sit
down and order in
a restaurant, you’re
experiencing a
user interface.
LIGHTFIELDSTUDIOSPROD/
DREAMSTIMEDescartes
famously
said, “I think,
therefore
I am.”
BY JEFF HESTER
Jeff is a keynote
speaker, coach,
and astrophysicist.
Follow his thoughts
at jeff-hester.comBROWSE THE “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION”
ARCHIVE AT http://www.Astronomy.com/Hester