Wonder, Awe, and Seeing with Firstness

Reflecting on why I'm writing

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I started this newsletter because I got the term "cognitive wonder" stuck in my head.

Cognitive wonder seemed like the perfect term for when an idea clicks and a new dimension of thought opens up, where the implications aren't immediately obvious but have to be explored cognitively.

The term captured something about what motivates my interests in science, philosophy, and science fiction, and I wanted to articulate this newly found common thread between these interests (as well as explore the interests themselves). Hence Cognitive Wonderland.

I just finished reading

Helen De Cruz

's book, Wonderstruck, and it has me reflecting on the whole wonder thing again. The book is all about the importance of awe and wonder and their connections with religion, science, and magic.

It's a good book! You should read it.

It draws on some of the same papers I read when I was first reading about wonder—in particular, this paper on awe by Keltner and Haidt. Keltner and Haidt articulate awe as having two central features: 1. an experience of vastness (either in physical scale or conceptual complexity), and 2. a "need to accommodate", accommodation meaning restructuring our mental schemas to make sense of the experience.

Seeing the Grand Canyon or a cathedral inspires awe because they are "vast" (just physically huge), and their size forces us to think on a different scale than we normally do, requiring a need to "accommodate" this bigness.

You can tell from the awe lines how much awe he is experiencing.

(I'm not sure I'm fully sold on these as the defining features of awe. If vastness always causes a need to accommodate by shifting our usual conception of scale, the need to accommodate is redundant as a defining feature. As for vastness, some argue vastness isn't required for awe because we can be in awe of little things. Plus the terms are vague. That said, I think it's fine for a fuzzy working definition, so this thought is just a parenthetical).

Helen de Cruz gives a helpful differentiation of awe and wonder. For de Cruz, wonder involves seeing things at the edge of our understanding. It's more tightly tied to a need for accommodation and, unlike awe, doesn't require vastness.

Seeing with Firstness

Both awe and wonder tend to go away with repeated exposure. Unless we consciously attempt to pay attention to what's around us, the city skyline or the open ocean that once brought awe can easily become part of the background if we see it every day.

This is why so many parents speak fondly of being able to see the world with child-like wonder again as their kids grow. Seeing the world with a child's curiosity allows us to revisit the awe and wonder all around us. We can see the world as if for the first time through their eyes. We can see with what de Cruz calls "firstness".

Similarly, learning new skills can have us look at things in new ways. Learning to draw makes you pay attention to different aspects of the visual world and learning music allows us to hear notes and acoustic relationships in music (or everyday sounds) we otherwise wouldn't have, as if hearing them for the first time.

According to de Cruz, Descartes suggested that awe and wonder start with an initial surprise that brings our attention to the extraordinary. Similarly, a contemporary model of awe and wonder suggests we initially experience surprise/wonder when we confront an experience we can't immediately accommodate. If we then successfully accommodate the experience, we experience awe—imagine the initial surprise at seeing the magnitude of the Grand Canyon, followed by the awe as you internalize the scale. According to this model, for things that we can’t accommodate, we're instead left with a desire to analyze (which sounds like curiosity to me).

This is an interesting way to think about it, and points to how approaching things with a curious mind can lead to a virtuous cycle of awe and wonder.

The Infinite Wonder and Awe Glitch

Consider a rainbow (which I talked about in depth here). If we pause to really appreciate it and see it (with firstness), its beauty and magnitude can awe us.

But we can direct our attention to something else: it's weird! It floats out there after rain for some reason! For most people (myself included, even after extensively researching them), rainbows are "on the edge of understanding", and if you consider how they work, wonder and curiosity open up to you.

If you know a bit more about how rainbows work—that it's caused by refraction and reflection from millions of raindrops—you can again feel awe about the scale and complexity of all the raindrops and lightwaves involved in creating the rainbow.

And then you can dig deeper—for example, learning more about what refraction is and why it works, why raindrops form, how our color perception works, et cetera, et cetera. Each of these is a source of more wonder that, once you grasp better, can transform from being "on the edge of understanding" to fully "accommodated", leading to awe in the complexity and magnitude of the world.

My point is, the potential for awe and wonder are all around us. I've talked before about how little we understand most of the everyday objects around us and how if we stop to consider them, they can be sources of wonder.

If we approach the world with a bit of curiosity, nearly anything can be a source of wonder that then leads to awe and more wonder.

Curiosity is an infinite wonder and awe hack.

Cognitive Wonder

When I originally wrote about cognitive wonder, I suggested what differentiates it from normal awe/wonder is multilayered complexity. It's evoked when an idea's implications are large but not immediately obvious—you have to think about them to see the ramifications.

Maybe another way of framing what I was trying to get at with cognitive wonder is that it's something that promotes our seeing things with firstness, evoking more wonder.

The theory of evolution by natural selection elicits feelings of awe and wonder because it's a large-scope theory, but also gives us new layers of the world to think about. All of biology can be considered through the lens of evolution, and it opens up new wonders. When paired with curiosity, it can kick off virtuous cycles of awe and wonder.

Science fiction talking about mind uploading or memory-altering drugs/creatures evoke cognitive wonder (in me at least) because they force us to see fundamental things that we take for granted with firstness. These stories threaten the stability and clarity with which we see our personal identities, or the ubiquity of memory, and show that even here there are questions to ponder, so we can see these things with firstness and wonder about their nature.

I wasn't always interested in science. In school it just seemed like a series of dry facts. Needing to memorize chemical nomenclature or the parts of the cell—these weren't interesting to me.

Learning about things like the theory of evolution opened my eyes to the juicy principles that underlie how the world works. Learning those principles allowed me to see everyday life with firstness, paving the way for those once-dry-facts to come alive as they took on more significant meaning.

Now, once-dry-facts like how sensory receptors work are so exciting to me I apparently spend my free time writing about them.

What I'm trying to do with Cognitive Wonderland is explore those juicy principles or ideas that excite me, that make me see aspects of the world with firstness, and have kicked off virtuous cycles of curiosity, awe, and wonder. If I'm able to convey any of that interest via writing here, I think this endeavor is well worth it.

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