Think Like a Martian

Think Like a Martian

In an interview, Feynman once shared a game that his father had taught him as a child. They’d sit at the dinner table engrossed in discussion of a topic, and his father would playfully ask something like, “Suppose we were Martians who had come to the Earth for the first time and were looking at things from the outside, having never seen them before. What would that be like? What would we see?”

On the one hand, this is a simple child’s fancy, but on the other, it captures the spirit of scientific inquiry. It’s a “game” that asks us what radically curious perception would look like, with zero preconceptions. What would the world look like to you if you had no pre-existing beliefs about it, no biases, no prior understanding to cloud your observations?

It’s a question that gets deeper and deeper the more you think about it.

With fresh eyes, everything would start to look wildly interesting. You would take nothing for granted. For example, being a Martian, let’s suppose you never slept and had no need for it. You didn’t know what sleep was and had never even imagined it before. It was not only not a part of your world, it wasn’t even something you acknowledged as being strange or impossible.

Now imagine you came to Earth and observed that within every twenty-four-hour cycle, human beings of every kind would fall into a period of unconsciousness, and they would close their eyes and grow still and lie horizontal, their breathing slowing. You’d notice they’d get into big pouches made out of foam and layers of fabric, roughly the same size as their bodies, and stay there for a handful of hours.

Now, if you were a scientist Martian, you would have a load of questions! Where would you even start? You’d wonder what was happening and why. You’d be curious about what it felt like to suddenly lose consciousness this way, and what purpose it was serving, and what it meant that humans seemed to vary in their practice of this habit. You’d wonder what their experience was like—what does it actually mean to not be awake? Does your brain still “work”? Does your consciousness go off all at once or does it happen gradually? Why?

For a Martian who only knows one state of being—wakefulness—thinking about the idea of sleep must be like human beings imagining some other, third state of consciousness in addition to sleep and wakefulness.

You have started with something completely arbitrary, obvious, and kind of boring (sleep), and in no time you are grappling with very deep questions of what it means to be conscious, how we can actually know what another person’s consciousness feels like, and what we are really talking about when we use an everyday word like “awake” or “aware.”

Now, such questions can be fun if they inspire a renewed appreciation for the strangeness of life . . . and can certainly be good starting points for writing science fiction! But let’s go deeper.

Feynman gave an analogy where he described the process of seeing a bird in a tree. Someone might ask you what bird it is, and you could give its name. Now, does that mean you know what the bird is? Do you really grasp the meaning of what is in front of you, and can you say you have knowledge of it? Consider that the name you give will be in your language. You say the bird is a “lark,” but an Italian speaker says it’s an “allodola” and a Greek speaker says it’s a “korydallos” and Hindi speaker says it’s a “लवा”! Maybe a Martian comes down and, when asked what he sees, blows air bubbles out a little funnel on his head . . .

You get the picture. Knowing the arbitrary symbols assigned to a thing is not knowing it. Recognizing certain patterns and features and mapping them onto pre-existing mental models is, in a way, the opposite of really knowing it. Have you ever really seen a bird? Look again. What do you really see? Imagine you have never been told anything about birds and have stumbled, brand new, with a fresh and unused brain, into the world. There is a phenomenon unfolding in front of you—a kind of movement of light, a noise, a being. What is it?

So, if you were the Martian observing Earth people sleeping, go a step deeper and imagine that you have no idea what “consciousness” is, and no pre-existing beliefs about this thing called “the mind.” After all, if someone were to ask you right now, what is the mind, do you think you could easily explain it to them if they didn’t already know?

The Martian question is a powerful tool for getting beyond the limits of our language. Sometimes, we think of learning as an accumulative process—that we are ignorant, and then we pile knowledge on top of that ignorance, adding to our understanding. But in many ways, really grasping the nature of reality is just as much about taking away—by peeling back the layers of assumption, we clear our perception and look at things afresh.

The biggest impediment to understanding the world as it is, then, is the insistence that we already know what it is. We see someone lose consciousness in a pouch made of foam and fabric, and we confidently say, “She’s gone to bed.” The language gives the impression we have a more comprehensive understanding of what has occurred . . . but do we?

When you ask the Martian question and try on a fresh perspective on things you think you already understand, you change the kinds of questions you ask. And that means you change the kind of answers you expose yourself to, and therefore the kinds of solutions you can dream up. You “think outside the box” because you are able to see that there is a box in the first place, and you become curious about who put it there and why, and what it would mean if it didn’t exist anymore.