Bigger on the Inside

I’m reading up on the gut biome, as one does, and I came across the following: “At about 8 to 9 meters in length, the human intestine provides the largest interface between our body and the outside world… Although this enormous mucosal interface (200m²) is not apparently visible, it plays a pivotal role through its dynamic interactions with a variety of factors coming from our surrounding environment. . .”

Did you catch that? The surface area of your intestine is 200m²! That’s half of a basketball court. It’s about a hundred times more surface area on the inside of you than on the outside. You are much bigger on the inside than the outside.

Thinking and grokking

Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land introduces the word “grok”, which is a Martian word meaning “to understand completely.” It also means “to digest.” Though a made-up word from a fictional language, it expresses a deep truth. To know is like digestion. When you digest food, you take that which is outside of you and through a process of division and separation break it down and make it part of you. The reason your intestine has so much surface area is to facilitate this absorption. You are able to become all food, or at least are able to make all food become you.

The mind does something similar. Think about sensation–when you feel something hot, your finger becomes hot. The actuality of the fire and the actuality of your finger are united. Ouch!

The activity of the sensible object and that of the sense is one and the same activity.

So you are becoming, in a sense, that which you sense. Knowledge is like sensation except that it doesn’t require the presence of an actual physical object. You need to be in the presence of heat to sense heat, but you can think whatever you like about absent objects, or even about the universal forms of objects, whether there are any objects around you or not.

Bigger on the inside

How do you do this? Aristotle argues that you take the forms ‘within’ you, somewhat like the way you digest food by taking it inside of yourself.

The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassible, capable of receiving the object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being its object.

Just as in sensation there is a unity of the actuality of the hot thing with the hot finger, so in knowledge there is a unity of the actuality of the form (of beauty or heat or some other universal) with the mind of the knower. When you know a tree, you have the treeness within you. You don’t actually have bark in your brain, but you have the form of the tree in your mind.

It was a good idea to call the soul ‘the place of forms’…

The mind is sort of a spiritual stomach where what’s outside of you becomes inside of you. It’s a very big place, too!

And in fact thought, as we have described it, is what it is by virtue of becoming all things…

You are bigger on the inside than the outside.