The Doorknob Paradox: Why Everyday Objects Fade From View When They're Working

[DocWatts]

Howdy! I thought I would share this philosophy write-up, which delves into the perception of objects in the everyday world - and what common sense gets wrong about this process.

https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/the-doorknob-paradox-why-everyday

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The Doorknob Paradox: Why Everyday Objects Fade From View When They're Working

You live in a world of invitations, not things. Why common sense gets this wrong, and what it means for our relationship to the everyday world.

When Objects Disappear

What if I told you that you only see doorknobs when they’re not working? Not that you’re hallucinating them, or that brass spheres don’t exist - no metaphysical sleight-of-hand here. But when a doorknob is functioning smoothly, as far as your perceptual system is concerned, there’s no object at all - only an invitation to action - otherwise known as an affordance. The term might be new, but you’ve been navigating the world through affordances your whole life. Every time you open a door, sit on a chair, respond to a smiling face - that’s your mind and environment working in tandem, drawing an appropriate response out of you before deliberation enters the picture.

Which brings us back to that doorknob. Barring a trip to the hardware store, a doorknob tends to vanish into the background - noticed only when there’s a problem: it’s unexpectedly locked, the latch won’t catch, someone’s nasty Cheeto fingers have been all over the knob. And when nothing’s wrong? It’s an invitation - and if that invitation fails, it shows up for you as an object.

“But I can go look at a doorknob right now, and ‘see’ it just fine,” you may retort. Fair enough - but notice what you had to do to make that happen. You had to stop what you were doing, shift into observation mode, treat the knob as something to inspect rather than use. That’s not how you encounter it when you’re coming home with groceries or going to the bathroom. That detached, observational stance is the exception rather than the rule - it’s something you do when you’re trying to make a point rather than moving through your daily life. You live in a world where invitations come first - and objects show up only when needed.

That’s not a metaphor or a thought experiment - it’s the nuts and bolts of how perception works. For perception isn’t passive observation, but a highly sophisticated form of curation - one that’s actively shaped by the body you have, the life you’ve lived, and the situation you find yourself in. Every waking moment, your mind is doing a ton of work behind the scenes to translate your environment into something that’s livable. Not an illusion, but a disclosed world - your brain’s working model of what’s relevant for you within your environment, curated for your needs, yet constrained by Reality. Arranged so that you can navigate it effortlessly while being lost in a conversation, a podcast, or your own thoughts. But abrasive enough to land you in the ER if you try to walk through a wall or ignore gravity.

The Auto Pilot You Can’t Turn Off

Mishaps aside, this autopilot usually works so well you barely notice it. If this doesn’t seem like a big deal, think again. For just a moment, stop and appreciate what you’ve been taking for granted. If you’ve ever broken a wrist, you know how quickly ‘automatic’ can fall apart - every doorknob a hassle, every zipper a struggle, every pickle jar a battle. That conscious attention that feels like an abundance? Suddenly every mundane task is demanding its cut.

Or if a broken bone isn’t resonating, think back to when you were first learning a skill - whether it was driving a car, handling a firearm, or playing chess. What was it like before what’s now second nature was drilled into you: check your mirrors, keep your finger away from the trigger, control the center of the board? As the skill is absorbed, something flips: where effort was once at the forefront, flow takes its place. Where there was deliberation, the appropriate response is drawn out of you, without having to think about it at all.

While you might be tempted to dismiss this as ‘mere’ muscle memory, its scope extends far beyond the mechanical. When you start to see openings on a chess board without having to calculate three moves ahead, that’s your autopilot system at work. As you develop a feel for whether the composition of a photograph or painting is working, what began as the rule of thirds becomes a shift in your affordance landscape. What you see is shaped by what you’ve experienced - new possibilities open up, invisible to those who haven’t walked the same path.

Affordances, and the autopilot that runs on them, aren’t happenstance - they’re a built-in feature of how minds and environments interact. One that’s always running in the background, whether you notice it or not. Something you can quiet, but not turn off completely - and for good reason. Evolution kept this feature in place because it works - and it works because it’s flexible. The ability to attend to your environment without every moment-to-moment interaction competing for finite attention offers serious survival advantages. This system isn’t perfect - it gets things wrong regularly - but fast and efficient beats methodical and slow. Which means that affordances aren’t etched in stone, they shift and flow with the situation.

The same knife that was slicing vegetables can become a self defense tool at a moment’s notice if danger walks into the kitchen. A fallen tree can become a chair if you’ve been hiking long enough. An intense stare can become an invitation or a threat depending on who it’s coming from, where you are, and what sort of mood you’re in.

What this flexibility gives us are disclosed worlds that are ripe for improvisation. A disclosed world built on rigid categories would shatter the first time you encountered something new - which happens all the time, even if you don’t go looking for it. But one that’s built on affordances allows us to adapt to novel circumstances on the fly - no instruction manual required.

Objects Aren’t Imaginary, But They Do Require A Mind

And here’s where the ordinary becomes strange. For all this time, we’ve been quietly chipping away at a core pillar of common sense: objects themselves. Or more specifically, where objects come from. We’re trained to think that objects exist independently of us - that they’re ‘out there’, just minding their own business, indifferent to whether or not anyone’s looking.

The story goes something like this: as infants we’re born without object permanence, and early on in our development we come to learn that things don’t vanish when they leave our sight. So far, so good. The only problem? The story usually ends here - but there’s an additional layer: where objects come from in the first place. Not how they’re manufactured or assembled, but something far more fundamental: how a seamless Reality gets carved up into a collection of things.

The uncomfortable claim is this: the raw materials that go into a pebble or a tree or a planet exist without us, sure. Reality will keep humming along whether or not anyone is watching. But objects? Objects require a mind. Reality doesn’t come pre-divided into things - that segmentation, that parsing of continuity into chunks, is something minds do. The world isn’t showing itself to you - you’re carving it up as you go. And the objects around you right now? You’re complicit in their existence. Which doesn’t make objects imaginary - just not as independent as you thought.

Next time: Deconstructing the everyday view of objects