A Bruise Is Not a Proof

I just finished Nicholas Carr’s Superbloom, nine hours in my ears, and it was a pleasure. Carr’s case is that the technologies built to connect us are pulling us apart, and that the more of life we live through screens, the more the real thing slips away. Most of it lands.

He closes with a rock. One summer day in 1763, in the port town of Harwich, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell were arguing about Bishop Berkeley, who held that things exist only as ideas in the mind, that to be is to be perceived. Boswell granted that the argument was absurd but impossible to refute. Johnson kicked a large stone hard enough to rebound from it and answered, “I refute it thus” (Boswell, 1791).

Carr reads the kick generously. Johnson was not making an argument; he was showing the body’s indifference to whatever the mind is spinning. As Carr puts it, a foot “does not have the luxury of sophistry”, and he turns Berkeley’s motto into “to be is to be kickable” (Carr, 2025).

I agree, mostly. But the analogy is not deep enough.

Think about how perception works. Sensors take in signals, and the brain reconstructs a useful picture of what is out there. That picture is all we ever get. The kick and the pain that follows can be argued to be an amazing, immersive simulation running in our heads. The pain is not the rock; it is an emergent signal in the body, decoded by the brain. Arguing that something is real because it hurts is simplifying at best. It sounds like well-argued hand-waving.

And anyone who has spent time with altered states, through meditation, fever, exhaustion or the long nights of a hard recovery, knows reality is more fluid than a kick allows. Some states can be perceived as more real than reality itself.

If the measure of what is real is how hard it presses on you, ordinary waking life does not always win, and Johnson’s foot settles less than it seems.

Still, Carr’s point stands as a way to live. Believing the world exists only through your own perception puts you at the centre of the universe, and the kick rightly refuses that. Go out and kick rocks, lots of them, as Carr says. Just do not mistake the bruise for a proof.

All in all, a good book with valid observations and conclusions, and a pleasurable listen. Highly recommended.

References

Boswell, J. (1791) The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. London: Charles Dilly.

Carr, N. (2025) Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. New York: W. W. Norton. Audiobook narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross, Recorded Books. Available at: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324064619 (Accessed: 18 October 2026).