We know that bees can see ultraviolet light that humans can not see. We know that dogs and other animals can hear sounds that humans can not hear. Scientists understand Newton’s laws, until the laws fall apart when studying the smallest of particles and objects traveling at very fast speeds. When we look for light to act light a particle it acts like a particle and when we look for light to act like a wave it acts like a wave… we still don’t really understand all there is to know about light.
And yet somehow we think we have a grasp on reality. We don’t. We do not yet have a full scientific grasp of our universe, we don’t even understand what consciousness is. What we do know is that our perception of the world is based on models of the world and not actually the world itself. We have very faulty user interfaces, insufficient sensors, that warp our perception of reality.
Think about the diversity of human perception for a moment. We know that there are people who can not see colour. There are even people who see colours that are not present, like Daniel Tammet, ‘The Boy With The Incredible Brain‘.
Watching this video makes me think about how my user interface differs from someone with autism, someone who might be overloaded with stimulus (information) in the environment that does not overwhelm me, and who might at the same time be blind (or at least unaware) of facial expressions that I find easy to read or interpret. Even for those that can interpret facial expressions, this is not an exact science and so we are each noticing different things with some people being far more perceptive than others.
Take this another step further and think of the incompleteness of the memories that we have. We make lousy eyewitnesses, and we reconstruct memories slightly differently over time. This is even more exaggerated when we add heightened emotions to an event. Have you ever heard someone talking about an experience from an emotional standpoint arguing with someone talking about the same experience from a logical standpoint? It’s like they are living in two different realities. In fact, each and every one of us perceive the world in drastically different ways, and our emotional state influences our perception, and our ability to recall our experience.
Our user interface with the world is not accurate, we know this, but we also know that the world isn’t just an illusion. We know the sun emits light and heat, we can see the light on surfaces in our field of vision, and we can feel the heat on our faces. But I can’t know that my experience of the colour blue is exactly like yours, or that my comfort with the heat of the sun is similar to yours either. But I wonder how much our upbringing, and the culture we live in influence how we interpret the world around us?
I remember learning in an anthropology class that some tribes that live in the dense forest struggle with the idea of seeing an image of an animal in the distance as an animal that is far way, instead thinking of them as tiny animals. Their model of the world does not include a full-sized tiger that can be seen a hundred meters away. Their visual perception of the world is different than someone raised in a desert.
How else does our environment that we live in influence what we can and do perceive? How does our politics, our ethics, and our beliefs influence our perception?
How different is my world from your world? And what consensuses can we come to in order to make it a better world for everyone?
